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Joe Franklin? I'm ready. It's Ira Glass here. Oh, you're the emcee on the show, Ira. I am the emcee on the show. Yes. Oh great. Ira? I-R-A, Ira? Ira, I-R-A. Oh, great. Now hold on one second, Ira. Don't go away. Hello? [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Call me after 3 o'clock. I have great news for you. Ira. Yes. So listen, Tony. If the phone rings, take it in the back. And then come out and tell me who it is. Just say, Joe's being with a camera crew. Just for about 10 minutes. We'll do about five minutes, 10 minutes, right, Ira? That's right. Well, one great thing about starting a new show is utter anonymity. Nobody really knows what to expect from you. This interviewee did not know us from Adam. OK, we're what? About a minute. We're one minute five into the new show. Right now, it is stretching in front of us, a perfect future yet to be fulfilled. An uncharted little world. A little baby coming into the world, no little scars on it or anything. Nobody hearing my words right now is thinking, "Oh, man, remember that show, back when it used to be good? That show, I never missed that show back in the old days, back in the first couple years before it got so-called popular. Back when it was still good." No, actually, I think that force, that human desire to say that is so strong, to say that "I was there back when that show was good," that force is so strong, it is so basic to who we are as people that I know-- OK, what are we? We are two minutes into the program-- I know that somewhere out there, one or two of you are saying, "Oh, sure. I used to listen to that show back in the first 30 seconds, back when it used to be really good. Remember back when they used to do all that crazy stuff? When they had that guy on the phone? Remember back then?" Well, from WBEZ, in the glorious city of Chicago, Illinois. The name of this show is Your Radio Playhouse. I'm your emcee. I'm your emcee, Ira Glass. OK, the idea of this show, this new little show, is stories, some by journalists and documentary producers, like myself, some just regular people telling their own little stories, some by artists, and writers, and performers of all different kinds. And the idea is we're going to bring you stuff you're not going to find anywhere else. And there is also going to be music. And tonight's show, we thought that we would have a theme. Tonight's show is going to be New Beginnings. And to kick things off, I called the man who's had, as best as anybody can tell, the longest running program in the history of television. His name is Joe Franklin, and his program ran for 43 years on local television in New York. And he claims that he invented the talk show format. And I called him to get some advice on how to create a long-running, healthy program. I've been called in many times to give a sort of a Dean, the elder statesman, even though I'm still a young kid. But I've been called in to give this kind of advice to new kids on the block. Conan O'Brien had me on his first show. And people like that. There's no guidance. It's a matter of paying attention. Your voice, I've heard so much about the sparkle, about the energy in your voice. The voice, on radio especially, is everything. And when the guest is sitting with you, you've got to look into his eyes. Many times, you get an author on there who's begrudgingly sitting there. He'd rather be home in his ivory tower. And above all, get the plug fast. Otherwise, he's worried you're not going to make the plug for the book. And I created a line, Ira, that's been picked up by George Burns. I always said, the main ingredient for longevity in the talk show field, where the mortality rate is so staggering, the main ingredient is sincerity. And once you learn to fake that, then you got it made. I made that up. And I just played it by ear. I was a natural born talker, I guess. So let me just summarize what I'm getting from you. You're saying you should just pay attention, look people in the eye, be sincere when I'm on the air, get in the plug early. That's the key. And don't look in their nose or their belly button. Look right in the eye. Eye contact is everything. And as I say, it's a lot of fun. And I never called anybody in my life to come on to my show. And I'm sure that they'll be coming to you too. I heard about you, and I called you and wanted to wish you good look, Ira. Imagine the thrill of John F. Kennedy walking into my studio. Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan, five times. And Bing Crosby. And I've got a major book out right now, by the way, Ira, called Up Late with Joe Franklin from Simon & Schuster. And if you find a copy in the store-- You see now, I guess I've sort of messed that one up, because I didn't let you get in your plug early. See, that is my fault. I got it in toward the bitter end. It's like Duke Ellington. He always used to have his dessert at the beginning of the meal. Duke Ellington said, because he would never have no room for it at the end. So he had his dessert at the beginning. Who is it? Well, no, good news, 6 o'clock. Well, Joe Franklin, thank you very much for being with us on our premier show. Ira, I'm going to be a listener and a fan. And let's always be in touch. All right, Your Radio Playhouse. All right. I'm making eye contact with you right-- wait, how does Joe put it? Wait a second. Look right in the eye. Eye contact is everything. I am making eye contact with you right now. That is just how much I have already learned. OK, so the thing about new beginnings is that there are the ones that we actually undertake and then there are the ones that we just wish for. And the ones that we wish for pretty much outnumber the ones that we really undertake. Well, Kevin Kelly spent most of his twenties wandering around Asia. He was basically wandering around as a freelance photographer. And he found himself photographing a lot of religious ceremonies and drawn to religious ceremonies of all sorts. And he says that he was really confused about what he believed. And he was the kind of person who had always dreamt about a new beginning, where he wouldn't struggle with these questions. I would get twisted and caught up. And these things were in the background, consuming me. And actually, I found that I could think about little else for many, many months, that behind all that I was doing, there was always this unresolved question of was God real. And if he was real, then how could we ignore him? And if we were trying to not ignore him, what would we do? And if he was real, then what about these other things that people said about God? We will not attempt to answer these questions, by the way, in this hour. I just want to just give you a sense of scope here, just modest scope. But what we want to talk about is what happened to Kevin Kelly. What happened is that at the age of 27, all of this changed when he came into Jerusalem on the eve of Easter and Passover. It was the same weekend. And flocks of people are coming into the city. So I entered Jerusalem on Easter with a simple expectation that I was going to photograph another religious ceremony, another religious festival. And then, for various reasons, I got locked out of my hostel room. They had a curfew. And I didn't make it back in time. And I was in quite a fix because I was a stranger in this very strange town. When it happened, I didn't have enough money to stay elsewhere, nor did I even have knowledge of where to go. So I wandered the Old Town of Jerusalem at night, which had been shuttered up and was like a time machine. It was as if I had been transported back to the 15th century, because all the souvenir vendors were gone, and what was left were the labyrinthian paths of cobbled passageways. And I wandered around for a number of hours, and it was getting colder. Eventually, I found myself at the one place that was still open, which was some of the churches. And particularly, after wandering around until about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, I finally settled into the Church of the Holy Scepter, which is called and viewed as the church built over the mound where Jesus Christ was crucified. And I was getting very tired. And there weren't many people around. And so eventually, I laid myself out on about the only flat area that was left, which was this marble slab underneath some pendants that had incense on them. And this was presumably the slab that commemorated the exact positioning of the crosses. So I slept there. I slept on the crucifixion spot on that night because it was the only place-- they had no place in the inn. I slept there until early morning, when the activity started to increase, and people started coming in. And I went out and followed the crowd where it was going when they were going out to the tombs area in Jerusalem. And I went out. And there were some folding chairs set up in front of this tomb area. And as the sun was coming up on that Easter morning, I was staring at empty tombs. And for a reason that I can not comprehend, as I sat on that chair contemplating this view of the early sun morning coming into the empty tombs, all that I had been wrestling with for the past many, many years in thinking about religion sort of became resolved in my mind. And at that very moment, I believed that Jesus Christ had, indeed, risen from those tombs. In an instant, the tension of trying to figure things out was resolved, because now, suddenly, everything was figured out. It was as if you had been working on a problem for a long time and suddenly the answer was there. And it was very clear that was the answer. And although there were many things that were still not clear to you, you were very certain that you were on the right path. Having that realization that I believe that Jesus Christ had actually risen from those tombs did not settle 1,001 other things about what one was supposed to do with that, what I was supposed to do with that. Did that mean I was supposed to be a monk? Did that mean I was supposed to be an evangelist? Did that mean that I had to immediately renounce all that I had, and get into sackcloths and ashes, and march out into the desert? All that was left unopened. And that is, in fact, what occupied my mind as I went back to my hostel to lay down and think about. Because I had no clue what it really meant to me ultimately, and that's what I was pondering when I was laying there napping. And I wouldn't say it was a voice, but there was an idea that came into my mind that just would not go away, and that was that I should live as if I would die in six months, that I should really, truly live. And that I could not tell for certain whether I would really die, but that either way, I should live as if I was going to die. And so that was the assignment. I'm a pretty rational person. I'm pretty logical. And after thinking the thought that I should live as if I was going to die in six months, the first thought that comes to my head was, "Well, that's pretty silly. I have no evidence whatsoever. I could live like I'm going to die in six months and not die at all. It would just be an interesting exercise." But at the same time, it was equally probable that I might die in six months. It happened all the time. There was no guarantee that I wouldn't die. And so fairly quickly, I decided that I could not settle that issue of whether I would really die or not, or just think that I was going to die in six months, and that, in either case, the important thing was to live as if I really believed that I was going to die in six months, which is what I set out to do. The next couple days, I had the joyous experience of saying to myself, "OK, what do I do for six months if I have only six months to live?" And the answers to that surprised me as much as the assignment, because after thinking that through and contemplating it, the conclusion that I came to was that what I wanted to do for six months was to go home and be ordinary, to go back to my parents, to help them take out the trash, and trim the hedges, and move furniture around, and to be with them. And I was really shocked by that, because I thought that with six months to live, I would climb Mount Everest, or I would go scuba diving to the depths of the ocean, or get in a speedboat and see how fast I could go. But instead, I wanted to go back home and be with my family for that time. I, of course, did not tell anybody my crazy idea. This is, in fact, the first time I'm really talking about it publicly. Because it's a very scary and alarming idea. And I never told anybody why I was coming home. I got back to where my parents live in New Jersey, and things were unbelievably ordinary. And yet, I found myself relishing the ordinariness and finding it in some ways as exotic as anything that I had traveled to see. I helped around the house. I dug up shrubs. I worked on a deck. I moved furniture, washed dishes. And I was intending to spend my last remaining six months at home getting to know my parents better and myself, hopefully. But about three months into that, my travel urges, I guess, got the better of me. And what I was most concerned about was I wanted to see my brothers and sisters. I had four brothers and sisters. And they were scattered all across the country. And so I felt very strongly that I wanted to see them before I died. And I got the idea that the way to see them was to ride my bicycle across the country and visit them on bicycle. But before I did that, I made up a will to dispose of the little things that I had. And I had some money left over. And one of the things I did with that money was I went to the bank and got some cashier's checks for $500 and $1,000. And I mailed the money to various people anonymously as gifts. And I think giving away those thousands of dollars was the first true act of charity I had ever done. Because there was absolutely no way for any kind of gratitude or elevated feelings to come back to me, because the people had no idea who had sent them that money. It was really remarkable to see the consequences of getting an anonymous gift like that. Because when you get a check for $1,000 in the mail, you immediately become suspicious of all your friends of having given that to you. And so there's this suspicion of charity, suspicion of goodness that starts to infect the people that are around you. And you look at someone, you think, "Hm, I wonder if he gave me that $1,000?" Does that make sense? You look at them, and you think, "I wonder if he gave me that $1,000?" And then you act really nice to him. And then the next person you see, the next of your friends, you think, "Could this be the person?" And then you act really nice to them. I almost want to begin a little speech here about let us all now take up this practice. All of us. Everyone within the sound of my voice. If we all could just do this right now, then I would believe that our little radio show, just 19 minutes into the program, had contributed in some way. I had enough money left over to basically pay for food and whatnot on my bicycle journey across America. And the path that I had to visit all my brothers and sisters was not a direct route, going from San Francisco to New York. I actually had to go up to Idaho, and back down to Texas, and then back up through Indiana. So it was a 5,000 mile trip. The day which, coincidentally, was exactly six months from when I had this assignment, was October 31. It was Halloween. And so the plan would be that I would ride back home, so that I would come back to die on the day after Halloween. I think there are a lot of people who have trouble staying in the present. There are some people who like to slip into the past as a means to perhaps fantasize or escape. And they find that the past is the place that they retreat to. And I often retreat to the future. I was not a person who planned or had a career staged out, or who had a particular woman he wanted to marry some day, or some vision of a house. The future that I found so hard to give up was a much more insidious type. It was that of I'd like to buy this record because, in the future, I want to hear this song again and again. Or I will read this book, and there are some cool ideas in it because someday I may write an article about this. And it's good to know that. There was a sense in which my entire life was shifted to the future. And the thought of doing something now for the enjoyment, or the pleasures, or the principle of the function of just right now, without any sense at all that it would ever be used again or that it could ever be brought forward, was extremely difficult and disconcerting. And I fought it day by day and tooth by tooth. One of the ways I dealt with this was that I was actually able, by the last weeks, to not think about my life beyond Halloween. There was a way which I had just-- each time a thought came up about something that was beyond this horizon, I just said, "Nope, can't think about it. It doesn't work. We have to dwell in the present." And at the same time I was doing that, and I was able to do that, I also decided that it was an entirely unnatural and inhumane way to live. And that having a future is part of what being human is about. And that when you take away the future for humans, you take away a lot of their humanness. And that it's not actually a very good thing to live entirely in the present. That one needs to have a past, and one needs to have a future to be fully human. It was a journey that began at the tomb of Jesus. And as I set off to my own presumed death, I did, indeed, think about Jesus Christ who, according to the Gospels, surrendered his own life in a very knowing way. So we have the history in the Gospels of Jesus's torment in his soul, as he approached what he knew of his anointed time to die. So it was, again, that very harsh information of knowing when you're going to die. And Jesus's soul was in great turmoil and pain because of knowing that. And I think I did experience some of that, not because I had the same weight. It was just my own life. But Jesus prayed that this burden be lifted, and there were days when I did pray that, that if I didn't have to die, I really would rather not. By late fall, I was pedaling through the Appalachians, and it was getting colder and colder. And my hands were freezing on the bicycles, and there was ice on my tents in the morning when I got up. And as each day went on, I was coming closer and closer to terrain that I was familiar with and that felt like home. And I was riding into New Jersey, and I was elated. I was elated that I had accomplished this long journey. And I was elated that I was home to see my parents. And I came in to their house on Halloween day. And I was so filled with ideas, and things, and emotions, that I didn't really say very much. And again, I couldn't say very much. I think we had a wonderful dinner. They were, of course, glad to see me because they hadn't seen me in a long time. They knew I was coming back, and we had a wonderful dinner. We had baskets of candy, which I gave out to the kids. And we had a discussion that night which was about nothing in particular. It was not about the future. It was just about, I think, talking about our family and my brothers and sisters. And I was telling them all that I had learned about them. And so it was a very together and, again, not a very dramatic evening, but just a pleasant one, one that you might have a memory about as you were dying, which was not a special evening, but just an ordinary evening. And I went to bed that night, which was a very difficult thing to do because I was fully prepared at that point never to wake up again. I had been praying. I had gotten everything arranged. I had fully gone through in my own mind, in my own soul, all the things that I might have regretted. And I had righted as many of those as I thought I could through letters. And I was prepared, as much as anybody could be prepared to die. And so I went to bed while the kids were still ringing doorbells. And I went to sleep, because I was very tired after that long trip. And I didn't know what was going to happen the next day. I thought I had done all that I could. And the next morning, I woke up. And the next morning, I woke up, and it was as if-- The next morning I woke up, and it was as if I had the entire-- my entire life again. The next morning, I woke up, and I had my entire life again. I had my future again. There was nothing special about the day. It was another ordinary day. I was reborn into ordinariness. But what more could one ask for? Well, Kevin Kelly is 43 now. That happened when he was 27. In his latest rebirth, he is the executive editor of Wired magazine, a glossy magazine about the future and the present. He told us that he wasn't even sure he has ever even told his parents this story, even this many years later. Anyway, he spoke with me and Paul Tough from the studios of KQED in San Francisco. This is Your Radio Playhouse on WBEZ Chicago. Good morning. Glass, Jacobson & Associates. Hey, is Barry there? Pardon me? Is Barry there? Yes, he is. He's on another call. Do you wish to hold, or I could take a message, or you can leave one on his voicemail? It's his son. Uh-huh. Isn't this starting to sound like-- this little dialogue-- isn't it starting to sound like an episode of Dr. Katz? You know that TV show? "This is his son." "Uh-huh. Yeah." Anyway, so I thought I would call my parents in Baltimore and ask for advice on this, our first evening of our brand new radio show, Your Radio Playhouse. Can I leave a message with you? Or is it better to use his voicemail? It doesn't matter. I'll put it right on his voicemail. OK, let's do. OK, hold on, please. This is the story of my childhood right there. Dad is a little too busy to talk. But there's the recording of Frank Sinatra when needed. Hello? Hey, Mom. Oh, hi, Ira. How you doing? Fine. Can you hold on a second? Sure. This is what it's like with my parents. They're so busy. Call them. Put on hold. [SINGING] Baby, what's your hurry? When I call my little sister, she works at Disney, and so there's Disney music playing on the hold system. But there's a lot of Disney music. And there's a lot of it that peo-- Hi. Hi, Mom. Yeah. It's me. Yeah. Listen, can I record a quick conversation with you about something? What about? Well, you know the new show goes on the air this week. And as part of the show, we were thinking about having me call around to different people and get advice from them. And I wanted to know if you would have any advice. Hm. Do I have any advice? Well, can I ask another question? Sure. Who is your target audience? You are such a pro. I'm saying that you're in danger of appealing to a narrow range of listeners if it becomes a little too-- I don't know what word to use. Artsy. Artsy, yeah. Are you and Dad still worried about me making a living in public radio? I know just for years, you were urging me to just get out and get, basically, any job in TV that I possibly could. But now that I've got my own show, are you guys still worried? Or do you feel like things are going OK? Do you want me to get into television still? Now that Hugh Grant is such a big star, and everybody who sees you or sees your picture thinks how much you look like Hugh Grant, that fires up that TV thing again in me. All right. I'm stopping the tape. This is me live. That was the tape. Only my mother could possibly believe this. Only a mother could pretty much believe this. Other adults see me, and the thought that goes through their head is not Hugh Grant. The thought that goes through their head is tall Jew. Well, gosh, wouldn't they want this wonderful humanistic, intelligent reporter who looks like Hugh Grant? All right. Yeah, let's move on. What's the theme for this week? The theme for this week is new beginnings. And we have several stories, people telling about various ways in which their life began anew at some point. That's very interesting, because I just did an interview this morning with a newspaper reporter about roman-- I'm just going to stop the tape again. This is my whole life. I call my mom for an interview, and it's not even her first interview of the day. I was lucky to get a booking. She's a therapist, and sometimes she gets called by the papers and stuff. --mance, romantic love. And people's expectations about relationships. And one of the things I believe is that there are a lot of people who are good at beginnings, but they're not good at middles. Which means what? It means that they like the beginning, where there's all this idealization and romantic projections. And the other person can be who they think they should be, rather than who they are. And when they get to the middle phase-- All right. I'm just going to stop the tape. Listen, all of you in the audience right now, let's just agree right now, it's the very beginning of our relationship. It's the very beginning of our radio relationship right now. This is our little first little radio date, and I just don't want any idealizing on either side. OK? Let's just make eye contact right now. Remember what Joe Franklin said about the eye contact. No idealizing. --where there's more of a reality-based relationship, they run away from it because it's not as exciting. It's interesting that you say that because, actually, as we've approached the first show, I've realized that I am much more comfortable with the notion of every day, work-a-day radio work, and being on every week, and having pieces on the air. But the notion of saying in a really big way, "OK, this is the beginning. It's the beginning, and we're going to have a big beginning, and we're going to make an epic statement," I feel very uncomfortable with. So you are good at middles. I'm better, I think, at middles than at beginnings. That's good. That's good because practically all of life is the middle. We have gotten so deep here. I never expected that it was going to get so deep. I'm just very pleased at how deep this has gotten. Now you're sitting there, you're thinking, "Is he making fun of me? What's happening now? Where are you?" No, I'm not. I'm not, actually. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. You have nothing to worry about. Are we going to get a tape of this since we're outside the Chicago listening area? Depending on how you sound, yeah. Well, that's my mom, Shirley Glass, speaking to us from Baltimore. I don't think she's going to get a tape. I do not think she's going to get a tape. Well, next on our little playhouse stage, we have Mr. Lawrence Steger. Now those of you who have been listening carefully to our program and taking notes, and I know there are many of you out there, you know what I'm supposed to do at this point. You know because you were listening carefully to Joe Franklin at the very beginning of our program. Above all, get the plug fast. That's right. Well, thank you, Joe Franklin. Lawrence Steger is a filmmaker and a performance artist, just back from performing in Glasgow, Scotland. He's going back there in January to collaborate with the performance artist, Ron Athey, who lives here in Chicago. And basically, we contacted Lawrence, and we told him the story that you heard over the course of the last half-hour, Kevin Kelly's story, this guy who believes he only has six months to live, goes on this cross-country road trip. And as it turned out, when Lawrence Steger found out, the day that he found out that he was HIV positive, this was five years ago, on that day, it was the exact day that he and a friend left on a cross-country car trip. So we commissioned him to do a little piece about his experience. And here it is. Title. Road. Treatment. It's shot entirely on video, mostly handheld. Shaky, out of focus, bad color. Overblown color actually. Sort of the way colors are separated on an old television console, yet still has all the outlines of the images repeated. The outlines of the images, the silhouettes, repeated over and over, ad nauseam, and fading into each other. Can I get this microphone adjusted a little, so I don't have to lean over so much? Yeah, sure. Just pull that. Check one, two, three. Sound better? Yeah. Sorry. Thanks. Synopsis. The story concerns Luke, gay, white, Midwestern, late twenties. Follows Luke on the day that he is informed of his HIV positive status. Luke cops a stance of cold, brittle, not unlike the Harrison Ford narration on Blade Runner, but there's a hint of vulnerability to Luke. Have we got the Harrison Ford or the Rutger Hauer voice? Yeah. Great. Roll it. Enhance 5719. Track 45 left. Great. Take it under me. That's great. Story follows Luke. He's accompanied by his college buddy, Bill, and both are packed for a road trip across the country to San Francisco. This isn't the right section of Blade Runner. Can you just kill the Blade Runner? Locations. Car interior. Gas station exterior. HIV clinic parking lot. HIV clinic interior. Highway. Music. Strauss's four last songs, particularly "Ruhe, meine Seele!" sung by Dame Janet Baker. Can you take it under me? Hold. Follows Luke and his friend Bill to the gas station and to the clinic, the last stop before getting on the highway. OK. Take it out. Take out the Janet Baker. Bill loads one hits of pot while driving on the way to the gas station and to the clinic. Can we nix that Strauss music? It's too mournful. There's really no music on the soundtrack. It's stark, crisp. Maybe some songs coming from the radio at the clinic's desk? Great. And definitely from the car radio mixed with surfing on an AM radio. No music. The drama is constantly being undermined through the cool, collective quality of Luke's demeanor. He seems detached, quote, "I am not sure how I feel. I feel a little sad, sort of mad. I guess blank. But I'm OK. I'm sure I'll get a handle on it," end quote. Luke thinks he's sounding like a short story assignment in a creative writing class or, worse, trapped inside an artsy novel. Luke imagines himself in a television dramatization of himself. Camera pulls back from behind Luke's head, sort of on a mini-crane. Camera floats, hovers over the back of Luke's head. "The ceiling of the car must be incredibly high," he thinks to himself. Bill pulls into the closest parking spot in the clinic, blows out the last of the one-hit, and, as he's knocking the brass pipe into the ashtray, turns to Luke with that slightly watery look in his eyes from too much intake. Luke takes it as one of those Care Bear looks that he's experienced before from Bill. A little clumsy since Bill has to force his face into a sympathetic posture. Quick close-up on the corner of Bill's mouth. There's a moment of anger flashing in Luke when he registers Bill's look. When Bill asks him, "What are you thinking about?" Luke responds, "Who's thinking? Nothing." "I hate thinking I'm in a novel," he thinks to himself. Cut to interior of the clinic, the reception area. Can we change this sound bed here? Great. Take it down just a-- Great. In the scene that we talked about on the phone, the clinic waiting room scene, that scene flips back and forth between various security black-and-white cameras mounted at the ceilings. The nurse assigned to Luke's anonymous number is a black drag queen named Stephanie, who wears a full nurse's outfit complete with a little paper hat that sits atop of her freshly coiffed hairdo. She's the only one in the clinic who wears a real uniform. Stephanie has the longest fingernails that Luke has ever seen on anyone. Luke thinks briefly about how the fingernails keep on growing even after a person dies, but he pushes that thought away with this fingers to his forehead, wonders why he is thinking about that. It's that novel thing again. Stephanie, the drag queen nurse, walks Luke back to the small cubicles that the tests are administered in and then used to relay the results. Luke's narrator imagines how many people have been in these cubicles and what they would look like if they were all piled on top of one another. Piles of tested bodies. Cut to Stephanie closing the hollow core door, makes that hollow core door sound. Do we have that on cart? Perfect. Maybe a shot from a security camera that shows all of the cubicles in the clinic. Luke imagines himself in a George Tooker painting that was reproduced in his sixth grade reader. He wonders what his sixth grade teacher would think of Stephanie. He wonders if his sixth grade teacher was ever tested. He imagines her body in the pileup of bodies who have come to the clinic. Stephanie has been saying something, and Luke has to blink his eyes again to refocus. He explains to Stephanie that he has been expecting this result, that he's experienced a large share of AIDS, cared for, and, likewise, buried lots of his friends. But it doesn't seem to come as a surprise. Stephanie says, "You can cry or hold my hand. I just want you to sit for a moment and let it sink in." Luke thinks, "Whatever." Cut to Bill in waiting room, flipping through People's The Year in Pictures. Cut back to close-up of Luke, forehead wrinkled. He thinks his narrator wants him to get out of the cubicle. He waits for Stephanie to finish her spiel, thanks her, and shakes her hand, getting a slight scrape from one of the fingernails. Close-up on Luke's hand, no scratch. The walls seem to pulsate as Luke walks down the hallway to the reception area. He tries to be as blank as possible to Bill. I'm not sure about this final section. I know that we talked about it ending on the highway with the car being surrounded by bikers on their way to the Sturgis bikers' rally. But now I like the idea of it ending on the highway entrance ramp. Cut to interior of car pulling out of parking lot. Luke keeps looking straight ahead, as he murmurs, "I'm positive." Long, slow pan from the back of Luke's head to the back of Bill's. There's no reaction in either of their faces or, better, the profiles of their faces. This is the longest shot. They don't look at each other. Perhaps this scene would be shot in blue screen with the camera in the backseat and the sky surrounding the two heads of Bill and Luke having that old, scratchy, 16 millimeter time lapse exposure, so the clouds seem to be moving at a rapid pace. Flickers, flips back and forth between real sky and blue screen backdrop. Voice comes up on a car radio. "Trying not to think of the future. Just live in the present moment." Something like that. You got that? It comes onto the radio. I also decided that it was an entirely unnatural and inhumane way to live, and that having a future is part of what being human is about, and that when you take away the future for humans, you take away a lot of the humanness, and that it's not actually a very good thing to live entirely in the present, that one needs to have a past. Luke comments to Bill, "Live entirely in the present, huh?" Bill drives and looks out the corner of his right eye to see what position Luke is holding his head in. Luke looks outside passenger window and, every once in a while, turns to glance at Bill. Long pause. There's dead air. Cut to Luke's point of view. Car is pulling onto entrance ramp of highway. Luke sees hitchhiker with a sign that he stands for any remote meaning to the narrative. Luke sees himself outside of his own story. He can't read the hitchhiker's sign. He knows that he's on a long silent journey. He leans over to turn off the radio. Cut to black. Well, Lawrence Steger is a Chicago performance artist and filmmaker. This is Your Radio Playhouse. I'm Ira Glass. OK, what am I doing right now? What am I doing right now? That's right. That's right. Eye contact. Look right in the eye. Eye contact is everything. That's right. Advice from the master. OK. Let's review our program so far. Let's just review. Let's just get things straight right now. Our stories so far have been about people whose futures were taken from them and were thrown into the present in one way or another. I guess when any big emotional moment happens, you are thrown in the present in a really aggressive, aggressive way, whether you choose to or not. You have this hyper sense of reality. Well, the next story is about someone whose future was taken from him when he was wrongly imprisoned for 20 years. And his sentence was commuted two years ago. And he found himself reborn into everyday life. It was like I just-- I don't know. It seemed like the oxygen was even different. You know what I mean? The air seemed to be thinner. I'll tell you what's been a real kick for me, getting up, cooking breakfast. Making pancakes, and eggs, and bacon, and stuff like that. It sounds drab maybe to the common-- everybody would think of that as, "That's really drab." But for me, that's really exciting. And that's one of the things I always dreamed of doing. I also dreamt of finding a very lovely lady, and I have. Inside, I'm happy. Inside. This is Ed Ryder. He was in prison for murder and was doing time in Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania. And a few years ago, a key witness who had testified against him admitted to lying while under oath, and other evidence came forward. He was made a free man. Back when he was in Graterford Prison, he played trumpet, and he sang with a jazz band. And that whole time, he dreamed of this new life, a new life that he would have outside as a professional musician. And that's what he's working on. That's what he's working on right now. And he's playing. He doesn't have a CD yet, but he's playing gigs in the real world. The first time I played, when I got out of prison, I didn't feel compelled to be so exact like I did when I was at Graterford. Inmates are the worst, critical people in the world. They criticize anything you do. In prison, you have a lot of musicians. After all, musicians, they don't make no money, so I guess the first place you find them at is in prison. But you have a lot of guys who are musicians. And even though they might not be actively playing anymore, they'll be quick to criticize you, whether the chord is not right, or whether you didn't flatten the ninth, whether you didn't raise this fifth, or you guys didn't play the changes right. Although it might not have took away from the structure of the music, it's just that, I guess you can say that prisoners have a tendency to think like classical musicians would. Everything has to be perfect and exact the way it's heard. And everything has to be like that. There's no going against the grain. And here, in the world, people are a little different. They don't concern themselves so much with that, as much as how are you entertaining us? How are you helping us to feel better about ourselves? How are you making us feel better? At Graterford, there is nothing you can do to make them feel better, except to release them. So if you can play for a Graterford audience, you don't even look for an applause. Just as long as they don't boo you, you're all right. If they can't find nothing wrong with the music, they'll tell you, "You just didn't turn right. When you had the horn up, you didn't hold it on a 45 degree angle. It didn't look right." So they'll find something. Now you know how we heard people earlier in the program talk about the importance of living in the present. But when we interviewed Ed Ryder, he pointed out that, in prison, the most important thing is to keep your eye on the future, on the day that you're going to get out. And that the guys who just live in the present do really badly, because, of course, the present is so terrible. I think when I was in prison, I dreamed more about the future in my head. I just had a lot of plans, a lot of things that I just dreamed about, I just dreamed of doing and dreamed of accomplishing. You're forced almost to. You know what I mean? You have nothing else to look forward to but tomorrow. You're constantly hoping and hoping. You're trying to plan something for the future. We asked him if he is still playing the same music now that his future is here and he's out. And we thought that maybe the songs that he used to play would just bring back these hard memories of prison that he'd rather just as soon avoid. But he said, no, he plays the same numbers now that he used to, though sometimes they mean something different to him today. When I was in Graterford, I always listened to it. I had a tape of "God Bless the Child That's Got His Own" by Billie Holiday. And what it meant to me when I was at Graterford-- and it has the same meaning now, but it's different. In the sense that, when I was at Graterford, when she said, "Them that's got shall get, Them that's not shall lose. So the Bible says, and it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, But God bless the child that has his own." Well, in my mind, at Graterford, I thought that, yes, I was the child that had his own, because I was out here on my own. I had no help at the time. There was no hope. I seen no way. I was like a child. I was like a child because I had no one I can turn to. My parents had passed. I had no one I could turn to. And I felt like every time I would listen to that, I felt as though she was talking directly to me. And for me, that meant that I was on my own in this prison situation. And I was going to have to make it the best way that I could. And I was going to have to muster all the energy that I could possibly muster. Now when I was released and I heard the same song again, it still had that meaning, but now it's a different-- I'm on my own differently because I'm not in prison anymore. That's not the struggle no more. It's me. But I'm on my own now because I've got things that I have to do. I have responsibilities now that I have to take care of. I have bills that I have to pay. I have job responsibility. I have a lot of other things that I have to do, and I have to do these things on my own now. I don't have no prison guards waking me up in the morning, telling me, "Hey, it's time to get up," or "It's time to go eat, " or "It's time where you guys can go to a shower." I don't have that anymore. I'm on my own. So all this now is dependent upon me and my own initiative. [SINGING] Them that's got shall get, them that's not will lose. So the Bible said, and it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that's got his own, that's got his own. You know the strong get more, while the weak ones fade. Empty pockets don't, they don't make the grade. Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that's got his own, that's got his own. Money, you've got lots of friends. They all keep hanging around your door. But when money's gone and all of the spendings end, they don't come around, they won't come around no more. Rich relations give a crust of bread and such. Go on and help yourself, but you better not take too much. Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that's got his own. God bless the child that's got his own. That's basically some of it. Ed Ryder joining us in the playhouse from the studios of WHYY in Philadelphia, speaking with me and associate producer Nancy Updike. Ed Ryder's a big Billie Holiday fanatic. That was the word he used, "fanatic," when we asked him about it. So when we asked him to play a number with his horn, with his trumpet, he played "Lover Man." That's pretty much all the time we have for this evening. This show was produced by Dolores Wilber, Peter Clowney, Nancy Updike, Alix Spiegel, and myself. Contributing editors Paul Tough and Jack Hitt on the west coast, Margy Rochlin on the east coast. I've got that backwards. Paul Tough and Jack Hitt on the east coast. Margy Rochlin on the west. You see, you get so confused when you have two pieces of music running at the same time. Torey Malatia has supported this show from the start. We'll be back next week, same time, we hope. From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Ira Glass.
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There's what we wish for and there's what we get. For Susan Bergman, the story went like this. Her father led a double life. On the one hand, he proudly described himself as a family man, a church organist, in a denomination that was so strict the women covered their heads, wore no make-up, no dancing, no smoking, no drinking, no going to theaters, no swimming with members of the opposite sex, even. Her father stage-managed things so they appeared to be the perfect blond-haired, blue-eyed, American family. But secretly, he was having sex with men. By all accounts, it was lots of men. Sometimes he would even fly off to New York, go to gay clubs there. In 1983, he was one of the first victims of AIDS. They had barely named the disease. The symptoms weren't familiar. And he died before his children got the chance to ask him about who he really was and talk to him about how they should reconcile who he had pretended to be all those years, with who he was. What was real of their childhood? Susan Bergman wrote a book about her family's experience. And on her book tour, a very particular thing started to happen. Gay men, who were still married or who had been married, started to contact her. They wanted to explain her father's double life to her. They wanted to explain their own double lives to her. And they wanted to offer her the conversation that she never got to have with her father. Well, from WBEZ in Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Back once again for another hour documenting life in these United States. Today's program in four acts. Act One, gay men. I talk to Susan Bergman about her father. Act Two, a gay man talks to me in a parked car in an undisclosed location about why he thinks that his children don't need to know that he's gay and why he stays married. Act Three, we take all the heavy, very heavy themes about lying and families from the first two acts and rework them as comedy, if you can believe that. And finally, Act Four, the sins of the fathers pass on to the sons. Stay with us. Act One, The Book Tour. Susan Bergman came to our studios, loaded down with evidence. OK, now you've brought in some tapes of yourself being interviewed on talk radio shows that I've got here. So this first one, do we need to explain it at all before we play it? I think this was a caller that was, in some ways, typical of the response that I got on talk radio. Here we go. I have a particularly close connection to this sort of thing. I'm a gay father, divorced now. So I'm very close to this. In particular, I can understand your father's secretiveness and his pain. There's always the resentment that you had to go through the pain, that you had to hide, that you had to lie. And you live with that resentment. It really never quite goes away, even in my case, after you've come completely out and divorced and the whole bit. And the resentment lives on, that I had to do live that lie, that I had to lie to my wife, that I had to lie to my children, that I had to life to my family. And never be happy. Never, never, never know happiness. Hey, Susan? Uh-huh. Can I just ask you, what was your reaction to-- when he was saying this, had it occurred to you before that your father would actually be resentful of the family for the secret that he was keeping from you? He was angry at us a lot. But it seemed like it was more-- I mean I interpreted that as we were bothering Dad, or Mom was asking too many questions. Yeah. It's not one that had occurred to me. And I would have to contest that assumption that one has to lie or one is put in a situation where lying is the only appropriate gesture or response. Let's go back to this tape. And I hope that-- I don't know. Is there anything that I can help you. Any questions that I could answer. Because I'm still alive and I've been through it. That's great. Boy, I hope I can do this without just kind of gushing all over you, because it's so great of you to call in and offer that. It's beautiful. I didn't get that chance with my father. I guess I would ask you-- I'm just stopping the tape here. I'm just going to stop the tape here, because as you're listening, you're making the gagging signal at your own reaction. Oh, I think that's so great. Oh, I think that's so wonderful. I was not in touch with the full range of the reaction until after I hung up the telephone and stopped the radio interview. And clearly, that man was hurting in a lot of ways. And the last thing I needed to do was have a fight with him on the air about being a liar, or whatever. Whatever anger I would have had towards my father didn't seem to me to apply to him. He was just some innocent bystander. So I just tried to be nice. And it was kind-- oh yeah. There's the thing that you wish for and there's the thing that you get. And if what you really need is a long talk with your father, the kind of talk where you get mad and argue, and maybe he gets mad, and maybe people admit mistakes, and maybe things get resolved or maybe they don't get resolved, and you learn that they won't get resolved. But if that conversation is what you need, then no stranger on a radio call-in show, however well meaning, is going to give that to you. It's a mockery of what you need. But there you are. There you are. You're talking to this man, this stranger. And you find yourself asking a version of the question that you would most like to ask your own father. And you get an answer that is totally useless, because really it has nothing to do with you. You said, you didn't want to share your quote, "real life," maybe. But why do you feel that you were forced to lie about that? How could your family have shared your life? You see the problem is that once you get trapped into doing the thing you think you're supposed to do at a young age-- I married at 23 because I thought it was-- I knew I was gay then already. Hm. So did my wife, for that matter. She put it aside. Gay men sent Susan Bergman photos of themselves. One happy couple stands there in one of the photos in matching sweaters, raising glasses, smiling. The letter said that if her father had lived and divorced her mother, this is the kind of happiness he could have had. The letters that Susan Bergman got from the children and spouses of gay fathers, she said, seemed to be written in a completely different language than the letters she got from the gay fathers. It was like two different cultures, two different perspectives. There are lots of books about men coming out, gay men coming out, gay women coming out. But nobody seemed to be able to remember a book that had been told from the point of view of the children and the wives that these gay men had left behind. And families who are in that situation felt this shock of we are not alone. And they contacted her. You brought examples of letters? Yeah. The most poignant letter that I got, this woman says she read the book. "Our lives are so similar, Susan, that it was eerie for me to read." She talks about their background. They were all so fundamentalist. Our family wasn't quite fundamentalist. But this woman says, "Bible believing churches that started in their living room. We had six well-behaved, talented, athletic children in our prosperous and highly visible family." "When my dad was diagnosed in 1988," she writes, "my mom kicked him out of the house and would have nothing else to do with him. Three of us moved him out of town, encouraged him to change his name, and lied about his mysterious disease and our parent's sudden separation. Now, they are both gone. And we are left to deal with the fraud that was our life." They had just buried their mother-- when she wrote me this letter-- who had died of AIDS because the father didn't protect the mother at all. She says, "I'm writing to you now, not to pour out my heart, but to ask if my sisters and I can come take you out for lunch soon there in Chicago? There are not many like us who have suffered such circumstances. And I know in my heart that I should be able to hold my head high and talk about my mother's needless death without shame. But as of now, I can't." That's the end of that letter. And I talked to this family at length, on several different occasions. They did come to Chicago. They did? Yeah. Two of the daughters came. Some of the sons were not willing to even acknowledge that the parents had died of AIDS yet, one of them being a physician. One of the sons being a physician? Yeah. But the interesting story that they have, as her father was dying, they spent hours and hours interviewing their father on tape about his sexual contacts. They got the names of all of the married men that he had been with in this three-city area and the addresses and the phone numbers, which he had. And they began calling those men's wives on the telephone, because they wanted to save lives, because they knew their mother was dying. And so they would call up these women and say, you don't know me but-- Yup. --my father has had sex with your husband. Yes. I mean can you imagine that? I mean, of course they debated this among themselves. They thought this is none of our business. But when their mother got AIDS, they knew that this list of 100 married men were not taking any precautions with their own wives. And they started calling. And I said, "Well, what was the reaction?" I asked them to go on. And they said a lot of women hung up the phone them. And some would say, "Oh, thank you very much for calling." And as you say that, the thing that occurs to me is it's such a complicated act, because partly it's an act of compassion for somebody. And then partly it's such an act of vengeance against somebody else, and calling-- I know but-- --out that man. I mean if you lose your mother to AIDS, I can see why. I never had to do that. Yeah. But I'll tell you, in the town I live in, outside Chicago, there is a family, at least one, where the same thing is going on. The father is very promiscuous, a prominent man in town, has four young children. His wife has no idea he's a practicing homosexual. They have unprotected sex. And people in the community come to me and say, "What should we do? We've asked him to tell her. We're thinking about telling her. We want to protect her so that her kids have one parent." And when I talk to-- And what do you tell them? I say that's their decision. They're going to have to really think about that, because I don't know the people. I can't go into their lives just because I wrote some book on some related subject. If they're involved in the family system in some way, they have to make that decision. I have no idea. But when I talk to gay men about this book, who have read it and want to have a conversation, almost everyone has said to me, "Oh yeah, my main partners are married men." I said, "Well, you have to think about your own responsibility to the family then, I imagine." All these different fathers who contacted you, did any of them say, I'm sorry, I did something that hurt people and I'm sorry? Well, no. Because there's a lot of talk trying to defend the position that's just newly being articulated in their lives. And I understand that they're building their ramparts or whatever. That position being, I was right to at least clear up this lie. Finally, I did the one right thing. I left my family and became a true homosexual. That's the right thing, that's being defended in almost all of the letters. This is a very interesting letter signed, anonymously yours. He says, "At the risk of intrusion, which is not my intention, I'm compelled to write you and express some gentle viewpoints based on experiences similar to those in your book, but admittedly little real knowledge of your life." I appreciated that acknowledgement very much. "Based on your writing, however, I strongly feel that your father's life with you and your family was not the sham it may superficially appear. I see the story from a different perspective, as that of a tragic, often unconscious struggle by your father to love his family and not end up as one of nature's mistakes, which of course he wasn't. Were there no kisses of bruised knees, soothing of tears and hurt feelings, umpteen occasions of personal denial, dreams of success and happiness for you and the others? Would it be unreasonable to consider yourself doubly-loved, by a fractured psyche fighting desperately against the nature he was given? In retrospect, are not his intents as important as his failures?" It's a beautiful letter in some ways. And in other ways, there are these irritants in these approaches. I shouldn't be so critical I suppose, but then to say to me, were there no kisses of bruised knees? Yes, of course. Yeah, I had a great Daddy in many regards. Yes, he was a split person. And I don't think that he enjoyed being split, and neither does this gentleman. But that doesn't make him a better father. And that's almost the thing that this letter is driving towards, like couldn't you be doubly loved, being loved by a homosexual father? No. I think I was well-loved by my father. I think my father was a split person, and that that destroyed him and it worked towards the destruction of his family. By coming to understand that your family was structured around a lie, that who you were told you were and that the family was, has nothing to do with what you really are or were, that's very complicated. Susan Bergman. Her book is called Anonymity. Coming up, a gay father explains why he chooses not to tell his children of his double life. Act Two, Dad in the Closet. This next story isn't intended to answer whatever questions Susan Bergman might have about her father. It's intended to answer our questions about these gay men who stay in their marriages, leading double lives. The man we found to interview for this has been married for 26 years, heads a support group, called Review, for men in similar circumstances. He was willing to be interviewed, but he didn't want me coming to his home and he didn't want to come to our studios either. On the phone, I understood this to mean that he didn't feel comfortable appearing in public like this. Later, he told me that I had misunderstood, that he just didn't want to drive that far. In any case, we met in a parking lot on Damen Avenue and drove to a quiet street, where I conducted the interview, in his car. My name is Jerry Walters. Now let me just ask you, is it OK for us to use your name on the radio? Jerry Walters isn't my real name. It's a name that when I used to work on a hotline, they said pick out a name that you're comfortable with and use that. And so that's what I've been using. Plus, it separates business from my club activities. So Jerry Walters is fine. This man is in his fifties, was a teenager during the Eisenhower years. He looked like any suburban dad. He was neatly dressed, in gray wool slacks, a sweater, and what appeared to be a clip-on necktie. He says he was always a good boy. He says he doesn't really get at angry people, doesn't know how to yell at people. Back in high school, he says, he was the kind of boy who'd go out with girls, but never make passes at them. I graduated. I would date occasionally. And I did find somebody that seemed like a very nice person, that we had a lot in common. And we went out on a date. But that afternoon, after I met her in the morning, and that afternoon I had my first gay experience. And so, it was really kind of a red-letter day. I went bowling with her in the evening. And I was out with another man that afternoon. So I thought well, the situation with the other man was scary and disappointing and painful, to say the least. And so I thought, well, fine. That's out of my system. I don't want any more of that. He went on to marry the girl, who he's still married to nearly three decades later. But soon after their wedding, he became increasingly obsessed with men. He found himself driving out to the forest preserves, where gay men were known to hang out. Men would walk over to his car. Men would try to talk to him. And I would drive out of the forest preserve areas like a bat out of hell, to be perfectly honest. And thinking that, fine, I didn't do anything. So there's no reason for me to feel guilty. But I would end up with headaches that were so severe that I couldn't work. I would come home four or five days a week, and just be incapacitated with the pain. But then I was taking aspirins and Tylenol, and everything else. I got hooked on tranquilizers. And it's a scary thing. When this obsession first takes hold, where first you are thinking about it, and before you know it, you are completely consumed by the thought of doing something with another male. You're not even sure of what you want to do. You're not sure who you want to do it with or where these people are, but you are totally consumed with that quest. Well suddenly, my wife became the person that was stopping me from pursuing what I absolutely, positively had to do to survive. And your thinking gets distorted, would be an understatement. Why what happens? What do you start to think about? Maybe I shouldn't say this and maybe it's unique in my situation, but you think, gee, if she had an accident or something-- yes, I knew-- it sounds bizarre. But you're almost ready to plot to kill somebody. And I've told her this. And it's something that we-- here's a very mild mannered person, almost plotting somebody's demise, because they're stopping you. And they don't even know what's going on at this point. Do you think that at that time, before you told your wife, do think that in a day-to-day way, you had a lot of resentment that you would act out on, you would snap at her, that you would just be short with her? Because what you are describing is being so resentful. No, I didn't. I held it inside. You see, this was your wife. You can't do this. I'm one of these people that holds the door open for women and very courteous with people. So I held it inside. And you think the top of your head is going to blow off instead. Finally, after two years of marriage, he got up the courage to tell his wife he wanted to have sex with men. She says, "Oh, is that all?" And I said, "You don't understand. I've got these feelings for men and I don't know how to deal with them." And she says, "Well, I married all of you. I didn't marry part of you. We'll just figure out how to deal with it." And so from there, we just set the guidelines that would work for us. I asked her what she needed to be comfortable? She wanted, number one, to know where I would be. And that's fine. I would sooner leave a phone number underneath the telephone, that if I don't show up by 10 o'clock or 12 o'clock, she calls. She wanted me to be home when the kids got home, or when the kids woke up in the morning, which is fine. The term, "are you sleeping with somebody," I think, is kind of stupid. If I'm going someplace to sleep, I'll sleep at home. I'm going out for sex, not for sleeping. So that was never a problem. That's really the only things. And she said, "I want to be the most important person in your life." And she always has been and she always will be. He says, of course, he uses condoms. So he doesn't being home any infections or AIDS. His children and the people he works with don't know he's gay, though after his father died, he told his mother. Why stay married? Because I love her and she loves me. And we're probably the best thing that happened to each other, ever. See, I don't like-- there's a difference between gay feelings and living the gay lifestyle, a dramatic difference. And I know a lot of people will disagree with this and maybe take offense at this. There is an arrested adolescence in the gay community. There is an acceptance of lying because it was needed to survive. And honesty is something that I really put a high price on and I really value it. I suggest to him that he's the one who lies, by staying in a straight marriage, and not telling his own children he's gay. He says he's not really lying to his children. As he explains it, there's no easy time to sit your kids down and tell them that you're gay. When they're 5 or 10, it'll make no sense. When they hit adolescence, it could be confusing, a kind of burden, as they sort through their own sexual identities. If his children ask him directly he says, then he'll tell the truth. And he says, they'll ask when they're ready to hear the answer. If you want to know something, you will ask the question. If you don't ask the question, either you know the answer or you don't want to deal with the answer. Am I right? How old are your children? They're in their 20's. They're girls. Hm. Well, what is your assessment of what's going on? Do you think that they know, but they choose not to ask consciously? Yes. And it's a conscious choice? Yes. I think it's very much a conscious choice. I think that they accept me for who I am. And I don't think they want to know a whole lot more about it. But you're saying they accept you for who you are, but they don't actually know entirely who you are, because you keep a certain part from them. I am who my children see. The only thing different about me is that I have sex with men. That is the only difference. If that makes me a different person in their eyes, what value is that? How is that going to enhance me as a father if suddenly this is in the equation too? I'm a good father. I'm a good husband. I take care of them. I was there when they needed things, and with school and growing up and advice and everything. And I don't think that what a person does in their bedroom, or someone else's bedroom, really is your children's concern. Later in our conversation, Jerry says that he'd like to tell his daughters the truth, but his wife doesn't want him to. She doesn't want anybody to know. He feels he has to respect her wishes. I ask him if his wife is simply ashamed that other people will know her husband looks for sex outside of the marriage? No, says Jerry. She knows the marriage works for them and simply doesn't want to have to put up with the opinions of people who won't understand. And they do have a sex life, Jerry says, of a sort. Are you as sexually attracted to women as you are to men? No. We don't depend on each other for our sexual satisfaction. I don't know if I should go into that or not. Probably not. Masturbation is something that is part of what we do for sexual satisfaction. And however you do it, it's satisfying. Does she see other men? No. She says that's not what I'm about. We talked for two hours. It started to get cold in the car. Over time, as we talked, it became clear that this man stayed in his marriage, partly because he couldn't imagine any other life for himself. To Jerry, being an adult means having a wife, a house in the burbs, a couple kids, dinner parties, and mortgage payments, and mowing the lawn. That was the only way that people lived. I mean anything else wasn't even considered. And so how could I be anything other than what I am? And that was to be a married man. Do you think that you could have a kind of relationship like you have with your wife, with another man? No. I tell him that these kind of long-term, marriage-like relationships are commonplace among the gay men I know. In the suburbs, it's not commonplace. Let's face it. In the city it's accepted. There are areas in the city where men can hold hands, where men can show affection outwardly. You won't find that in the suburbs. But I find there's a part of you which doesn't even believe that it exists. It doesn't, where I live. For a while, I told him about Susan Bergman's book, about how difficult it was for her when she realized that her father wasn't what he seemed. I suggested to Jerry that his own daughters might feel betrayed, might find it hard to trust him if someday they find out he's been less than candid about his sexuality. He didn't agree. Shall we take the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus in that context too, that your parents told you that this man is Santa Claus? Do you hate your parents or distrust your parents' judgment from that point on? When you were a child, you were given just enough information to live your life. They didn't tell you that the landlord's going to throw you out of the house. They didn't tell you that your father's going to lose his job. They didn't tell you a lot of the things that could hurt you, because they were your parents. Their job was to protect you. Her situation is that her father was, on the surface anyway, presented the image of being a family man, a very religious man-- Right. --was a musician in their church. And so there was this constant lie, because-- Where is the lie? Was he not all of those things? Wasn't he all of those things, plus one other thing? We are complicated individuals. We can be a lot of things. You said he was a musician. He was a family man. He was a minister. He was a lot of things. And he was just this one more thing, that he didn't choose to share with her. And I think that was his privilege. How much do you need to know a person to love them, to live with them? Jerry says he talks to about 260 men a year in the support group he leads for gay and bisexual married men. He says he urges men to think very seriously about what they'll be giving up if they choose to quit their marriages, if they choose to be honest with their families, if they choose to end their double lives. Coming up, lies that every parent tells, including a secret that my mom has kept from her kids. And yes, it involves sex. Yes. In a minute, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and artists to take a whack at that theme with monologues, documentaries, short fiction, short radio plays, anything we can think of. Today's program, Double Lives. Act Three, Lighten Up. Up until now, we've been hearing about pretty serious lies, told between parents and children. But there are lots of trivial lies that parents tell. In fact, you can reasonably argue that it is impossible to raise children without lying to them, which brings us to the Neo-Futurists. The Neo-Futurists are a Chicago group who perform 30 plays in 60 minutes every Friday and Saturday night. And they prepared this play, they call it a play. I think non-Neo-Futurists would call it a sketch. They prepared this play on our theme today. It's by Greg Allen, a recent father himself. Twenty-one lies I will tell my children. Go. Number one. If you don't get down, you're going to break your neck. Two. Santa's coming. Three. Mommy was just, um, singing. Go back to bed. Four. I will never forget this for as long as I live. Five. I'm sure he didn't mean to hurt you. Six. I said shucks. Oh, shucks. Seven. Sure. I like your music. It's just different. Eight. One more time and you're going to get out and walk. Nine. Just because your friends do it, doesn't mean you have to do it. Ten. Oh now, you don't really mean that. Eleven. Sure. I like your haircut. It's just different. Twelve. I never said that. Thirteen. No one is going to notice a little pimple. Fourteen. Sex is the expression of love and devotion. Fifteen. It doesn't matter about the new car. All that matters is that you're OK. Sixteen. I'm going to kill you. Seventeen. Sure. I like your boyfriend. He's just different. Eighteen. I was just closing my eyes for a minute. Nineteen. You were the best baby in the world. Twenty. Everything is going to be all right. Twenty-one. Daddy will always be here to take care of you. Curtain. Greg Allen, Diana Slickman, Dave Awl, Heather Riordan, David Kodeski, Anita Loomis, and Stephanie Shaw, of the Neo-Futurists. Our parents can surprise us with what they don't tell us, with what they don't talk about, especially when it comes to sex. Recently, I had this experience. An ex-girlfriend was in the gym, looking through a copy of a Marie Claire magazine, a woman's magazine. And there was an article in it on women's fantasies, their sexual fantasies, "What Do Your Man's Dirty Daydreams Reveal About What He Wants from You?" In the article, six sexperts-- that was the word they used, sexperts-- reveal the six most common male sex fantasy scenarios. So my ex-girlfriend is reading. And there, in the third paragraph, one of the sexperts turns out to be my mother. Hello. Hey, Mom. Yeah. It's Ira. Yeah. So I'd like to do a little interview. OK. So Mom, can I read to you a quote from an article? Of course. OK. Here it is. "Your man wants a woman who excites him through her own excitement. You could stimulate yourself while he watches or let him participate by moving his hand to where you want it." Yeah. That's you being quoted in Marie Claire. [LAUGHTER] You're kidding. What issue? All I know is that Anaheed was at the gym. And she opens up Marie Claire to an article called, "Men's Sexual Fantasies." And it says at the top here, "Sexperts reveal the six most common scenarios, unlock the secret longings and psyches of the modern men who fantasize." And you, basically, are one of this sexperts. Yeah. Yeah, I am. I didn't really know you were a sexpert? What did you think I was? [LAUGHTER]. Just another Jewish mom and psychologist. Uh-huh. So it wasn't like you were a sexpert and you were keeping it from your family? Um. You're talking about my family, meaning my children, not my husband? Yeah. Because he knows that I'm a sexpert. And you can call him to verify that. I think I'm just going to let that go. But my children always seem embarrassed if I discuss anything sexual. So therefore, I tend not to around them. When would you try to discuss something sexual with us? I might make a joke or say something that had a sexual connotation, and I'd get this disapproval. I don't think that that's true. No? Yeah. I mean it doesn't affect me in any way to think that you and Dad would be sexual with each other. In fact, I even remember as a teenager understanding that and being kind of reassured by it. Uh-huh. Does that make any sense? It makes a little bit of sense. But it really doesn't cover all the situations, if I'm just telling a joke or talking about somebody else. And I think it has to do with boundaries. And I think it has to do with that children, even adult children, do not like to regard their parents' sexuality. Hm. You know something, you're actually convincing me. [LAUGHTER] Well, let's do a little scientific test. Can you think of a sexual joke? You just tell one, right now. And I'll tell you my reaction. I can't think of one. [LAUGHTER] You know what I'm feeling right now? I'm feeling a profound-- Oh, actually I heard a wonderful-- Wait a minute, no-- I heard a wonderful joke, but I don't even know if it's a joke or story. Because this is like something that might be true. Uh-huh. That when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and he said, one giant step for man and one-- what is it? One giant step for mankind or whatever-- One small step for a man, one giant step for mankind. Right. Right. That's it. Right. One small step for man, one giant step for mankind. And then, he also said, "Good luck, Mr. Gorki." And for years people have been asking him what that meant? And he would never tell them. And then this year, someone brought it up again, what did you mean when you said, "Good luck, Mr. Gorki? And he said, well, I can tell now, because Mr. Gorki died this year. When I was a little boy, Mr. Gorki was our next door neighbor. And I was playing outside one day. And their bedroom window was open. And I heard Mrs. Gorki say, "Oral sex? You want me to give you oral sex? You'll get oral sex from me the day that boy next door walks on the moon." [LAUGHTER] Well, now I'm examining my own feelings. And I have to say, I did get very nervous there, in a way that does not correspond, perhaps, with shrugging my shoulders at the notion of you having some sexual life and sexual thoughts. Yeah. So let me read you some of your other quotes here. All right. In the fantasy of man dominates woman, you're quoted as saying-- says Dr. Glass, quote, "In a caring relationship, it's certainly not abusive or unhealthy if the fantasy is played out in a light, teasing way." You're also quoted extensively in fantasy number five, spontaneous encounter with a beautiful stranger. The key quote is this one, as far as I'm concerned, "Go to a restaurant, and at first pretend you don't know each other," suggests Dr. Glass. Which when I read that, it actually explained some dinners I've had with you and Dad,-- --I thought. Well, you didn't talk very much between the two of you. No. No. That's just the opposite. Have you done this? Have you gone to a restaurant with Dad and pretended you didn't know each other? No. No. No. No. But if you did, you're saying that-- We've gone to restaurants with you and pretended we didn't know you. [LAUGHTER] What do you mean by that? Well, when you were younger and-- --let's say that your manner of dressing didn't exactly conform to the style-- All right, all right, all right. I think everybody-- yeah. --that the people in the restaurant. Daddy would look at you. And he would start popping Gelusil, before we'd go out to eat. And I'd say, now Barry, people are going to look at him and they're going to look at us, and they're going to know that we did not pick out his clothes. So now that I know that you're this big sexpert, do you have any sex advice for me? Find a nice girl and get married. That's not sex advice. We always end up this way, don't we? With that particular advice, yeah. That's the lady I know. I could ask you any question and that would be the advice. Well, that was the first rule of journalism you taught me. Is what? No matter what they ask you, be sure to get your point in. You mean when you were first being interviewed by people, this is what I told you to say. Right. Right. Well, I'm glad we got to that then. My mom. Dr. Shirley Glass, in Baltimore. Act Four, Sins of the Fathers. What does it do to children if parents tell a big lie for years? Part of Susan Bergman's book, Anonymity, is her trying to understand the two parts of her father, strict, religious, family man; promiscuous, gay, night clubber. His personality was split in half, she writes, into two irreconcilable halves. But part of her book is about her discovery that growing up in his home, she became somebody who was also split in half, somebody able to carry on a life with two irreconcilable parts. She found herself as an adult, leading a double life. To end our program, we asked her to read from her book. I pretend I am a faithful wife. My husband is married to that faithful woman. The woman looks like me. She moves around in my body. This is what I mean. You can't tell by looking. He makes love to her. He has asked her a question once or twice, and she has heard herself reply with an avoidance, "Is there anything you haven't told me? I want to know more of you, Susan." They spent last evening on opposite ends of the house, keeping things going, changing the music, refreshing people's drinks and trays of food. "What makes you ask that tonight after such a great party? All our friends here, scrumptious food. Didn't you enjoy yourself?" She unfastens her gold-beaded bracelet and folds it carefully into its silk-lined box, replacing the lid. "I saw the way Tom looked at you." "There's absolutely nothing for you to worry about between me and anyone here tonight. Most definitely nothing's up with Tom." She concentrates on slowing down, as she hangs up her belt and tosses her stockings in a basket of hand washing. "You're doing this jealous thing again. What kind of look?" "Do you have any secrets from me?" "A few." She'll keep it light. "This is not my natural hair color, quite. But the rest is real." You must understand that lying is a temporal invisibility. It's the leaves you wrap yourself in when the voice in the garden calls. I was learning to deflect any doubt or question about my faithfulness, back onto the questioner, so that I didn't have to perpetuate the lie. I had for years, part lied, but mostly told the truth. Two and more irreconcilable parts, which let me understand my father, or made me into him. Here was my father's ailment again, his dread of being known. There's a family with children on the line. I force my family to serve as the same kind of false front I was raised to be from my father. Our presence testified to his normality. We failed, no matter how we strove for blessing, to discover the root of our calamity. I can't shake his choice alone, I tell myself. So we slipped and fell, which is human. And he died, stuck. And this gluey lie I keep perpetuating, sticks to me like a curse, revisited on the next generation. My father is in the window when I glance up, and in the hurried tone of my voice, in the shape of my ribs. What if, lights on, as is, he had asked us to love him? I opened the book I had slipped into my jacket pocket and read, "Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell on thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity; nor sworn deceitfully." If her hands are clean and her heart pure, I had been forgiven. But I had yet to go to the man I had wronged, and whom I desperately wanted to love me, to cancel my ongoing lie, my maintaining the family pattern of dishonesty. My husband couldn't bear ever to look at me again. Hadn't my family put him through enough already? Wasn't I a hard pill he had to swallow and swallow? He would remarry within the year, a woman of fidelity and beauty and a way with children, my children. What kinds of stories would they be told about me? All that we had made together-- I took inventory-- did not add up to the ultimate banishment of the untruthful from the presence of God. If you give me the opportunity Lord, one more time, whatever the consequence, I prayed, I will tell the truth. Judson put the question simply, the same one as before. That morning, I had sat in the sun, and read, and drunk my coffee, uninterrupted. Maybe it was a morning unlike any my father had ever been given. When Judson came home later that morning, is when he asked, "Is there something you'd like to tell me?" There was a reason my husband was unable to retire his doubts. I had made an offer of honesty, yes, but hadn't thought the test would come so soon. Walking out on the plank of my own promise, I peered down at the water. First, you leave your father's house, and then your own. There was a deep gulf below me I could not see into. This was the last of my life, as I knew it. "Whatever the consequence," I said inside my head to remind myself, breathing once. He could tell in the stillness of the pause between his question and my looking back up at him, that his life was changing too. Today's program was produced by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Dolores Wilber, Peter Clowney, and Nancy Upkike. Contributing editors Margy Rochlin, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Sarah Vowell. Musical help today by John Connors, Steve Cushing, and the mysterious and elusive Rumpety Rattles. To buy a tape of this or any of our This American Life programs, they're only $10, call us at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380, 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, whose mother never says things like-- Oral sex? You want me to give you oral sex? You'll get oral sex from me the day that boy next door walks on the moon. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories of This American Life.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And let me do something that I've never done before. Let me just reach out and retune your radio for you. You're on the air at WPLP. Good evening, Bob. I'm going to write more than one letter. I'm going to write the station. I'm going to write the chamber of commerce. --basketball team. I always wanted to go to Miami High-- You ever flip through the dial, past the stations that you listen to all the time, just skim up the dial, slowly, from station to station, waiting for something? You don't even know what. Something. Anything. Something like this, a radio signal whose source is impossible to figure out and the intimacy of one voice. What could be more personal, even in another language? [SPEAKING INUIT] Hello to you, Barney and Rosie. Hello to you, Rose. I'm happy to you-- OK, I'm singing to you Ayatollah Khomeini [SPEAKING INUIT] [BEGINS SINGING] This recording off the radio is one of those things that got recorded and then was passed from person to person to person. Finally, it ended up on a compilation tape of radio moments put together by radio station WFMU in New Jersey. And that's how we got it. By anybody's best guess, it's a radio station in northern Canada. The speaker is Inuit. And here's where it gets a little hazier. Because they're talking about a strike over and over on this tape, it's possible that this is a situation where the regular radio staff is on strike, and these are the replacement workers. Or it's possible that these are the regular workers who are about to go on strike, fed up, at the end of their rope. Or maybe that's not the story at all. That's actually one of the things that I like about this. Like a lot of good radio, part of what is so appealing about it is what it leaves you wondering and thinking about when it's over. Can you imagine tuning your radio and stumbling upon this? You know, just stumbling on this? It's so ephemeral, this moment just happening and passing and about to actually evaporate into nothing forever. And that's part of what makes radio different from other media, I think, that quality where it can seem so small and so fleeting. Ian Brown used to host the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show Sunday Morning, and he was very great to listen to. He was smart and unpretentious and this great interviewer and writer. And when the show was revamped and he was taken off the air as host, he read this little radio essay on his last day about the intimacy of radio-- the false intimacy of radio, that feeling that we get together every week, you and me. I mean, literally, that's what it feels like. It feels like you and me. You and me, even though we don't know each other at all. Anyway, months passed after he ended that job, and we wanted to get him on our show-- on This American Life And I called him up, and he was not brusk but businesslike, very proper, formal. And it sounds ridiculous to say-- I feel sort of silly saying it-- but it was hard not to feel a little strange about it. It was hard not to feel a little bit like here is this friend who went suddenly cold. And I would not feel that way about Ted Koppel or Peter Jennings or anybody else who I've ever seen on television. I can tell you that. There is just something about radio. There's just something about radio. It's more personal. Well, this is our hundredth episode of This American Life. Each week on our program, we choose a theme, and for our hundredth show, we bring you an hour of stories about the medium in which we work . A program on radio-- what makes it great when it's great, what makes it terrible when it's terrible, which it often is. Act One of our program today, Brigadoon. Searching for an illegal radio station in Miami that keeps appearing and disappearing and appearing again in the mist. Act Two, The Invisible Leading the Blind. Jack Hitt stumbles on a radio station that seems to completely ignore the last six decades of broadcasting style and convention. Act Three, Radio Most People Listen To, an act in which we spend some time with the radio programmers who think that it's better to play the same exact songs over and over all day long, the consultants who make every radio station sound the same. In short, the thinking that makes most radio in America today so boring, and we defend those guys. Act Four, Noble Calling. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who says that when peace comes to his country of East Timor, he has just one wish. He wants to do a radio show like Howard Stern's. Stay with us. The following program is furnished by. Are you married or are you living in sin? A little of each. You blast me, boy. You blast me. Act One, Brigadoon. We're devoting this first half of our program to the ephemeral thrill of stumbling onto some radio station, some radio moment, that you don't know where it came from, and you don't know what it is, but you just cannot stop listening. We have this first story from Iggy Scam in Miami. My friend [? Sinclair ?] was the one who first found the Northside black power pirate radio station way down the left of the FM dial. You could only tune it in up on the Northside, so we'd listen to it while we drove down 79th Street whenever I went to his house. You could tell it was pirate radio because of the number of times the DJs would say [BLEEP] in every sentence. They'd play all this poorly-recorded local rap, like this one song, "Too Many Suckers and Not Enough Stretchers" where the guy raps, "Living in the M, the I, the A-M-I. Sometimes, I've got to ask myself why." And then they'd play Tupac and then, every couple of beats, the DJs would just cut in over it and just scream, howl, or go "Uh!" And then the music would cut out completely. Most of the time, there'd be four or five DJs all in the room with the mic, all just talking and yelling and telling jokes over the music. It was totally loud and chaotic and fun. They even took phone calls somehow. They'd play a beat over the radio, and then people would call up to rap over it over the phone. Talk about DIY. Actually, they were never really that overtly political at all, really. We only called it the "black power station" because of one time when they were taking calls, and this dude called up and said, check it out, man. Southern Bell van's been parked in front of my house for three days. There ain't nothing wrong with the goddamn phone. It's the white man spying on us and trying to keep us down. Like I said, it was a great station. Besides being really great radio, the station was exciting. Who were these guys? Where did they broadcast from? And how did everyone in the city know their number to call in when they never gave it out over the air? When the DJs talked, I'd listen to see if there was even some discernible code that they used. I couldn't catch one. I never found out anything about it, really, and eventually, I just moved away from Miami. But after all my plans fell apart one by one last year, I found myself back in Miami trying to sort it all out. I ended up living back up on the Northside, off 79th Street. Good old 79th Street, home to the "Welcome To Miami" water tower and the INS building. Six lanes of road from beach to swamp, full of rusty, old, American cars blasting bass. The home of the urban trailer park and the indoor flea market, the $0.99 quart of malt liquor. I always thought 79th Street, and not the beaches or hotels, is probably the true heart of Miami. You could look at everything and think, this was all once somebody's idea of a good idea. Right away, I started trying to tune in to the station, but I couldn't seem to find it. I didn't know if my radio had bad reception or if they'd just gone off the air. I wasn't even sure of the exact frequency, really. I became sort of obsessed with finding out what happened to those guys, but there was no way to find out. Meanwhile, I kept busy taking long bike rides to explore the Northside, an almost touching daily tour of the very architecture of defeat. Often, I rode by sad, old Bobby Maduro Stadium, which is named for a Cuban baseball star who had never made the majors. Originally, it had been built in the '50s by a Cuban financier who was trying to lure Major League Baseball into Miami. And even then, he built it way too small for the major leagues. The financier lost all his money eventually, backing Castro, and then later backing anti-Castro revolutionaries. By the 1980s, the stadium was only used as a shelter and processing center for Nicaraguan refugees. And now, it was a host to a weekend flea market in its parking lot. Eventually, I pretty much fell in love with the Northside for its own sake, and I gave up the search for the station. But then one time, on my daily ride past the unused warehouses and huge fenced-off lots full of weed and rubble and the boarded-up housing projects, I found what could've been an important clue about the station. Down at the end of a dead-end street where almost certainly no one would see it, someone had spray painted "Tape Radio, 61.5 WEED." Now, 61.5 would seem to be a radio frequency. WEED would seem to be a station's call letters. Was this some kind of ad? How could it be a station, though, if the FM band doesn't even go down that low? Even if there could be a station at 61.5, no one would have a radio that could tune it in. 61.5 would almost certainly be dead air-- static. I decided to even try it as a phone number--615-WEED. Not in service. I figured that since there's never really any people walking around down there on that dead-end street, if 61.5 was somehow a station, they were probably broadcasting from a warehouse on that very street and that the broadcasters themselves must have painted it. Later that same day, I found the exact same spray painted message in the same exact writing in black paint 30 blocks north in Little Haiti. I never did find out what it meant. But that night, it was hot as hell outside-- the beginning of the Miami summer-- and I was just laying around feeling sweaty and miserable when I checked the radio for first time in weeks. And I couldn't believe it. The station was back on the air. DJ Funky One was on, playing music and taking calls. He'd play a little instrumental beat part, and then suddenly cut in completely over the music, put the caller on the air and yell, what's up? Caller would say, I want to say it two times for Little Haiti. DJ Funky One would say, all right, baby. Little Haiti's in the house. What's up? Next caller wanted to say one time for the Larchmont clique. All right, what's up? One time for Arena Towers, one time for the 6-8, one time for Edison, two times for the 7-4 boys, and a shout out to Shadow Man. It went on all night, music and calls. Outside my window, the station's signal was flying strong over the dark, rosy streets and avenues, past the open windows and open apartment doors and front porches, and the whole sad city out there sweating in the night. I drank some tall cans from the 79th and Biscayne gas station beer special and listened, and it felt like every radio in the Northside must be tuned in. Finally, after a while, I heard the phone number actually given out on the air. So one afternoon, when only music was on and they weren't taking calls, I called up anyway. I couldn't believe it when DJ Funky One himself actually answered the phone. I said, "Uh, what are you guys called?" He said, "We're the Space Station." "Well, where do you guys broadcast from?" "Carol City." I said, "Do you, like, have a license or anything?" And DJ Funky One started laughing really hard, and he said, "Yeah, yeah. We got all that [BLEEP], man." And then he hung up on me. Carol City was at the very north end of the county. It had originally been a white, suburban subdivision, but eventually, it was where city planners tried to get the rising black population of the '60s to move to when the city needed new slum land as far away from downtown as possible. These days, it's a seedy, menacing residential sprawl of little homes and gang graffiti known widely as a place where kids from white, suburban subdivisions go to buy drugs. I rode up there, but I found no more graffiti clues to the station's whereabouts. Later, with a car radio, I found that you couldn't even get the station that well north of 125th Street, which is about 60 blocks south of Carol City. So I think that DJ Funky One was probably lying about Carol City. So I started keeping my eyes open for any new clues on my ride home from the more wealthy southern parts of town, where I was working. It was a long ride home but always interesting. When you left downtown for the Northside, it was like crossing over into the flip side of the postcard. You rode out of the pink and blue neon glare of air-conditioned malls and chain stores and gated condos and hotels and skyscrapers into a dark, narrow maze of funky old wood houses, hand-painted signs, and corner stores. The suburbs have the police protection, but the Northside has voodoo. Well finally, one day I got a huge clue when the station was apparently having an on-air live promo party. DJ Funky One said, come on down. We've got all this great food down here at Mama's Kitchen. We've got the fried chicken plate for five bucks and Mama's conch dinner for seven bucks. Could it be? DJ Funky One and a pirate radio transmitter live in a restaurant? The address they gave out was only a couple blocks away in the heart of Little Haiti. But when I got there, there was no restaurant at all, just two black dudes on a couch in front of this tiny house cut up into four efficiencies. There was no music anywhere. There was no sign of a transmitter. I said, "Uh, are you guys with the radio station?" They looked at me like I was crazy and nodded. "This is Mama's Kitchen?" I could smell chicken. They said it was. I said, "But where's DJ Funky One? Where's the station?" They broke up laughing, and then one guy said, "Everyone wants to know that." So Mama's Kitchen was really just some guy's mom's kitchen. I ended up passing on the conch dinner, and I just bought a frozen cup of Cherry Kool-Aid for a quarter. I took it to my favorite spot by the tracks and sat there with it, laughing in the summer heat. Now that I'd met two people from the station-- or had I?-- the whole thing was even more mysterious. Well, I guess I don't mind not knowing, and now I'll probably never find out more about the station because now it was time to move away from the Northside. But I had one last Saturday night with the station, one last night of the station sending out the Miami-style bass to be packaged and delivered to the suburbs via 79th Street in a great, rusted 1971 Oldsmobile. One last ride through the ruins and failing streets and bad ideas that talk to you late at night, like radio. Iggy Scam's story first appeared in his handwritten, self-published zine Scam. Some music during this story was by the Mission Burrito Project in San Francisco, which delivers free, organic, vegan burritos to the homeless one night a week. --at the Centers for Disease-- Music from Wayne Shorter, Greg Osby, and-- Well, assistant city manager Virginia Dolloff resigned on Friday after two weeks of negotiations over severance issues. City manager Brian Martin disclosed that. Martin had asked -- Act Two, The Invisible Leading the Blind. So much radio listening happens in the car. This radio signal is one that our contributing editor Jack Hitt chanced upon on a long drive. It was my decision. I don't want to get into it. You hire and fire until you get one that works. Last month, I was cruising the backwoods of Massachusetts on assignment in a rental car. For the longest time, radio wasn't much help in relieving the boredom of interstate travel. After three hours, my finger was numb from jamming the Seek button when the radio suddenly snagged this station. And it was two elderly gentleman reading. It was unlike anything I'd heard all morning, or for that matter, for the last 30 years. Well, a good Monday morning to you, and welcome to the March 2 edition of The News, as being read to you by us volunteers, us being Mike-- That's me. --and yours truly, Gordon, Monday morning hosts here. And we read for the reading disabled or anyone else who would like to listen. And in the background, you're listening to a usually-swinging band playing Beatles music, Ted Heath from London, England. And we'll hear more of Ted on the way out at 12 o'clock. And then, at 11:00, we'll be playing Engelbert Humperdinck. Nice fellow. Of course, music is not our game here. No, it isn't. We just put it in to relieve or give ourselves a break and get us in the mood to read to you, because for the next two hours, we will be reading. You're listening to the Lowell Association for the Blind Talking Information Radio Reading Service coming to you-- The service is provided for the reading impaired. Mike and Gordon read items right out of the Lowell Sun, the Nashua Telegram, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune. They happily lack all the mannered, practiced intonation and attitude of commercial radio. Their keen story selection favors Homeric battles among sewer commissioners and landfill managers or pronouncements from local cranky professors. I knew right away that I had found my escape from Gordon Liddy and Chumbawamba. We really stick to local news if we can-- Merrimack Valley news, southern New Hampshire, northern Massachusetts, anywhere within our listening audience. But it's always local news because we feel-- and I think, Mike, you'll agree with me-- they can hear the national and the international news on their regular radios or televisions. Yes, I agree. And we're going to get under way with Mike reading from the Nashua Telegraph, today's edition, by the way. Yes, good morning. And from the University of New Hampshire, the headline here says, "Domestic Assault Researcher Backs Unorthodox Views." Murray Strauss defends his theory that wives assault husbands as often as the reverse. That's Mike, who seems to have naturally married the vocal charms of Lawrence Welk and Howard Cosell. Gordon's the other one, who tends toward a quieter style. In this story, Mike reveals that the official statistics on domestic abuse are flawed because men simply don't report their beatings to police. And Mike explains why. Although both men and women are likely to be ashamed of being hit by a partner, many men are even more ashamed because they feel it shows them to be a wimp, he said. Every story ends with a touch of banter from the two hosts. You know, Mike, that's never happened to me. Oh, me neither. Well, you're married. I'm not. No wife would ever hit me because it would have to be somebody else's wife, and I don't make friends with other people's wives. I can't remember if I've been hit by somebody else. Oh, you can. Come on. That was a very serious story-- Yes, it was. --but we sort of made a little light of it at the end. And we're sort of informal here on our little radio station, and we hope you don't mind it. "Informal" is not quite the right word. The right word is "surreal." Even though the readings are as ordinary as anything found in a newspaper-- Dear Abby, the horoscopes-- their intensity makes the listener feel not so much like he's hearing a radio station as living in this place where Mike and Gordon dwell. Even the obits are absorbing. Eugene R. Goyette of Alfred, Maine. Committal prayers and services will be conducted at 11:00 AM tomorrow in the chapel at Saint Joseph's cemetery in Chelmsford. Mrs. Anna E. [? Leckis-- ?] or Leekis-- [? Kunzler ?] of Lowell, wife of Charles E. [? Kunzler Sr. ?] Calling hours are at the-- no, this is another one. I'm sorry. She's evidently already been buried, Mrs. [? Kunzler. I could not turn the stories off, whether it was assistant city manager Virginia Dolloff getting fired because she hadn't done enough to stimulate growth along one part of lower Middlesex Street, or sewer commissioner Tom Moran who, now a candidate for selectman, was worried that his sewer experience might peg him as a one-issue politician, or the account of Representative [? Millnozzle ?] breaking his leg. But the story that had me spellbound for 10 minutes was a long and treacherous account of the annual meeting of the Dracut Water Supply District. It was rich in character and subterfuge, a mini Shakespearean drama. Essentially, three board members who faced pay cuts had packed the meeting with relatives. And in the end, they GOT raises. Graham's relatives at the meeting included his wife and about 10 brothers, sisters-in-laws, cousins, and nephews. Also present were about 15 Graham friends, neighbors, and business associates. Blatus had about 10 relatives at the meeting-- three sons, a sister, a brother, a cousin, and in-laws. [? Annis's ?] wife, daughter, son, and son-in-law were there, as were several of his neighbors. In all, counting relatives and friends of the commissioners, Blatus and [? Gardette ?], totalled close to 100. But wait, there's more. 26 from the school department, six firefighters, three police officers, and two from the sewer department. The disputed raise, by the way, was a mere $2,000. But the ferocity of the battle was apparent, and even the political tactics were strangely familiar. Like Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich, the raise plotters pretended to be astonished that anyone would question their motives for going to the meeting. So they shrouded themselves in patriotism. "It's just one of those things that happens," said district clerk Michael Blatus. "Everybody can go to a meeting. Shame on the people who don't-- By the end of the piece, my heart went out to Maureen [? Cares, ?] who had arrived innocently ready to defend smaller Jeffersonian government. But she was easily crushed. "I'm disappointed," said Maureen [? Cares, ?] who attended with her husband. "This was my first water district meeting, and it strikes me as though the other side-- and I hate to use that tern-- it appears that there were some efforts to bring out a particular constituency." Mike? I think that should have been subtitled "All in the Family." And now, I'd like to introduce Lowell's weather wizard, Steve Roberts. The core audience of this program is maybe 200 blind people in New England who actually hear the broadcast on special radios configured to receive its non-AM/FM signal. Occasionally, they air the show on the local college channel, which is how I heard it. But for the most part, Mike and Gordon's universe shares in our air space but is not of it. It's what Lake Wobegon would be if real people lived there, and then broadcast their own show without Garrison Keillor. In this alternate universe, the men are not always strong. Rather, they are savagely beaten by their wives. And the children are not at all above average. From Tyngsboro, sophomores at three area technical high schools scored poorly last year on a nationwide test of English, math, and other key subjects. Greater Lowell sophomores scored in the 27th percentile, meaning 73% of the school systems nationwide scored higher. Not that there isn't a good deal of Keillor's sweetness on the air. Mike and Gordon discuss a pledge drive that will occur between now and the-- I'm not making this up-- Acme Club picnic. Later, there's a discussion of the election of the town hog reeve. That's the guy charged with rounding up the village's pigs if they bust out of the pens. When you hear this program, you realize just how homogenized everything else on radio is. This is banter that hasn't been focus grouped or copied from another show with better ratings. Finding Mike and Gordon was like discovering radio as it might have been 65 years ago, a kind of ur-radio, beautifully preserved in amber. By the way, I have a little funny I want to make. Is El Nino related to that old movie star Sal Mineo? No, I don't think so. I had to say that. I just had to say that. Well, that's all right. I'll ask Dutch. He's an aficionado of these things. Sal Mineo, eh? OK, Steve, thanks a lot. You're welcome. Back to the news, we are. Jack Hitt listens to the radio from his home in New Haven, Connecticut. Coming up in the second half of our program, we move from the radio we love to the radio that actually exists on most radio stations, plus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who wants to host a radio show like Howard Stern's. And which Nobel Peace recipient is it? Nelson Mandela? Henry Kissinger? Yasser Arafat? The Dalai Lama? Real answers in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Radio. What makes it so great? What makes it so terrible? And we have arrived at Act Three, The Radio Most People Listen To. He can't even get it out. We start June 26. Free tickets? Myra, please. Well, I just thought I'd ask. Not for you. This is a recording of V103, WVAZ in Chicago. A few years back, V103 was in fourth or fifth place. But radio is not an art, my friend. No, no no. It's a science. And by applying scientific principles, consultant Tony Gray and program director Max Myrick transformed V103 until it tied for number one in the Chicago market, year after year, with adults age 25 to 54. This, of course, means lots more ad revenue, much bigger profits. Twice as many adults listen to them as listen to Chicago's public radio station. The story of how Max and Tony did this, made their station number one, is the story of how radio works-- pretty much every commercial station on the dial. This is the science of modern radio. And it begins here, 15 blocks away from the radio station. These are the offices of a company that V103 hires called Strategic Media Research. Every day, young women in 10 windowless rooms get on the phone in the late afternoon and early evening and call radio listeners. It's targeted research. For V103, they only call the listeners that V103 wants more than any others. These are 35- to 44-year-old African-American women. They go for women rather than for men for a very simple reason, Tony Gray tells me. Women are more likely to actually fill out the Arbitron diaries, which ratings are based on. In most cases across the country, the stations target females because you know you can rely on the women to fill out the diaries. So they get these women on the phone, and they hook them up to a computer which plays them brief clips of 30 different songs over the phone. It takes about 15 minutes. For each song, the women press numbers on the phone's keypad to indicate if they're familiar with the song, how much they like the song, and if they're getting bored of the song, which Max says is the most important thing. Once you get a record on the air, you have to know when to take it off, because there's nothing that'll drive a person away from a station than a song that they're just tired of. Every week, a printout of the audience scores arrives on Max's desk. And he marks it up, dividing the songs into A songs, B songs, C songs. A songs will be played on V103 every three and a half hours. B songs will be played every five hours. Cs will be played twice a day. These 30 songs are the only new songs that V103 plays They make up 40% of the music on the station. The other 60% is what radio programmers call "golds," proven songs that always test well with the target audience. For V103, that means Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing," anything by Anita Baker. On last week's list, Max crossed off six songs that just did not test well enough to stay on the station, one of them a sentimental favorite for Max by his favorite artist, an artist that he does not want me to name on the radio. So I'll just say that he's a crossover black artist who married Lisa Marie Presley. The reason this song is in brackets is because we've been playing it for several weeks. So it's saying it'll never be a hit. The research is saying it's not going to happen. Now, you like this song. I love this song. I love the artist. But you cannot let those feelings interfere. No, it's not about me. It's about listeners. It's about playing what they want. You have your own radio station here. You can play whatever you want. That's my job. You said the most important thing. I have my own radio station at home. And I play all the stuff I want to play as often as I want to play it. I make tapes. But when I come here, it's about business-- big business. Millions of dollars are affected by the decisions we make. So that's the real bottom line. V103 has four competitors who are going after the same demographic group that they are. The average person, says Max, jumps around between two and three radio stations all the time. If at any moment V103 has a song that scores lower with the audience and one of its competitors has a song that scores higher, V103 loses. Some programming tidbits I picked up during my visit to V103-- if you play rap music, you pretty much say goodbye to any adult audience. So even stations that target African-Americans usually don't play much rap. V103 plays none. Sampling is another matter. One of the reasons that sampling bits of old songs so popular now in pop music has to do with the way that radio stations operate, with the science of modern radio. Picture-- if you were a songwriter and you put some famous old clip from a pop song into your song, when radio stations do those telephone surveys of listeners, way more listeners, especially older listeners, are likely to say that they recognize and like your song. And radio stations will add your song to the playlist. One of the songs that Max is adding is a song called "Too Close," which has a sample in it. Oh, here it is. This is another song we were looking at. Normally, we would not go on a song like this because it tends to be a little young. But the bed for the song is from a familiar adult song. What's the sample that they steal-- use? What is that song? You'd have to put it in. Oh, here you go. It was a rap song back in-- oh, "Christmas Rappin'" by Kurtis Blow. Kurtis Blow. Right. Remember that? The '80s, sure. This is a very familiar sound. If you're in the adult demo, it's not going to make you mad to hear this song because it's just so familiar. You know this song? What is this song? When they came to V103, Max and Tony made some changes in personnel, they tinkered with the station's slogans and promotions. They paid a marketing firm to call 200,000 women on the phone telling them to listen for a contest on V103. But the main thing, Tony says, the single most important thing that moved them from number five to tied for first place was picking their music more carefully, letting in nothing that did not test well with the target demographic. A higher degree of discipline. And what, again, my experience has been, a short playlist always seems to fix the problem a lot quicker than, let's say, a more liberal playlist. When I went to visit V103, I had not been in a commercial radio station for 20 years. And I was curious about what it was going to be like, Chicago's number one station. Turns out it looks exactly like Chicago's public radio station-- same carpet, same fixtures, same office equipment, same phone system. It looked exactly the same, except everyone at V103 had much nicer clothes. And the stereo speakers in Max's office are nicer than the ones in the studio that I speak to you from right now. Tony and Max and I are the same age-- 39 and 40. All three of us started in radio as teenagers Ask them what they love about radio, and they talk about finding unknown songs, putting them on the air, watching them become hits. They talk about the satisfaction of watching the science of radio marketing actually work. And their lives are organized around one moment that happens every month-- the moment they get their numbers. It happens every month. I can't sleep the night before the book comes out. I can't do it. I can't sleep. I can't do it. And when I pull them up, I always have my head down. I don't even want to see them. And luckily, we've been at the top of the page. But man-- Running a station the scientific way means, of course, that most radio stations sound the same. It's why most radio is so boring, why we hear the same songs repeated over and over, everywhere on the dial, from city to city, why V103 can't even play Otis Redding. I should note that public radio does not stand above all this. Research has been driving it for years. The jazz played on Chicago's public radio station is audience tested. The classical musical on most stations is audience tested. The most any of us can hope for in this environment is pockets of individuality. And one of the interesting things about V103 is that their format does include pockets of individuality, most notably, the morning show. Tom Joyner, who's syndicated around the country, who does one of the most idiosyncratic, funny, truly interesting radio shows I have ever heard. It jumps quickly from This Day in Black History to the three-minute radio soap opera It's Your World. From serious and semi-serious to straight-out comedy, it is surprising and just great by any measure. So we kind of made a little noise, huh, Mr. Novak? Indeed you did. You've got some power, I would say. No. No, no, the people, not me. The people, OK. It's not me. A few weeks ago, Joyner and his morning crew took on conservative columnist Robert Novak. This is while President Clinton was in Africa apologizing for slavery. Novak, at the time, said something on television about how African-Americans would not be in the United States if not for slavery. Joyner's show started a barrage of mail to the Chicago newspaper that publishes Novak's syndicated column. And very, very quickly, Novak came onto Joyner's show to try to clarify his position for Joyner's audience. Some of our really fine citizens are African-Americans-- in government, in business, athletics and show business. You know how they got here? They were all slaves, weren't they? So it's kind of a problem. We wouldn't have this enrichment of our society if it wasn't for slavery. I never said slavery was a good thing. I said it was an unusual thing. Mr. Novak, let me jump in right quick, if I may. When you say it's kind of a problem, the "it's" in that sentence presumably stands for slavery. So if slavery is kind of a problem-- No, I didn't mean that. OK, what did you mean by that? I meant it's a logical problem that we wouldn't have-- One more thing about the scientific way of making radio-- it is weirdly democratic. Every song is chosen by polling. Here's this multimillion dollar business, all these well-groomed men and women and their expensive clothes spending every hour of every day thinking about how to please middle-aged, inner-city black women. How many other civic institutions are doing that? And let me just say one thing, that I'm not in the business of offending people. And I am genuinely sorry if anybody was offended by the remarks I made before or even the remarks I made this morning. OK. We appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Novak. All right. You've got it. CNN, Washington bureau. Well, of course, the science of radio-- the machine of modern radio-- takes as well as it gives. It breaks hearts. Lots of people and ideas get knocked off the air as programmers try things they think will more predictably and scientifically attract listeners. Ida Hakkila had a job as a DJ on two big New York rock stations, and she got pushed out for more predictable programming. She began at a station called Z-Rock. I was the voice of Z-Rock. And what they'd have me do was-- I was kind of younger. I don't think I'd do it now. But I was the only female voice on the station. So I had to be really, really angry, which isn't the way that I am, personally. So it'd be like, AM 1480 Z-Rock! you know, like I was going to hurt somebody. So sometimes-- And were those instructions to you? Did they actually sit with you in the studio and they're like, "No, angrier. Make it sound angrier"? No. Actually, I did all the production. I just did everything. It was funny. And I think I got paid, like, $5 an hour. And then, at the end of the day, there was a boss that would hear everything. And he'd say, "Could you sound more, I don't know, like a dominatrix?" And at some point, you became a DJ-- a regular DJ on the station, right? Right. Well, what happened was, they started out this butt rock rock station. It was called Q104.3. What are you calling it? Butt rock. Butt rock? And I mean that in the most endearing way. I really love the music. It was AC/DC and Ozzy. And for some reason, the best way to describe it would be to call it butt rock. And the way commercial radio is, there's these very slight parameters. But this guy, as program director, knew that the best thing to do with me was to let me go. The very first shifts that I did were Saturday nights. He'd let me play some of my own records, which was an amazing amount of freedom. I know it doesn't sound like very much, but it was enough space to be a human and to have a lot of fun with the listeners. So what happened? So how come you're not there? Oh, because in 1996, I guess Viacom could own more than one station, and they decided that they wanted to have a station that appealed to males age 25 to 54. So they changed the format from pure rock, which is what they called it, to classic rock. These distinctions you're making-- pure rock versus classic rock versus new rock-- it's so Talmudic. It's just so fine. Classic rock, oh, it was like Aqualung again, and, like, Jimmy Buffett and stuff that just-- I was literally praying to get fired when I kind of saw the writing on the wall. I walked into the promotions closet, and I saw these Jimmy Buffett t-shirts. And I said, OK, I don't want to work here anymore. I hope they fire me. That's the sign that the Antichrist has arrived-- the Jimmy Buffett t-shirts. That's exactly it. Ida turned in her resignation. Then she looked for other jobs, including one at her first radio stations-- Z-Rock and K-Rock. But she decided she couldn't work there when she saw what those jobs would be. And I just kind of knew what was going to happen to me was that they'd want me to become somebody that said what they wanted me to say. You know those-- they're called liners in commercial radio, where DJs say stuff like, keep your button set on us. Wow. I didn't know there was a name for that. Yeah, that's called a liner, where they say, like, 20 songs in a row or your money back. Stuff like that. So really, like, middle of the road-- and these were people who were actually-- maybe 10 years before, they were the most vital and vibrant DJs, and they had just been beaten. They were people who were just absolutely beaten. They were reduced to having to say-- I just remember that button one, like, keep your button locked on us. And every day is a no-repeat day. And, we play 20 songs or someone wins $20,000. And, Ida, literally, what would be in front of you as you were on the air? Would there be a list of, you're going to play this song, you'll play this song, you'll play this song, you'll play this song? Yeah, it's basically a list. It's a list that says exactly what song comes at what time. So then, what's the pleasure of being a DJ? What is the thing that you're doing yourself? Somebody else has chosen the songs and all of that. I don't know why people become DJs. But I don't think that they look at the room like a really big phone or something really vital or exciting or alive, but more like they look at it like a room. You look at the radio station like a really big telephone? Yeah. Yeah, I thought of it as a really big phone. And it was a magic room. It was just the most vital room. And I really, really liked the listeners. All my phones lit up the whole show, and I just basically talked to people. And I'd talk about what people were doing at work. I'd talk about what they were eating at lunch. People would send me pictures of what they did. And it was this community. And if it was hot and people were working on roofs, I'd have them call up and talk about how hot they were and who's the hottest. And I shouted out songs. I know it sounds really hokey or stupid or whatever, but you were just making somebody's day. And I can't tell you how much I loved that. That's what, I think, breaks my heart the most is I miss that like you wouldn't believe. It's so weird. It's like you were betrayed by radio itself. I just so don't want to sound like a bitter person. And there aren't very many people, if anybody, that understands what I've gone through, which is, I was saying, it's just like an open wound. Or I am just so heartbroken. This is something that I love so much. And I just don't think that it exists. It's like being in love with somebody that you've never met. It's like some kind of strange situation where I just love this thing, and I don't see it anywhere. So what are you doing now? Now? Oh, god. Well, actually, I've been doing a lot of cool things, like being in a band. And I've been writing a lot. But the real reality of it is that I ran out of money. So I'm answering phones, and I waitressed for a while. And do you listen to the radio on your job? I actually tuned into some internet stations. There was a station that I really liked in Calgary that was-- they didn't even play good music, but the people just seemed real. Wait, you got onto the internet, and you had to search on the internet for a radio station in Calgary? I actually went all over every single thing that they put on Yahoo. And I listened to every single station that existed. Until you found one that you could stand? Like, there was nothing in the metropolitan or tri-state area on the actual radio? You literally had to pull in a station from another country. Participating with sister stations KEX Portland, WKRC Cincinnati, and-- Let's address the issues on the ground that affect the daily lives of the people, people who are being killed or kidnapped or tortured. All of these problems-- Act Four, Noble Calling. This is Jose Ramos-Horta on an international news program called Worldview that's broadcast on Chicago's public radio station. Horta is an exile from his homeland in East Timor, has spent two decades as the leading international figure denouncing the invasion of his country by Indonesia, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his efforts to hinder the oppression of a small people. But before his appearance on this radio program, Worldview, he confided in producer Edie Rubinowitz that someday, if peace comes to his country, he has another dream. He would like to do a radio program himself, one like Howard Stern's. He's seen Stern's movie, Private Parts, on an airplane. We reached Horta at the United Nations offices in Geneva. That's the kind of radio program I would do in Timor one day. I probably wouldn't copy off the hair, but his approach is really hilarious, and I enjoy listening to him when I can. So you've heard his radio show? Oh, yes. Yes. I heard before-- long before the film came in-- when I was in New York. A few times, I heard it on a taxi, like when you take a taxi somewhere. At first, I didn't know what the hell this is, but I noticed the taxi driver would crack up, would laugh. And then I would join in, so after that, of course, I heard it many times whenever I could, yes. Let me play you a little clip from the Howard Stern Show, OK? Yeah. All right, here we go. This is a clip, he's talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger. So I said, Fred, let's go chase Arnold into the bathroom and tell him how great we think it is that he's doing Conan The Barbarian. We went in there and he's like, "What?" [FART NOISES] "Hey, boys." [FART NOISES] "Hey, boys, please. Thank you so much for nice compliment, but please." [FART NOISES] "Sorry to bother you, Arnold." "That's OK, boys." Yeah. Something tells me he gets a little thing on the side going with some girls. Oh, here we go. I'm tellling you. "Meet me in my trailer." "Jamie Lee, that was a good strip." "That was very nice. Now, let's go practice in private. Come here, Rosanne." So can you imagine that your own radio program in East Timor would go in this kind of direction? Well, I don't know whether I can afford to be exactly like that. Well, they would get me off the air right away. But it is entertaining. When you imagine what you'd like to do on your radio show, what would you like to do? The kind of program, the kind of show that would not take people too seriously, like government leaders, politicians. When you describe it that way, it makes it sound like you'd have mostly a political show. You saw in Howard Stern's movie, Private Parts, he has, like, naked ladies in the studio. Would you do that? In our society, in our country, no, I couldn't do that. I don't think you'd find too many women in the Third World that would do that. You have to take into consideration that in certain countries, there are certain things that people are not yet prepared to listen. For instance, if I were to talk about sex the same way Howard Stern Show talks, the bishop would excommunicate me right away. Yes, and I should say, you won the Nobel Peace Prize-- it was a co-award, you and an archbishop. Yeah. Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo is an outstanding, courageous individual. And I don't think he would appreciate very much if I were to have a radio program exactly similar to Howard Stern when it comes to discussing sex. And let me ask you to explain, what's so appealing to you about Howard Stern? Well, he challenges all the hypocrisy, the snobism, the double standards. He says things, he does things that most people would want to do and to say but that they don't dare. You know, when you describe his program the way you do, it sounds that, in a way, it's almost a diplomat's dream. A diplomat can't usually say exactly what's on their mind, and here, you have a radio personality who gets to say exactly what he wants. Exactly. Many diplomats feel like I do. You get frustrated with all this posturing at the United Nations. And sometimes, I lose my temper and I tell some people what I actually think of them. And if I were not constrained by the delicate work I do, if I were to have my own radio program, I tell you, I would be almost exactly like Howard Stern. We don't believe you. Flat out don't-- I don't really care what you believe. I don't believe it. I think that Mark has a radar in his pants for money. Yep. Do you think there are many members of the diplomatic corps who listen to Howard Stern and are fans? Oh, yes, yes. People have fun. They enjoy it. Most of them feel, well, that's exactly what I would like to say myself. And if only I could have a job where I were able to speak honestly like this. Exactly. Yes, yes. Now, over the last few weeks, knowing that we were going to do this interview, we've been trying to arrange to get you onto The Howard Stern Show so you could take a look firsthand at your potential new career. And we haven't been successful so far. And I understand that at one point, you were in contact with them. You called them up. Yeah. Can you tell me what happened? Well, first, the lady had no idea what I was talking about. I told her East Timor. She said, East what? She probably thought I was calling from the East Side in New York. After, I tried to explain-- she even didn't know what the Nobel Peace Prize is all about. She had never heard of the Nobel Peace Prize? No. and then she pass on to the editors or the producer, whoever. And they say they don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. I'm going to play you one more clip. This is also from The Howard Stern Show. Morning, Howard. Right. I'm interested in the porno cruise contest. All right, listen. This is the ultimate prize. It's a porno cruise. It's like 70 hot chicks who are going to be naked the entire time, filming porno. They're going to be poolside. It's a cruise, a legitimate cruise, and we've got two tickets to give away. In other words, they're having a cruise, and it's going to be all porno actresses. And they're giving away tickets to it. But that again, is a joke, no? No, I think it's real. It's real? I think it's real. Well, OK, if it's a joke to joke people, I would. Many, many years ago, when I was a journalist back in Timor, on April Fools Day, I ran a story saying that a Swedish cruise vessel had ran aground not far from the capital, and there were many blond, nice, Swedish women around. And I tell you, everybody, including some very respectable men, they all rushed there. And all there was when they got there, there I was, waiting for them. There was no boat, no Swedish women. You were ahead of your time. Thank you. In a certain way-- you're trying to get freedom for your homeland-- do you view this kind of speech, which, I have to say, Howard Stern is often criticized here in the States for the things he says and the way he is. Do you view this as being, in a certain way, what freedom is all about? Yes, obviously, that is freedom. It is irreverent, but it is freedom. It is honesty. And that's why it is so popular and many people hate him because of that. But he should, in fact, receive a medal of freedom for what he's doing. Jose Ramos-Horta in Geneva. Well, our hundredth addition of This American Life was produced by Julie Snyder and myself with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike, senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett and [? Sahini ?] Davenport. To buy a cassette of this or any of our 100 shows, call us at WBEZ here in Chicago. 312-832-3380. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who has issued new orders for how I'm supposed to do the show from now on. "Could you sound more, I don't know, like a dominatrix?" I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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In the 1830s, the area around Niagara Falls was still mostly wilderness. Railroads were just coming in, and already people were complaining about how commercialization was ruining Niagara Falls. Already there were cheesy attempts to make money off tourism. In 1827, promoters sent a ship full of animals over the falls. They had advertised that it would be ferocious animals of the forest-- panthers, wildcats, wolves. Instead, the cargo included a buffalo, two foxes, a raccoon, a dog, and 15 geese. It didn't matter. Everybody made money. The town of Niagara Falls had barely been settled for two decades. This kind of exploitation of the falls has continued for nearly two centuries since then. And what's surprising about it really is how unsuccessful it's been. Power plants fell into the river. Bridges collapsed. Deals were struck that benefited no one. If the classic story of America is the story of people who started with nothing, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, made something of themselves, the story of Niagara Falls is the opposite story. Here, they started with something, something big, something huge, but didn't build anything lasting from it. The modern history of Niagara Falls can be divided roughly into three phases-- the schemers who came in trying to exploit the falls for tourism, how their dreams rose and fell. But that's not the story we're here to tell today. Then there were the schemers who came in trying to exploit the falls for industry. By the twentieth century, they built hydroelectric power plants and factories that used that power, that cheap power, moved in. But then those factories left, decimated by the same economic forces that ravaged the industries in most of the Rust Belt states, forces so powerful they can destroy a town, even a town with one of the world's natural wonders in it. But that's not the story we're here to tell today either. We're here to tell the story of the third phase of Niagara's life-- the people who live in the aftermath of those dreams that have been dreamt and lost, who live in present day Niagara Falls, a city like many cities around the country, blessed at some point with natural advantages and resources that somehow fell from grace, fell apart, a town full of people trying to make sense of what's happened, living in the aftermath of what's happened, some who've made their peace with what Niagara is, some who haven't. During the next half hour, we're going to bring you two sets of stories interlaced, half of them from documentary producer Alix Spiegel, who went to the falls and interviewed people living there, half from David Kodeski, who grew up in the town of Niagara Falls. It's This American Life, from WBEZ Chicago, Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. All the stories this hour will be from Alix and David. We'll start with this one from Alix. There's a painting of Niagara above the couch in Paul's living room and another on the opposite wall over a chair. These pictures have a romantic, epic feel, like the two Niagara pictures he's hung on the wall near the front door. Then there are the four aerial photographs of the falls above the greenhouse window and the etchings of the falls in his office and the small, delicate portrait of the falls in the kitchen over the sink. There is in fact a picture of Niagara on almost every wall of every room in Paul's house. I visit Paul, and we sit together on the couch in his living room under the biggest picture of blue water rushing the brink. He's wearing his Niagara baseball cap. Walking towards the falls you can notice the crescendo building up, the change. Then you can hear this mmmmmm, and that sound of the falls as you're getting closer and closer and closer. And finally you're there. It's like the "1812 Overture," when the symbols go, boom! Dum-da-da-dum! I get goosebumps when I hear that every time I hear it. Honest to God. If you've ever heard the "1812 Overture," I'm sure. Well, that's the same feeling. That's what people should get when they go to Niagara-- goosebumps. Paul was a schoolteacher but retired early so he could study and write about Niagara full time. He's written five books, a folder of poems and gives lectures to local high schools and environmental groups. Nothing about the falls is too small for Paul to study. He is, for example, the only person ever to compile a comprehensive history of suicides at the falls. He did this by combing through a century's worth of newspapers at the local library, picking out all the articles and references to suicide, and collecting this information in a series of graphs, colored bar charts on poster board, which break the suicides down by age, sex, and so on. Monday, blue Monday, I guess is the most popular day. Wednesday is the least popular. Over the hump. People always feel good. Over the hump. Weekend's coming, so who wants to do away with themselves? We got the weekend coming. And then what time of the day are suicides? 4 o'clock in the afternoon. So tired of work. Can't stand it. Can't decide to go home or whatever. And then what month of the year? September is the most. And believe it or not, the next month is the least, October. Paul reads me a poem he wrote called "Sensing the Wonders of Niagara." He tells me that the American Falls and the area around the American Falls is supposed to be a natural reserve according to a hundred years of New York state law. But, he says, the city of Niagara doesn't care. He says there are too many skyscrapers, too much honky-tonk, too many factories, and tourist helicopters buzzing low all day long. On the Canadian side of the falls, there's casino gambling and wax museums and sushi. Then Paul starts asking me questions, not the kind I'm supposed to answer. The kind that answer themselves. Who are we, the residents on either side of this wonder, to think that it is ours to do with as we wish? Why do we insist on introducing more and more buildings and distractions around the falls? Why must we turn the falls into a commodity? How come so many people are so unhappy today? Why are people angry when they drive? Isn't this because there are no places of natural beauty where people can escape modern life? How would it look if you stood in line at the Louvre in Paris to see the Mona Lisa, as I did in 1979, how would it be if when you finally got to see it there were neon lights all around it, flashing. Buy this. Buy that. Buy this. Could you really enjoy the painting? No. If you went to hear Mozart-- oh, my favorite composer, Mozart. If you wanted to hear Mozart and went to a concert, and you've waited for months to hear this concert and then, right next to the stage was a rock band playing at the same time, could you enjoy the Mozart? I'm afraid not. So when you come to see Niagara Falls, you should see something natural. When you come to hear Niagara Falls, you should hear something natural. Paul writes letters to the Niagara Gazette and the Buffalo News, and speaks out at town meetings about limiting commercialization of the area around the falls. His opinions are unpopular. He's seen as an outsider, an extremist. He's been called a complainer and anti-industry. One city councilman told one of his friends that he'd like to see Paul disappear. In 1983, Paul was testifying against a landfill that he thought might threaten the Niagara River. And that night he was woken up at three in the morning by the sound of a truck in his driveway. A truck pulled up in my driveway and put a large metal sawhorse against my overhead garage door. And my dog was barking. I got up, and I just got to see the truck leaving my driveway. And there were two men on the back of the pickup truck and a man driving. And there were two blinking amber lights on the sawhorse. I put my coat on, went outside, and I took a look at it. I said, my god, why is this here? So I called the police. And the sheriff came to my house. And he said Mr. Gromosiak, you've been warned. I said, by whom? He said, I don't know, but that's how they warn people. I said, oh, really? As a kid, Paul would visit Niagara three or four times a week. He would sit on his favorite stump, watch the water, and fantasize about what his life would be like. But now Paul doesn't visit Niagara at all. He lives less than three miles from the falls, studies and writes about the falls every day, covers his walls with pictures of the falls, but he can't bring himself to go. For relaxation, I can't anymore. I just can't. I get upset now. I could cry. I feel like I'm walking on the ruins of a wonder. So I go other places to walk. When you think about your life in the future, do you ever think that you will be able to-- No. No. No, I can't. I don't think I will. I will only go there when I have to, to do a favor for someone or to take people there to see it. But I will remind them about what it was. Paul tells me that he sometimes thinks that fighting for the falls is his destiny. He never married and lives alone, so he has plenty of time to really pursue it. And ultimately, he believes he will see a natural Niagara Falls-- one day-- when he gets to heaven. Could you imagine being in that place forever, how it used to be with the bald eagle soaring above, hundreds of them, with that ground shaking, with the trees bending over the gorge, growing larger than most other places in North America, all kinds of food to eat? Just cup your hands together and put them in the water and drink it while you're looking at the falls. I can deal with that forever. I can deal with that forever. There are really only two kinds of jobs at Niagara-- heavy industry and tourism. I got a job in tourism. Early in the spring of 1986, I was hired by Gray Line Tours, Incorporated, licensed by the state of New York and the province of Ontario. I had to pass a couple of simple tests. The Canadian, or Horseshoe Falls, are 158 feet high. The American Falls are 184 feet high and have a crest line of 1,060 feet. 30,000 cubic feet of water pass over both falls every minute during the daylight hours in the summer months. The water at the base of the falls is as deep as the falls are high. I became Niagara Parks commission tour guide number 674. All that spring, summer, and fall, I drove van loads of tourists to all points of interest in the region. Every tour a three-hour tour, three times a day, 21 times a week. Did you go on the boat, I'm often asked. Yes, I went on the boat three times a day, 21 times a week. Today, I know that in family photo albums in India and Japan there are pictures of me pointing out a geologic feature, telling a tale of daredevilry, posed with the rest of the tour group, the natural wonder in the background providing the perfect backdrop. When I was a kid we visited the falls often, nearly every weekend, usually just before Sunday supper at grandma and grandpa's. Yet I never really got over my terror of the falls. Despite the fact that I led tours at Niagara Falls three times a day every day for a single summer, I never got over my terror of them. The water there is so swift, the drop so sudden. You can't stand there at the brink-- watching the water roll over, changing yet always the same-- you can't stand there without the thought crossing your mind. It would be so easy, so peaceful, to just jump. And it does happen. Often. Everyone who lives here has a story of someone they've seen, of someone they've heard about, of someone they've known who was killed in the falls. Sometimes people will plan for a long time for a trip to the falls. They stand there watching the water for a while. Usually they'll remove their shoes, place their belongings, their personal effects inside their shoes, climb up over the railing and jump. I've seen it happen once. It was terrible. A young woman. I was at Table Rock guiding a tour. There was commotion as the would-be be rescuers ran past us. There were people on the observation deck calling out to the people on the Maid of the Mist boat trip who were taking photos of the majestic cataract, waving to the people 158 feet above, people who had seen her jump and were now trying to get the tourists aboard the boat to help the woman who was now being tossed about in the swirling waters. Her body was sucked behind the curtain of water. Disappeared. I don't know if they ever found her body. Sometimes they don't. They pay people to go down to the lower river and retrieve the bodies they do find. $100 a body. I think it started back in my grandfather's day. He did a lot of hunting and a lot of fishing. Them days they used to hunt below the falls. And being he was around the river all the time, any time they had someone jump over the falls, commit suicide or someone drowned accidentally, or someone would fall over the cliff, they'd get my grandfather to go down and recover the bodies or if the person was injured to find them and get the help to bring them up. Well, then from there, it went to my dad. Now, when I was eight or nine years old, I used to go down with my dad when he pulled bodies out. I'd just stand back and watch. He did the same to all my brothers. And I got three boys and a daughter. And all my boys used to go down with me to retrieve the bodies too, help us carry them up and everything. Wes Hill collects the dead bodies of people who go over the falls. A warning-- some of his descriptions may be a little graphic for some listeners. After you see one or two or three, you get used to it. It's just like looking at a dead animal really, because 90% of these people committed suicide. And it wasn't accidental. They wanted to be there, so why feel sorry for them? And it gets so after you've taken out a hundred or so, then it's just like somebody repairing a car. It's the same thing over and over again. And I've taken around 400 bodies out of the river. One time, it was in the afternoon. I was going to collect my paycheck. And it was too early to get my paycheck. I had to wait a couple hours. My wife was with me, so I said, let's drive down to the Maid of the Mist, and I'll go look around the driftwood, see what's floating in there. Because I got all kinds of fish and tackle and boat parts and everything out of the driftwood years ago. So as I parked car in the parking lot of the Maid of the Mist, I could see something pink going around the point just below the Maid of the Mist docks. There's a point of a rock that sticks out. I told my wife, that looked like someone's back or something. So I walked in behind one of the docks, and I got a pike pole. It's a logger's pole they have the pull out driftwood. I got that, and I walked around the bay and went in behind this big rock. And here's an old woman laying there in the water. So I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up on shore. Her body was still warm and everything, but her back was all smashed. She was dead. Apparently somebody in Montreal went to visit his mother and father. And he went in the house. And there's a suicide note on the table saying that one didn't want to live without the other. And being they're up in their 70s, they figure, one could die any time. So they said they're going over Niagara Falls and jump together. And they did. We got her body that day, and I got the man's body about a week later. I got a 18-year-old girl out of the river. She got pregnant, and her boyfriend said he'd marry her. And then he didn't, and she accidentally caught him with another girl. And she jumped over the falls. And of course, with the pressure on the body, when I went to pull her body out, the baby was halfway out. That is sickening. Back in 1950, my brother, Red, decided he was going to try to go over the falls in a barrel. And he figured he needed something light, that if it hit any rocks, it would bounce so he wouldn't get hurt. So he got these big truck inner tubes, and he had them all put together with nylon webbing and everything, and a large net over the whole thing. The ends were closed with smaller inner tubes. And he figured if he went over in this thing made with inner tubes-- and he called it the Thing-- that he'd come out all right. So I told him, I'm not going to help you. And he said, why? I said, mainly because you weigh more than the barrel you're going over in. And I said, those inner tubes, when you go over the falls, it's going to hit the water and stop dead. And I said, you're going to shoot right through it, right out of it. No, no, he says, I'll be all right. I seen him that morning when he left my house. I was with my mother. And I went down to the Maid of the Mist landing with my brothers and my mother, because they figured he'd come out all right and they wanted to be there to greet him. And I was standing on the dock of the Maid of the Mist when I seen this jumble of tubes come out. And I turned to my mother and said, Bill's dead. She said, how do you know? I said, look at the tubes. They're all smashed up. And the small boat from the Maid of the Mist pulled the tubes in. He wasn't in it. They got his body the next morning. My mother had been fighting my father and us boys for years. Every time we'd go down to the whirlpool, take a body out or rescue somebody, she'd say, you're going to get in trouble. Stay home. She'd worry about us all the time we were gone. She always did that. When my brother said he was going over the falls, two of the neighbors said, why don't you try to stop him? She says, ain't no sense in talking to my family. She says, see? I can't talk him out of it. She tried, but we're all bullheaded. Did she hate the falls or did she-- She hated it. She really hated it. My other brother Norman, he worked on the Maid of the Mist for years, and when they started the hydro project, he went to work in the hydro. And he was down working in the tunnels, and a rock came down one of the shafts and hit him on the head and killed him. So actually, he was killed working along the river too. There's a legend for retelling by tour guides. I would retell this legend at the base of the Bridal Veil Falls during the Cave of the Winds trip part of my tour. This is a legend. Every year the Indians who lived at the falls would, in the autumn, choose a maid to be sacrificed at Niagara to appease the angry god who lived in the waterfall, to ensure safe passage through long, cold, dark winter months. Now, it happened one year that the kind chief's only lovely daughter was selected as the maid of sacrifice. The chief loved his daughter very much. And though it broke his heart, he went through with the preparations. When the fateful day arrived, the canoe, beautifully painted and laden with garlands of flowers and cornucopias of nature's bounty was carried to the village with his lovely only daughter inside. It was set into the river, and she drifted away, silently, nobly to her destiny. When she hit the first rapids above the falls, she let out a small cry of terror, and her father, overcome by heartwrenching grief, jumped into his own canoe in hopes of rescuing her. As her canoe tossed and turned in the rapids, she called out again and again. The chief paddled faster, but alas, he was too late. With a final cry, she passed over the brink and was lost. Her father paddled with speed to the edge, and he too disappeared. It is said that the roar that you hear at the falls is the father crying out in anger, and the mist you feel raining down are her tears. I would retell this legend three times a day every day to Australian and German tourists, to visitors from Tokyo and Bombay, to smiling blond-haired, straight-toothed families from Nebraska. They would smile and nod. Smile and nod. And then, simply because I could not help myself, I would tell them that the whole thing was a fabrication. Not true at all. The visitors, whether from Missouri or Melbourne, would lower their cameras, squinting at me, slack-jawed, like they were woken from a dream. I'd tell them that the aboriginal people who lived here never, ever engaged in human sacrifice of any kind, that really, what was in a way amazing about this story was that it survived for so long from the time of the very earliest tour guides in the area, from the 1820s when Niagara was only just starting up. What I didn't tell them was that I would, as a kid, attend the Maid of the Mist parade every summer. It came right down main street in Niagara Falls. And at the end of the parade every year, after the Shriners, the Knights of Columbus, high school bands and waving dignitaries, the most elaborate float would appear-- a re-creation of the Maid of the Mist legend, usually with a pretty young woman from the reservation nearby. There she'd be in her chicken wire and crepe paper canoe, poised on the very brink of the paper mache cataract, smiling, waving, throwing wooden nickels. I met a man in a bar who told me a story about the city of Niagara Falls, which is the story I think of whenever I'm trying to explain Niagara to myself. He told me that the mayor of the city gets two things-- a $30,000 salary and a license plate for his car. The license plate reads NF number one-- Niagara Falls number one. A couple years ago, there was a mayor in Niagara who got voted out of office, but was so mad about being ousted that he refused to give the license plate to the new mayor. They argued back and forth and back and forth, the new mayor insisting the old mayor give the plate up, the old mayor refusing. Finally, said the man in the a bar, the new mayor came up with a plan. He hired some men to steal the plate off the car of the old mayor. This, I should say, is unlikely. The new mayor was a policeman for 31 years, and he absolutely denied taking the plate. But the man in the bar said that he and many of his friends didn't believe the mayor. He said, this is the kind of town Niagara is. It's the kind of town where the new mayor steals the license plate off the old mayor's car. Don Glynn is a newspaper man who's worked at the Niagara Gazette for 37 years, not including his time as a paper boy. He takes me on a tour of the city. We drive through downtown Niagara. There's not much driving to do. It's mostly a grid of empty lots. So we circle the same streets over and over, past the convention center, past the old Niagara Hotel, past the Wintergarden and the Rainbow Mall, past the convention center, past the old Niagara Hotel. You see this big building here, the flashcube, we call it. That's the Occidental Chemical center. There's very little occupancy in there anymore because, well, Occidental has moved out for the most part. And the largest tenant in that nine story building-- this says something about the city of Niagara Falls-- the largest tenant is the Small Business Disaster Assistance office. All these places on both sides of the street for two or three blocks are just bars. And a lot of them are in Chapter 11. In fact, I often thought it would be neat to open a bar and just call it Chapter 11. It'd probably be packed with all the people that can't pay their bills. Niagara was an industrial boomtown from the '20s through the early '50s, but in the late '50s and '60s, the electrochemical companies which lined the river found cheap power, nonunion labor, and lower taxes in other states. They left, and people left with them. Then in the late '60s and early '70s, things got so bad that Niagara elected a flamboyant mayor with a plan. The mayor was E. Dent Lackey, and the plan was urban renewal. It was a simple plan which had three parts. Part one, the city would buy up all the property on the 82 acres of land which constituted Niagara's downtown area. Part two, the city would tear down all the property on the 82 acres of land which it had bought. And part three, developers from across America would flock to buy the empty lots, and they would build a new city. This plan is part of the reason it doesn't take very long to go on a driving tour of Niagara Falls. They only made it through parts one and two. Everything was just kind of like leveled, and they thought that all these developers would come in and rebuild. And that didn't happen, because the developers weren't standing in line like this mayor thought they would be. They just didn't want to come here, and they didn't want to invest. So it was this one administration that just kind of leveled the city. I thought he had a lot to do with it, Mayor E. Dent Lackey, for whom the plaza is named, by the way. You tear down a city and they name a plaza for you. Don turns a corner and drives us past the Lackey Plaza, a large concrete square with a shallow white wall around it in front of Niagara's convention center. He points to the corner of the wall, where there's a smooth bronze plate. See that marker there on the end there? See that little plate there? It looks like just an empty space. Uh-huh. Somebody stole the plaque. That's the Lackey Plaza, and that was the only proof that that was the Lackey Plaza, and someone stole it. It's been gone for like half a dozen years, the Lackey Plaza plaque. Does that tell you something about the city? Isn't that pathetic? I mean somebody felt that strongly about it that they removed the plaque. But that tells you something. We drive up the street a ways, past two enormous parking complexes a couple of blocks from the falls. They are pristine structures, four-story garages which take up two entire city blocks and dwarf everything around them. We've got these ramp garages, and they've never really been filled. They've never been used, and they're free. You notice that? Yeah, because it was foolish to try to charge. Finally they put a fee on this one here, but that's only because they're trying to take advantage of the people that work in the office building across the street. But the one closest to the falls is free. You can walk in there, and all the levels are free. It doesn't cost anything. And yet all the booths are in place there and the electronic system and the cars. They spent a lot of money on just setting up the mechanisms, and they don't use it. You got to remember that this is probably the capital of pipe dreams. I don't know why that is. You could go over to Navy Island, which is close by. It's around five miles away. That was one of the sites suggested once for the home of the United Nations. I mean, that's big thinking and big planning, right? Of course it never happened because the Rockefellers donated the land in New York. But they actually thought they could get the United Nations here. More than half of Niagara's population has left since the '50s. With industry gone, Don tells me about 2/3 of the population of Niagara Falls is on some form of public aid, and almost 60% of its population is elderly. Young people do not stay here. They move out. So in another, let's say, 20 years, you're going to have an entire city full of 80-year-olds. This is going to be like a huge retirement village or senior citizen's village. Absolutely. No question. I think you're right. Young people just don't come in here and don't stay here. And then, 25 years from now, it's going to be a ghost town, isn't it? Well, it has all the makings of that, yeah. Coming up, two weddings and a funeral, plus tape recordings made by someone inside a barrel as he went over the falls. Guess which Bon Jovi song he was listening to as he went over the brink. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's program, Niagara. Stories from documentary producer Alix Spiegel, who visited the falls, and from David Kodeski, who grew up there. In one sense, the story of Niagara Falls is the story of how we as Americans relate to nature. We revere it and romanticize it on the one hand, and we try to exploit on the other. It's no accident that one of our country's most famous ecological disasters, Love Canal, where so many toxic chemicals were dumped that residents had to be evacuated, is just a few minutes' drive from the falls. Those chemicals were there because so many factories grew up near the falls, near the cheap hydroelectric power provided by the falls. And that's where our story continues. Cheap, plentiful hydroelectric power lured the electrochemical industries of the world to Niagara. My father worked 40 years or so for DuPont in the sodium facility there. My uncle Ray worked for Carborundum, my cousin Paul for Union Carbide, my cousin Carl for Goodyear Tire and Rubber, my uncle Matt for Occidental Chemical and Petroleum, formerly known as Hooker Chemical. The factories line the Niagara River not far from the falls themselves. When I was driving tours that summer, we were instructed to direct the attention of our guests toward the river to point out the wideness of the river, to point out the relative calmness of the water. We were instructed to keep the attention toward the river and away from the chemical factories belching yellow and white smoke. None of this would appear in the official tour guide training manuals, of course, but the veteran guides who trained us reminded us that we were working for tips. And who would tip a tour guide who pointed out a ravaged and polluted landscape? Someone whose attention had drifted to the east might ask, what are those factories? And we were then instructed to explain how during the war effort these plants had supplied the armed services to aid in beating the Axis powers and those nylons GIs were plying Euro cuties with were made right here in Niagara Falls. The summer I turned 17, there was a great deal of family talk about which plant I should work for, just for the summer, see if I like it. The money's good. The money is very good. But I did not want to work in any one of the factories under any circumstances. They seemed deadly. I knew that my grandfather retired early because of his failing health. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1966. My grandfather was a chemical operator. He ran what they called caustic, caustic and chlorine. They make drain cleaner out of it, detergents, soap too. They use it to purify water. My relatives say dioxin was in the air there. They say that when they made caustic, the vapor would go up and it would turn into caustic dust. They say it was everywhere, even in the place where they ate. They say you could write your name in the dust on the table. You'd leave your coffee cup on the table, and there'd be a mark. I spent a lot of time sitting on the front porch of my parents' house staring at the factories on the horizon-- towers, ironworks, smokestacks. You could also see the mist of the falls from there, but you couldn't be sure if it was the mist you were seeing or the smoke from the factories. Near my parents' house, kids would play on the sites of abandoned factories and dump sites. They called them the whites because everything there was thick with white ash. It's hard to say what this did to people. If you look at the studies, Niagara's cancer rate is higher than other areas, but just a little. He went in and out of the hospital for months. One night when Tom was home from the hospital, we were all watching a movie on television, Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror, the one where she gets chased around her apartment by that little Zuni fetish doll. And Tom had to go to the bathroom. And we helped him down the hall and into the bathroom, and he had a seizure. He went limp. He passed out on the bathroom floor, and his eyes rolled back into his head. We all started to cry. That summer, Tom was given radiation therapy, cobalt treatments. We had to watch him. We had to take care of him. Sharon was taking care of him one afternoon, and they were playing with some toy soldiers in the yard. Sharon believes that Tom knew that he was dying. He was killing the already fallen soldiers, shooting them over and over. And Sharon said, why are you killing them like that? Well, he said, well, they won't suffer like that. Death and love-- that's what Niagara represents-- the nexus of death and love. Suicides on the one hand, honeymoons on the other. When I told a friend I was going to Niagara Falls, he asked me if I was getting married. Four different people asked me that question. I told them all I had no immediate plans. Then I called 1-800-785-L-O-V-E, the Niagara wedding chapel at the Radisson Hotel in Niagara Falls, New York. The Niagara wedding chapel offers what they call a full-service wedding, which means that in addition to a ceremony with flowers, preacher, complimentary bottle of champagne, license, and wedding video, I'm entitled to a day of beauty at the hair salon next door and a discount on a room for my wedding night at the Radisson. Niagara, I was told, is the honeymoon capital of the world. The Niagara wedding chapel performs over 2,000 weddings annually. At the end of our conversation, the man on the phone, who identified himself as the owner's brother, suggested that he and I get married. He told me he was single and I had a nice voice. I actually have his proposal in my notes of our conversation. There it is. Right under the information about the 24-hour waiting period, I wrote with a blue ballpoint pen, "Will marry me." It's Catherine and A.J.'s first time, which is a little unusual for the Niagara wedding chapel. Most of their market is second marriages. Catherine and A.J. have driven to Niagara from Pittsburgh with 30 of their friends and family, and are now waiting together with their maid of honor in the welcome area outside the chapel. They all look happy and nervous. They're laughing and joking, talking about the kinds of things you talk about right before you get married. A.J., you still have time to back out. No. He's calmer than me. I know. He's so calm. That's cool. I should have gone to the bathroom. Chris, the owner and manager of the Niagara chapel, comes in to tell Catherine and A.J. that even though two of their guests haven't arrived, the wedding must start. He's got a 4:30. He can't wait anymore. Everyone hurries to their places while Chris makes a brief announcement to their guests. They're allowed to take pictures, but everyone must remain in their seats until the end of the ceremony. I barely have time to wonder why this last instruction is necessary before-- Catherine starts crying as soon as she enters the chapel. She cries her way to the altar, cries as she takes her beside A.J., cries as the justice reads through the opening of the ceremony, cries more when the justice asks her if she'll love her husband through sickness and through health. The bareness of her emotion infects everyone in the room. I see three people in the front row hunch their shoulders and bring their hands to their faces, then the man in the second row next to the wall, then the woman sitting next to him. It jumps the 12-year-old boy sitting next to her and moves to the third row, then the fourth. Now I am crying. We are all in the room crying. Everyone happy and flushed and sure that everything, everywhere is going to be OK after all. And then, six minutes and 47 seconds after it begins, it's finished. A.J. and Catherine are now husband and wife. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you Mr. and Mrs. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. In another 10 minutes they're gone. All evidence of the couple is removed, and the only sound in the chapel is the hum of fluorescent lights. Chris pops in a new video for the next couple and resets the video machine. He sets out a new bouquet and checks to see if the bride's dressing room is clean. Then his 4:30 arrives, Rod and Lori, just the two of them. No friends. No family. Lori goes to the bride's dressing room to check her makeup, and I try to talk to Rod. This is not an easy thing to do. Where are you coming from? New Jersey. Oh, all the way up from New Jersey? Right. What brought you up here? Well, Lori. She wanted to come to the falls? Right. Had you heard about it? Yeah, I think. You know. He's very quiet. He is. Lori comes out, and she and Rod are introduced to the minister. There are handshakes and some uncomfortable laughter. Then-- No one cries at this wedding. The two of them walk alone to the altar. The chapel is empty, just rows and rows of chairs. Rod and Lori stand stiffly as the preacher reads on and on. Rod seems perpetually awkward, not visibly happy at all. Lori isn't visibly happy either. As I've said, there's no one in the room, just a bunch of chairs and some video cameras. And it's hard not to wonder why they've chosen to engage in this exercise at all. It just seems so sad. I look around the little stage that serves as a wedding altar, where all day long it's a series of these dramas in 30-minute intervals, one couple after another, some happy, some not. Then eight minutes after it began, it's over. Rod and Lori are husband and wife. No one's there to applaud. Niagara, home of the two-tank honeymoon-- one tank up, one tank back. That's what Chris tells me. He hands me a card which says, Niagara, honeymoon capital of the world. But Niagara isn't the honeymoon capital of the world. It hasn't been for a long, long time. It held this title between the 1840s and the 1940s when the railroads made Niagara a cheap and easy weekend getaway for newlyweds in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, all up and down the east coast. But the railroad was discontinued decades ago, and affordable air travel makes destinations like Hawaii much more popular with newlyweds today. But the idea of Niagara as honeymoon capital remains in a hundred old movies and songs. And those movies and songs are a powerful force. Chris tells me he gets calls from Florence Italy, London England, from Japan. In the office in the back of the chapel, there's an entire wall of pictures of happy couples who have been married by Chris. I look at the pictures. Chris gets ready for his 5 o'clock. Here's another story we would tell as tour guides. This one happens to be true. Annie Edson Taylor was a 73-year-old school teacher from Bay City, Michigan. She arrived in Niagara sometime in the summer of 1903. She was alone, some say an old maid. She was penniless. She was desperate. She'd made up her mind that she would be the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live. She designed and had built a special barrel. She hired a manager, one Frank M. "Tussy" Russell. Russell announced to the world that the 73-year-old Taylor was a widow, 42. Taylor met the press saying, I might as well be dead as remain in my present condition. It will be fame and fortune or instant death. At half past 1:00 on October 24, 1903, Annie Edson Taylor squeezed into her barrel. Cold water inside the barrel sloshed around her ankles. Annie could feel the pull of the river, the swiftness of the rapids. Her barrel banged and scraped against the rocks above the falls. Annie, deafened by the roar of the river, prayed aloud. The barrel neared the crest of the mighty Horseshoe and hung there at the lip, seemingly stuck, hanging over the boiling chasm. The crowd gasped, held its breath, and then she dropped into the cataclysm, into the chasm, into the roiling tempest below. She was pulled out of the barrel below the falls, dazed, bleeding, but very much alive. A cheer went up from the assembled crowd. The woman is alive! While Annie recuperated in a Canadian hotel, Frank M. "Tussy" Russell disappeared with Annie's barrel. He made his fortune with it and a beautiful young woman posing as Annie, queen of the falls. Annie had another barrel built, posed for photos with it, told and retold her story to tourists for pennies. She wrote her autobiography. She aged on the streets of Niagara, told tourists she was a widow, 52. She became scary, died alone, a lady of good breeding and refinement. This is a story of my hometown. The prevailing symbol of the town used to be the beautiful Indian Maid of the Mist, when really it ought to have been bad luck, down at the heels Annie Edson Taylor, a lady of good breeding and refinement who never got an even break. You have to become one. I remember when the guys were working on my barrel, I used to stand back, stand aside and just psych into it. I used to do a lot of work on it myself. And that's the only thing keeping you from death. You become one. You actually acquire quite a relationship with a barrel, a piece of metal, that one will not understand unless they're there. That is saving their life. So you can imagine the psyching in and the unity that you have with this vessel. Peter DeBernardi lives half a mile from the falls, so close that his windows sometimes rattle from the roar. One night in 1987, Peter was lying in bed listening to the falls, and it hit him. He would make history by going over the falls in a barrel built for two men, the first time ever two people would go over together. He found a partner, a guy named Jeff, and together with a crew of men they built a 3,000 pound deluxe steel barrel with inner tubes inside to cushion their fall, two windows of bulletproof glass so they could see out as they went over, and a stereo system so they could listen to tunes. They also installed a recording system so they could document the whole experience on tape. It took them 19 months to build. And then, as Peter will tell you, there was the mental preparation. As far as psyching in, I used to sit out here on the front porch sometimes up to 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, because it's just me and the falls. It's rumbling. Like I said, I'm only a half mile away. And it was so quiet. Now sometimes if the wind is right, the breeze is right, it carries the mist all the way down the gorge. You can see it's like a white wall that goes down the gorge. OK? I'm sitting there. And all of a sudden, there was this little finger of mist that left the mainstream of the mist, came over, and it hovered over the small [UNINTELLIGIBLE] across the street here. And it looked like two little fingers. And it was pointing-- believe it or not-- pointing right at me sitting there. It stayed there for about 10 minutes. Then it finally, like a finger, as if you're just bending your finger back to the palm of your hand, it joined the rest of the mist. And that was it. Talk about getting in deep with this. It was trying to send me messages. And oh, god, what I went through mentally on this. The night before, I came home. I was out doing a normal job during the day, and then I came home, had something to eat, went to bed, fell asleep, and woke up the next morning. I didn't wake up, nothing like that. I guess I was so mentally prepared, psychologically prepared, that it didn't bother me. As a matter of fact, around my bed, I used to have pictures of Niagara Falls. I used to stare into them to fall asleep. I never had any bad nightmares or nothing like that. But next morning I got up, and Jeff was down. So we got everything together, the whole crew together. And the vessel was up at the crew chief's house. It was a great big state truck. And the barrel was on a special crib system on the truck. And I remember we climbed into it. And I will never forget the sound. And to this day, that sound remains in my mind. Them pounding those metal dog lathes. It was like being sealed into a metal coffin. And that was like, yeah, this could be it. This is your coffin. That's good. So here we are. We're going down the road. That was the shortest two-mile trip ever in my life. We could hear each gear shift, each stop, each turn. I knew exactly where we were turning. And they went down Murray Hill and along River Road. Feels like we're going down Murray Hill. Uh-oh. OK. She's straight now man. OK, good. Guess what? What? We're [BLEEP] on River Road, I think now. No kidding. 55. Yeah, there we go. And the truck pulled in, backed up. And they released the barrel, and they pushed it. And that's when it crashed into the water. Uh-oh, Peter, we're there. We're there. When you hit that water, this barrel weighing that much-- a ton and a half, when we hit that river bed-- it was about five feet of water-- it slammed into the floor of it so hard that it, like, jolted the mind. It was benumbing to the mind. And I thought, oh, my god, we didn't even go over yet. We just hit the river. Then I'm looking out of the glass. And here's a bunch of seagulls floating over. And I'm looking out through the bulletproof glass. And what's in my mind immediately is that, oh, no. No, no, no. This barrel is freshly painted. There's people here with cameras and stuff. Please don't crap all over this barrel. That was in my mind. Meanwhile we're on a 25-second second countdown-- 25, 24-- Sounds in the barrel were of course the two-way communication we had with our crew. Our crew chief had the radio, and he was telling us how many feet away we were from the brink. He was giving us a description of everything that was happening. And we had a stereo. That's a story itself. I'll tell you later on the story of how these fellows programmed the music. Well, I can say it. My barrel partner, Jeff, he says, guy, we got to have tunes in there, you know? And he's just quite a fellow. He said, you got to have tunes in there. And the tunes were, believe it or not-- the guys did a good job programming the tape. They should be music directors, I swear, at a radio station. As soon as I hit the river, the first song was "Riverboat Fantasy." Then the next song was "Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi. You know, after we go over. I mean, these guys, what a warped sense of humor. We're going down, Peter. We're going down. Now, prior to doing the falls, I always thought it'd be something like a fast elevator ride, super fast. You know that feeling you get inside, real queasy, like, whoo. No, not at all. Not at all. And we did a 360 back flip, and I didn't believe what I was looking at because it felt like you lied down on the couch and went to bed, lying perfectly horizontal. And it was peaceful. It was so peaceful. The serenity, even with the music-- for three and a half seconds. After three and a half seconds, though, we hit, yes, that rock that was the size of a house. Hit the side of that. Water blew in at the same time. Then we went under the surface, hit two more times. And I can remember it shifted the barrel. It twisted it like a 180 in a circle. I remember we hit two more times. Everything went kind of translucent, white, darkest color. Then of course we hit two more times, then it surfaced. And then it was all over. I remember Jeff yelling out, we did it. We did it. There were a few profanities here and there, which I won't say right now. Whoo-hoo! Whoo! We're OK! [BLEEP] right we're OK! Peter, what a [BLEEP] buzz, eh? We [BLEEP] made it, man. Put her there bud! But when we came out of the barrel, I can tell you, we were able to climb out of that thing right at the base of the falls, right at the bottom of Table Rock, the lower observation deck. And I tell you, because you're so sealed in that thing, when those hatches were opened up, that was a nice vision seeing the crew chief's face sticking in the hatch and it was opened up. And what a feeling when you climb out of that thing. And of course people are applauding all around, and the crew's got big smiles on their face. And you're literally looking straight up-- we were that close to the base-- at what you had just done and went over that magnificent beauty. After the stunt, I had never went down there. Six years, seven years. I live no more than a half a mile from it too. That's ironic about this, that it's hard for me to believe that I've done that, bottom line. It seems like a dream, like that wasn't me that went over. It was somebody else. You know, to this day, though, I don't try to act like a smart ass, like, yeah, we did the falls. Yeah, wow, super stunt men here. No. Not at all. I have the admiration that, thank you for letting it happen because it let us through. Whatever forces there were, whatever happened, I was allowed to do that. And she let me do it. Well, the program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder, senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett. Original music by Carrie Biolo and Jen Paulson. David Kodeski's stories were adapted from his one-man autobiographical show, Niagara. He's now working on a play called, I Can't Explain the Beauty. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this or any of our shows, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or if you don't want to write down the phone number, just visit our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can order a tape or you can listen to our programs there for absolutely free. That's right, free. Again that's www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. This American Life comes to you from the city of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, Mayor. Funding for our program comes from the listeners of WBEZ Chicago. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who describes what it was like to listen to today's program this way. It was like being sealed into a metal coffin. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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It's hard. After "On the Road Again" and "Six Days On the Road" and "Hit the Road Jack" and "Roadrunner" and "Born to Run" and "Running on Empty" and "Life in the Fast Lane" and "Lost Highway" and "Highway One Revisited." After "Let's Get Away From it All." After Easy Rider and Thelma and Louise and Lost in America and too many road movies to name or even remember. After Jack Kerouac and Route 66. And as long as we're at this, after Huck Finn and The Journals of Lewis and Clark. After all that it is hard for an American to just hit the road without some expectations. Take Jamie. After his mother died, after three months of visiting her in the hospital and three years in which she'd been sick, he hit the road, in the car that used to be hers. I kept trying to be, like, you know, what is the realization I'm going to come to? Or what is the feeling that I'm going to settle on? And that was what I kept feeling was, like, am I feeling something? Am I experiencing something? Really? You felt like, OK, I'm on this big road trip. I'm supposed to have a revelation. Yeah. That's what I thought. You know, I was hoping that I would, yeah, be somewhere, I'd step out of the car and experience the grandeur of the place and just be like, yeah, this is what life is. And this is, like, my mom dying. And this is, like, where I am in my life. And, you know. But it didn't happen like that. Any road trip is going to feel longer than you think it will. And you'll be tired and you won't get a meal exactly when you're hungry. You never find a bed exactly when you want to go to sleep. And you're probably not going to find out what it is that you got on the road to find out in the first place. And you know all that. You know all that going into it. And you still, we all still bind to the cliche about road trips. That what a road trip stands for is hope. Hope. That somewhere, anywhere, is better than here. That somewhere on the road I will turn into the person that I want to be. I'll turn into the person that I believe I could be, that I am. And, come Memorial Day, we hit the road. You and me and our whole great nation, with high hopes and no expectations for the future. And, to hasten the journey, we bring you now this hour of radio. Today, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Road Trip. Act One, Busman's Holiday. Dishwasher Pete loved riding the bus from city to city until one last seven day trip that took him off the whole deal. Act Two, Merci. How do you even say that? Mare-see? Merci. Can a road trip in Europe save a marriage? The answer is with one case study. Act Three, On the Road in a Tuxedo. At the age of 92, comedian George Burns was still traveling all the time. Margy Rochlin briefly traveled with him. What it is like when being on the road has been your job for decades. Act Four, Paw Paw for Jesus. Cheryl Trykv achieves what everyone wants when they hit the road. She actually finds adventure, and it is not pretty. Stay with us. Act One, Busman's Holiday. Regular listeners to our program may remember Dishwasher Pete who travels from state to state washing dishes and publishing his zine Dishwasher. Usually he only stays in one place for a few weeks. And then he takes the Greyhound bus to the next town. Lately he's been living in Portland. But he was only too happy to get back on the bus. I like riding Greyhound. Over the last eight years I figure I've ridden at least 100,000 miles on Greyhound. In total, about four solid months of my life have been spent cooped up in their buses. I would consider it my home away from home, if only I had a home. What I like most about Greyhound is how long it takes to get anywhere on the bus. Airline passengers love to complain about the five excruciatingly long hours it takes to fly from coast to coast. But on the bus that same distance takes three full days to cover, which is what I think is about the perfect amount of time for such a trip. And unlike airplane flights, no movies are shown on Greyhound, no headsets handed out, no free magazines available. No waitresses force bags of peanuts on you every five minutes. On the bus, passengers are largely left alone with their thoughts. I have this theory about people who ride Greyhound. About how, as we sit on the bus for hours and days, waiting to reach our destination, we travel in what I call a transitional state, thinking about where we're coming from and where we're going to. I know I do. And from my talking to other people on the bus, I know many others do as well. For example, this one route I've ridden a lot goes south through Crescent City, California, home of the Pelican Bay maximum security prison. I rode next to this guy who'd been locked away for 14 years and had just gotten out. Across the aisle from me was a teenager with a buzz cut on his way to boot camp. We talked for a while, but mostly we just sat and thought about the different places we were headed. For a long time I've been wanting to tape record the stories I've heard on the bus, to document this phenomenon that I've been trying to figure out. So I was pretty excited when This American Life offered to send me on a Greyhound trip with a fancy tape recorder and a seven-day Ameripass. For a week, I could wander any Greyhound route I chose and test my theory about the bus. So I packed up a loaf of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a bunch of bananas and stepped on a Greyhound. I spent the first 10 hours traveling down the coast of Oregon. I was so eager to talk with the other passengers I stayed awake all night even though everyone else was sleeping. It wasn't until we stopped for breakfast in Crescent City that I was finally able to strike up a conversation. Steve was about 50 years old, sported a bushy beard and wore an olive green army jacket. A large wooden crucifix dangled from his neck. He said he was an itinerant preacher and that Greyhound was his chapel. Well, I just preach in my own time. Not any specific times. And usually try to avoid audiences when I do speak because that way I reduce the possibilities of rejection or mockery. [LAUGHS] You avoid audiences. Then who are you talking to? Well, see, I believe in the transmission of voice or spirit can transmit 360 degrees into the world times 360 degrees. And Greyhound's conducive for your traveling ministry? Well, in the fact that I do not have my own privacy, like in a private vehicle, there becomes an either intermeshing or clashing of spirits like on a crowded-type Greyhound. Sometimes things are more harmonious, and other times people pick and poke and they solicit a reaction. So normally your preaching on the bus would come with you just talking to the person sitting next to you? Most of my preaching is done by myself, just speaking into the air, though, without another human being being there. You might be one of the first human beings that's ever really listened to me or acknowledged that in my presence. Steve's ministry is not limited to the teachings of Christ but also included a healthy dose of praise for natural medicines, like cannabis and opium. I thought I was agreeing with him when I said that it did seem ridiculous that pharmaceutical companies simply sold nature back to us. But Steve took offense and pulled out a bottle of Anbesol, which he described as 60% grain alcohol plus benzocaine. Which is a chemical, as a chemical similar to the naturally occurring cocaine. And so if a person likes the cocaine-- What's it for? Well, it's just a little topical anesthetic which is like a local number. And so they talk about toothache and things of that nature. Certainly not a central nervous system relaxant like the opium poppy. Which I consider more of a valuable plant. Because of its pain relief but-- Chug a lug. Just a little nip. Just a little nip now. So is that numbing your whole mouth now? Well, it takes about 10, 15 seconds. Actually, there is an immediate effect, but, yes, it is actually, believe it or not, numbing and very pleasant. Steve continued talking, but it became increasingly difficult to understand what he was saying as his speech slurred. By the end of our 15 minute talk he told me it was the longest conversation he had in the last three and a half years. Then Steve got on the northbound bus bound for Portland and I continued on to San Francisco. From San Francisco I rode 10 hours to Los Angeles, sitting next to an 11-year-old kid that didn't want to talk to me. At the Hollywood bus station I saw a bus headed for San Francisco and figured, what the heck? Maybe I'd get lucky on that bus. So I spent the next 10 hours retracing my route back north, sitting beside a guy who slept the whole way. I had to wonder, where were all the talkers, all those chatty passengers that usually sit next to me and share their stories about where they're coming from or going to? In Reno I switched to a bus route I've always been curious about, the one that headed south through old mining towns down to Las Vegas. My attempts to find out who rode that particular bus led nowhere. I approached the other half dozen passengers one by one. But no one would talk to me. On the bus from Las Vegas to Flagstaff, Arizona, I asked the woman sitting next to me if I could record our conversation for the radio. She acted like I was nuts. "You want to talk to me about Greyhound for the radio? What radio station is that?" "Well," I explained, "it's a show that's on different stations in different cities." "What station is it on in Los Angeles then?" she asked. "Los Angeles, I'm not sure." "You want to record me for the radio, and you don't even know what station it is? Yeah, right," she's scoffed. "Give me a break." She alerted the other passengers around us that I was trying to pull something over on her. Soon I was verbally assaulted from all sides, the butt of everyone's jokes. I put the tape recorder away and stared out the window. My enthusiasm for this trip was rapidly dwindling. At a rest stop I slinked away from the pack of passengers who were smoking their cigarettes and ridiculing me and stood off by myself. Maybe I'd been wrong. Maybe there wasn't anything significant on the minds of Greyhound passengers after all. When the smoke break ended, I reluctantly got back on the bus. On any bus there's usually some sort of outcast, like the drunk guy who smells like urine or the woman babbling to herself. Then it dawned on me. With these dorky headphones on my head, this foot long microphone in hand, trying to get people to let me interview them about where they're going, it was me. I was the weirdo on this bus. Hello? Well, I guess since nobody else will talk to me on this bus and there are only a couple people on this bus and we've got about nine more hours to go and it doesn't look like anybody else will be getting on the bus because we are in the middle of the desert. So I may as well talk to myself. We are somewhere in the desert. I can see we're traveling under a clear blue sky. I can see about 30 miles. And a whole lot of dirt, rocks. I guess I didn't have much more to say than anybody else on the bus. Um-- All these years I've boasted of being some sort of hardy Greyhound passenger, impervious to all those things that many people complain about. The seemingly never ending rides, the annoying passengers, the claustrophobia. I mean, I sat next to a guy vomiting on himself and it's no big deal. I sat across the aisle from people having noisy sex and it didn't bother me. But now, on this trip, Greyhound was starting to get to me. On the bus to Phoenix, I found myself wedged between the window and a guy who took up way too much of my seat. I tried to sleep for the first time in days but found that I couldn't. My whole body was sore. I had shooting pains in the back of my thighs. My back ached. I had a headache. The baby in front of me cried the whole way. The toddler behind me got smacked around for not sitting still after having been pumped up on candy. I was becoming increasingly claustrophobic. I was beginning to lose it. Normally I survive long bus rides by concentrating on my destination, but now I didn't have a destination. I wasn't really going anywhere. How could I expect to find anyone in the transitional state when I wasn't even in transition myself? Maybe this was the problem with the whole mission. I had ceased being a regular Greyhound passenger. I was an outsider. I stood in line for the bus to Las Cruces, New Mexico, trying to calm down. I thought I was in control until I watched a mother drag her kicking and crying toddler across the bus station by the kid's hair. I snapped. I couldn't take it. I couldn't handle being constantly surrounded by so many people anymore. I sure wasn't feeling at home like I usually do. I stepped out of line for the Las Cruces bus. I had to get home. Sadly, Portland was still a 36-hour ride away. At the Arizona-California border, a new passenger sat down across the aisle from me. Not needing any more abuse from strangers, I resisted my initial temptation to talk with her. A couple miles down the road I watched her pull a Polaroid photo from her purse, stare at it for a half minute, and then tuck it back in her purse. A minute later she had the photo out again and this time I snuck a peek and saw that it was a photo of her sitting in the lap of a guy wearing prison garb. Since she had boarded the bus in a prison town, I realized she had probably just visited a jailed boyfriend or husband. Now she had to sit on the bus for who knows how many hours and dwell upon the person she had just left. At last, I thought, the one person I had been looking for on this whole trip. Someone in transition. Someone who could help me prove my theory about the bus. Her name was Lisa. And she was just as suspicious of me as any other passenger had been. But she did consent to let our conversation be recorded. Arizona. Yeah. Nothing great. No. The conversation didn't get very far. She gave only one or two word replies to most of my questions. Eventually she ended up asking me the majority of the questions. After a couple of awkward minutes, I put the microphone and tape recorder away. She stared at her photograph some more while I watched the desert in the fading sunlight. A half hour later, after the bus had darkened and people dozed off, Lisa tapped me on the arm and told me she had inherited powers from her grandmother. Powers with which she could grant me any wish I desired. For this service she would only charge me $5.00. "At my shop," she said, "usually I charge $10, uh, $20 for a wish." She said it just like that. "$10, uh, $20." Well, $5 for a wish seemed like a bargain so I started counting up the hundreds of nickles I had won in a Las Vegas slot machine. But she said it would only work with a $5 bill. I didn't have any fives, but I did have a 10. "A 10 will work," she said. I followed her instructions, folding the bill into a little ball and handed it to her. She squeezed it in her fist and said, "Now make a wish. But you can't tell anyone what it is." So I made a wish. Then she told me to tell her my second and third wishes. That these wishes were important, too, but not as important as the super important first wish. Well, in my state I only had one wish that I needed fulfilling, so I just made stuff up for the merely important second and third wishes, wishing for better health and a new romance. On the dark bus she whispered across the aisle, assuring me that I was now in better health and that I could expect a new love in my life. Then she asked me to tell her my super important wish, my number one wish. "But you told me not to tell me anyone," I said. "You can tell me," she said, "but don't tell anyone else." So I told her I wished I wasn't riding the bus anymore. "Oh," she said. "You're tired of riding the bus. I can see it in your face that you're very tired. You have a kind face." She whispered about my face and described how tired I looked for five minutes, mentioning three times that while I might be laughing on the outside I was really crying on the inside. But I wasn't laughing, not even on the outside. When she was done I watched her slip my 10 in her pocket. Meanwhile, I was still on the bus. Dishwasher Pete will be putting out a new issue of his zine Dishwasher in a few weeks. Grab a pen. If you send him a dollar, you can get it. At P.O. Box 8213, Portland, Oregon, 97207. Act Two, Merci. A road trip can be a profound test of any relationship. After all, expectations are high, everybody's looking for a good time. And at the same time you're in circumstances that can make anybody irritable, probably because you're together all the time. All the time. Because of all this, a road trip can save a marriage or destroy it. We bring you this case example told by Carmen Rivera and Candido Tirado at the Nuyorican Cafe in guess which east coast city. A couple years ago a friend of Carmen's decided to get married in Italy. The friend was already married, but the friend had not told her parents. So she decided to get married again on her anniversary in Italy with her parents present. So we think it's a good idea, but we're not really sure if we want to go. She invites us to the wedding and we're not really sure because we had gone to Italy the year before and we're kind of not getting along. We're not communicating and we're kind of angry at each other. And it was this atmosphere of a general malaise in the house. Malaise? [LAUGHS] That's what it was. What do you want to call it? Fighting. Changing the TV channel. I mean, we fought about everything. Yeah, but that was like a malaise. OK. Whatever. OK. So we're in this malaise. We haven't decided yet. And we get a phone call from Paris, from a friend of ours, [? Malika ?], who invites us to stay in her house in Paris. And we tell her about the wedding in Italy and she goes, well, why don't you come stay with me and then we'll all go together to Italy? So I think that's a great idea. We can kind of be with friends in Europe-- I need to interrupt here. When she says Paris, see, you don't get the idea. This is an obsession. Ever since I know her, she says, I want to go to Paris, I want to go Paris. That's not true. Don't exaggerate. Every movie that has Paris in the backdrop, we see. Every magazine article, "Look, Candido, Paris." So I decided to quench this thirst. All right, that's kind of true. OK. So I'm really psyched and I'm thinking, OK, maybe if we go to Paris we can work on our, you know-- Malaise. --malaise. So the next thing we know, we're in Paris. And it's better than I ever thought it could be. The light was amazing, and the architecture's amazing. The food. The art, the food. It was wonderful. But where's [? Malika ?], the person that was going to give us the apartment to stay in? She's nowhere to be found. And we call her apartment, and they say the number's disconnected. So we get a hotel room on the Left Bank. And I'm just really overly excited. And one day on our way to the Eiffel Tower, we go through the Jardin du Luxembourg, which is a beautiful park. And out of the corner of my eye, I see chess tables. And like we said before, he's a chess master. He's a national master. He's in the top 1% of the United States. So the last thing I want to see is a chess table. So I tell him, "Look, Candido, look at the puppet show over there. Isn't that really great? All these little kids. Look, tennis courts. Wow, there's so many things to do in the park--" Look, chess tables over here. Let's go see. So we're in this great romantic city, city of love, and we're supposed to be, you know, trying to reconnect and cure our malaise and he spent all his time in Paris playing chess and I spent my time-- Going to museums, stuff like that. Who cares? Then it's time to go to the wedding. The week passes and we take a train overnight to Paris. Modena. To Modena. Excuse me. But we get to Modena, and her friend, we call her, and she says, yeah, I'll be there in 25 minutes. Comes to pick us up in three hours. And I saw that as a sign that we shouldn't be there. We should be in Paris where I could be playing chess. And Carmen didn't want to go back. Because I knew that as soon as we got back to Paris, he would play chess. I was like, no way. I want a vacation. We're going to be here in Italy. We're going to support my friend. I don't want to hear the word chess. So her friend lives like-- we thought she lived in the city but she really lives like in Arkansas. Cow country. So now we get stuck in this house in Arkansas. Formigene. Formigene. And she drops us there with her non-English, Spanish speaking parents and she leaves to the country house. And leaves us there. And then she cancels the wedding. And she decides not even to tell her parents that she's married. So we spend that week alone with her parents. It wasn't that bad. Because they were pretty nice. We got drunk a couple of times. On liquor made out of chestnuts, and they were very nice to us. But he's complaining again, there's no chess. Everything's old, it looks like a tomb. I'm upset, there's no chess players here. I want to leave. I get claustrophobic, you know. We start fighting more and more. So we start fighting more and more. My friend asks me if I support her decision about this wedding. I tell her, no. I mean, you know, you're 35 years old, you should tell your parents you're married. And so she's mad at me. So she stops talking to me. Him and I have one of the hugest fights, and we break up. And he says, "You know what?" I'm going back to Paris. And I'm like, go. I'm like, go, but I have all the passports. I take care of the tickets. I'm the one that made all the phone calls in French and Italian. So I tell him, OK, if you can figure out on your own how to get back to Paris, you can go. So he couldn't figure out how to get back, so he stayed with me. I knew how to go back. I just didn't know how to speak the language to get back, you know. OK. All right. So the next stage of this whole trip is to go to Corsica. And we had made plans, so we all go. So my friend is mad. They're fighting and we're fighting. And we wind up in Corsica. Now Corsica, I don't know if you've been there but it's like the ugliest place I've ever been to. It's these ugly rocks coming out from the ground. And so I'm not really happy here. And I'm feeling more and more claustrophobic because now I'm in another country. So we drive down and we turn a mountain and we go to the south of, um-- Corsica. Corsica which is Bonifacio. Bonifacio, it's the southernmost city. And they turned and we come up into this beautiful town. And the other people, they went camping. So we wouldn't go camping with them because I don't camp in New York. You know. I'm not traveling across the world to go camping. So they get very angry at us, of course. You know, that's another thing to be angry about. And we get to Bonifacio and it's, like, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to. It's built into the rock, but it looks like Monaco. It has those kind of lights. It's very romantic. And our friend drops us off in our hotel and she goes, "Well, I'll see you next week." And she just drives off. Now, we don't have work, we don't have chess, we don't have her friend. All we have left between us is our general malaise. We start-- first, we're not really talking to each other and he's really upset. He's like, you know, this really sucks. I can't believe that you did this to me. I could have been in Paris. But then we start taking walks. I mean, there's really not much else to do and, so-- One morning. There's a beautiful prehistoric town, and we start kind of connecting and talking about the history. One morning we're eating breakfast in a beautiful restaurant that's built into the rock. And it's a very clear day. And we're on the patio. And you can see Sardinia. And it dawned on me, wow, we're two Puerto Ricans from the Bronx and we're here and we see Sardinia and this beautiful day. And I look over to Candido and I'm like, wow, I'm really glad I'm sharing this with him. I was feeling the same way. So Sunday morning was the seventh day. She calls and she says, OK, be downstairs in 20 minutes. We go downstairs, 20 minutes, she comes and we get back in the car. And it took 12 hours to get back to Formigine. Because there's a long ride, there's a ferry, and then there's another long ride in Italy. And in those 12 hours nobody said a word. And she was really upset. And we're kind of feeling good, but we're just reading the vibe and we're like, OK, we shouldn't say anything. The next morning we pack. And we're supposed to be leaving about 4:00 to catch the 5 o'clock train. And somewhere about 12 o'clock she calls Carmen over. She wants to talk to me privately. And she brings me into this office in her-- she has a really big house. And she says, I'm really mad at you because you didn't talk to me on the way back from Corsica. I don't know what's up with you. You didn't go camping. You didn't go camping with me. You went to Paris first. And you said you were going to come here earlier. But then you were here too long in my house and you used the washing machine. Like, oh my god, make up your mind. If you're upset at me, just pick something. I was so confused. And then it dawned on me kind of, you know, this is not the friendship I thought it was. And I'm like, well, you know what? I'm not going to deal with this. I'm out of here. She was like, fine, get out of my house right now. So I go get Candido, in the back yard studying chess. I carry my chess books with me. He has a chess book. My chess board. But, you know, we're happy so I don't feel like a chess widow anymore, so it's OK. So I go tell him we have to leave. So we pack. And as we're packing-- and I know something's going to happen because we have to have that blow up, you know? We go outside, and there's a black cloud right on top of the house. And it starts to rain on top of the house. It wasn't raining any other place. There was sun all over the place, except on top of the house. So I said OK, this is the universe playing a trick on us or God laughing at us. And her mother says, take them to the train station. Her mother doesn't know anything. So I know we're not going to make it to the train station because in the car we are going to blows. So she takes the back roads down the tomato fields and she begins to berate us. She starts arguing. She just rehashes the whole argument all over again and how we couldn't make it on our own to the train station. You're so smart, why don't you make it on your own? And we had just done it before-- I'm in Arkansas, that's why. That's true. So she says, if you don't let me speak, I'm going to throw you out of the car. So we said, throw us out. Throw us out. Which she did. She gets out of the car. She takes all our bags out-- Throws them in the street. She's like, get out of here, I never want to see you again. Stops traffic. I mean, there's like 50 cars now looking at us. People getting out of the cars. And leaves us with our bags, walking down this road. But we have a cart. So we put all the bags in the cart. And suddenly, we feel free. We start laughing. We start laughing. And we never felt so free in this three weeks. It was like five miles away from the train station. As we walk down this straight, narrow road I started thinking about the soldiers in World War II when the war was over. And they were going home and they had won the war. And Carmen and I are walking-- We looked at each other, and we talked about that, this war that we'd just been through. And it just felt so peaceful and-- So right. I fell in love again. It was really beautiful. Thank you. Thank you very much. Carmen Rivera and Candido Tirado told their story during an evening of traveling stories held by The Moth. They're playwrights. Both of them have plays running at the Spanish Repertory Theater in New York. Coming up, martinis every day, El Producto cigars, no fresh fruit or vegetables, and four high school cheerleaders. That's what you get when your job is one long road trip and you are the 92-year-old George Burns. We have an eyewitness account. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program of course we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle that theme. Today's program, as our nation heads out on the road for the Memorial Day weekend, Road Trip, the pleasures and disappointments of life on the road. We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, On the Road in a Tuxedo. There are two ways you feel when you interview a celebrity. There are those that make you feel like a person. Then there are the kind who make you feel like a blip. There's nothing wrong with a blip interview. In fact, it's liberating. You can say whatever you want to them. They will not remember you. 10 years ago reporter Margy Rochlin was sent to do a magazine story about George Burns. For a 92-year-old, he was spending a lot of time on the road. 25 shows a year at conventions and other one night gigs. Plus weeklong stints in Vegas and Atlantic City. This is the story of a road trip as business not pleasure. George's entourage in its entirety at that time included Irving Fein, his then 77-year-old manager, and Morty Jacobs, his piano player for, at that time, 23 years. From the start it was clear to Margy, they were kind men, they were polite men. They called her "kid" the way they called everybody "kid." They reminded her a lot of some of her older Jewish relatives. But this was a blip story. 9 o'clock Friday night, Moscow, Idaho. University Inn. We sit around in the common living room that connects George and Irving's bedrooms. George and Irving always get connected bedrooms, with a living room in between if they can. In the late afternoon when it's quiet, this is where George and Irving like to sit. They watch television. They read the trades. Right now Morty's here. The sun is set and it's early evening. In general, they have three main topics of conversation, the act, the schedule, and where they want to eat. Here's some typical dialogue. Morty will say, "Where should we eat?" And Irving will say, "The Broiler Room." That's the hotel steakhouse. And then George will say, "John will know." John's the handler who picked us up at the airport and drove us to the hotel. And then Irving will say, "I think we should do the Broiler Room." And then George will say, "John will know. Ask John." And then Irving will say, "I'm making a reservation at the Broiler Room." But not moved towards the telephone. And on and on and on. It's like dialogue that David Mamet would write if David Mamet wrote scenes where absolutely nothing was at stake. We head down to the Broiler Room. All through dinner there's this constant traffic of fans, including at one point four cheerleaders. They're wearing short skirts and tight sweaters and their nervous energy fills the room. "Go, George, Go!" they scream over and over again while they shake and wiggle and do air splits and rattle their crepe paper pom poms. Then, floor show over, they run out in a single file as if everything they do is part of a routine. Then in comes the chef to ask for George's autograph. But George Burns likes these intrusions. He's nourished by them. When it's finally quite he says to me, "Aren't people nice?" Because I'm a reporter, I'm a blip. But the public gets his full attention. He establishes eye contact with each approaching fan and he smiles at them and he asks how they're doing. And when he leaves the Broiler Room, he'll choose the most complicated route, slowly threading his way through the tables of the main dining room, touching people on the shoulder lightly, and saying things like, "Don't pay the check." It's nice to be here. It's nice to be anywhere. While we're on the road I probably see him do his act five times. Each time it sounds totally spontaneous, like he's making it up right there, just riffing for the crowd, even though, give or take a gag or two, it's the exact same act he's been doing for 15 years. And thank you for that standing ovation. But it made me nervous. See, as a rule, an entertainer gets a standing ovation at the end of the show. You were afraid I wouldn't last that long. What's amazing about all this is that on the surface the act doesn't seem to vary from city to city. But to George it's an eternal work in progress. Every night he makes microscopic changes. Maybe he'll decide to sing "Young at Heart" before "Old Bones." When he does this, he gets all worked up about it, thinks about it all day long. But this is how he's been able to be on the road for so long. This is how he keeps the act feeling fresh for himself. Sometimes he'll change a punchline. He has a gag in his act about people having to retire when they're 70. He says, "When I was 70, I had pimples." But one day George tries out a new line on me. He says, "When I was 70, I had cupid's eczema." I think that sounds sort of dirty, but I'm not going to be the one to tell him. In fact, I have tape of this, of myself lying to the nicest man on earth. What would you think that is, cupid's eczema? Is that like, I don't know, young-- It doesn't sound dirty, does it? No. Good. OK. That's all. Is it? No. It's not supposed to be. Oh. No it doesn't sound dirty. When I was 70 I had cupid's eczema. Well, that is dirty. It isn't dirty. You're making it dirty. You don't know what cupid's eczema is. It could be anything. Well, eczema is a-- A rash. A rash. And cupid is the love. It's a love rash. OK. A love rash. What's dirty about a love rash? That's true. George and Irving can go on like this for hours. They go back and forth and back and forth. And that night, George tries out the cupid's eczema line. It doesn't get laughs. On the way home in the car we're silent. George and a driver in the front. Me in the back, squeezed hip to elbow between Irving and Morty. Suddenly, George's rumbling voice cuts through the darkness. "I'll never do that again," he says. It's quiet for a while more. "Morty," he says, "tomorrow night let's--" and then the conversation starts all over again. Normally when I think of going on the road, I think of waking up at any hour, of not having to be anywhere at a certain time. You're on a big adventure. The rules no longer apply. There's no accountability. But that's a civilian's road trip. I am on a very different kind of road trip. The road trip I'm on is not about adventure and unpredictability. The road trip I'm on is about making sure that everything is the same. This is the secret to George Burns' longevity, of how he's been able to stay on the road for so long without going crazy. He wakes up at a certain time. He goes to sleep at a certain time. When he goes on the road, he likes his driver to take him to the airport in the late morning. When he agrees to a booking it's stipulated in his contract that he'll be provided with a backless stool to sit on, a lightly rehearsed orchestra, an ashtray to flick his ashes in, and a pre-show speed ball made up of a couple of martinis chased by a cup of black coffee. He will only smoke El Productos. In the afternoon he likes to take a two hour nap. He hates fresh fruit and vegetables. By the end of our time together, I could order for him in a restaurant if necessary. He likes bay shrimp cocktails. He likes roast chicken. He likes his martinis, but doesn't care what brand of liquor they're made with. He just wants them to come one after the other. He is 92 and no one can tell him what is good or bad for him to put in his own mouth. Same goes for what comes out of it. As the gin and vermouth kick in, his conversation tends to get naughty. One night he recites to me a particularly memorable limerick that involves a mouse, the phrase "hickory dickory dock" and a reference to his own private parts. Morty and Irving laugh, but I don't know what to do. If I laugh too hard, I'm scared they're going to think I'm some sort of slut girl. And if I don't, then I'm a pill, no fun at all. I feel as if I'm in another country with different customs and mores, and so I simply try every possible reaction one after the other, laughing, groaning, shaking my head, waiting for something that works. The pace is very slow. I wake up in the morning, drink coffee, wait for Irving's call. Mostly I have free time. I lay on a variety of queen-sized beds in a variety of shag carpet hotel rooms and stare up at the ceiling. One day Irving calls to invite me to talk to George as he eats breakfast. You want something, kid? Nah. I'm just going to-- I could have ordered something for you. It's OK. I already had breakfast. You did, eh? Yes, I did. Did you do your cereal already, George? No. I don't know if I can do the cereal. You can do the cereal, George. George is wearing a thick beige terry cloth bathrobe, beige pajamas, and slippers. His stiff grey toupee is somewhere in the other room. It's startling to see the man that lives underneath the hair, the stacked heeled shoes, the crisp tuxedo. He looks vulnerable, bird like. I have this realization. This will be a man who I will get to know in the moments between words. Even on a road trip designed to avoid surprises, I find myself surprised by these men. My view of them comes to change as we spend more time together. 11:00 AM. Reno, Nevada, Bally's hotel. I'm trying to keep my focus, but I'm tired. Tired of the empty hours, tired of waiting for Irving to call. Whenever I call my boyfriend, his answering machine picks up. Finally I take the elevator to the hotel casino. I play the slot machines, mindlessly pulling down the handle. Somehow Irving finds me. I'm playing the quarter slots. I'm risking a grand total of $10, but he's positive that I will return home having handed over the title to my car. He goes away, then comes back and tells me it's time to quit. He goes away, then comes back 15 minutes later and tells me again. I'm annoyed at his nagging, and touched. To save me from financial ruin, he asks me to take a walk with him. Irving takes my hand and loops it past his bent elbow. Arm in arm, we stroll past places with names like The Mapes Hotel and the Liberty Bell Saloon. The way Irving is almost bouncing down the street lets me know he's enjoying that we come off like a mismatched couple, that I'm his babe and he is my silver-haired, energetic sugar daddy. Most of the time Irving does the talking. He tells me about his past. It's a history of 20th century show business, big jobs at CBS radio, in the movie studios. Jack Benny hired him to be the president of his production company. It's a long story. Every once in awhile, though, Irving asks me personal questions about my family, about my friends, about my boyfriend. And then we head back to the hotel. And when we get to my room, he drops me off with this thought. He says, "Leave your boyfriend. He's no good. Find someone else." And he walks away, and I stand there feeling conflicted. I think, I'm no longer a blip to Irving, but who does he think he is? He doesn't know me. He's never met my boyfriend. A couple of years later I foll his advice. And every once in awhile I think back, trying to remember what it was that I said to him, what allowed him to distill this conclusion from my small talk. How come he knew something that took so long for me to figure out? All I could come up with was how transparent I must have seemed to these men. Transparent like teenagers are to me. I mean, how many different human stories are there? These men had already been there. Finally, we are on the road for so long that George is treating me like old news, which is where you want to be with George. When Irving lets me into George's suite before a show, George emerges from his room wearing shiny patent leather loafers, a crisp white shirt, a bow tie, and a knee-length paisley dressing down. He is pantless. He doesn't want to put on his tuxedo slacks until the very last minute so they don't lose their knife-sharp crease. In the pocket of these pants is a watch chain. On the watch chain is Gracie's tiny gold wedding ring. The way he tells the story of their marriage is that he discovered his one true talent when he met Gracie Allen. And he stayed married to her for 38 years. He was the brains of the act, the one who wrote almost every word she said. But she was the one who the public loved. He tells me that since her death in 1964, he visits her once a month at Forest Lawn Cemetery so he can tell her what's been going on in his life. But at first, his need to see her was so great that he'd go every day. Tonight he shows me the ring. When Gracie died, it was terrible. Terribly dry. Then finally I started sleeping in Gracie's bed, and that helped a lot. The night where Gracie died, that night, Bobby Darin said to me, George-- Mr. Burns he always called me-- he says, you don't want to sleep alone. Why don't I go home and sleep with you? I says, Bobby I'd love it. That's a wonderful thing to do. Yeah, he slept with me that night. But I mean, did it take you a long time to get your life back together? I was shocked when Gracie died. I didn't think Gracie should die. But you can't do anything. So, how long did it take you to get back to work? I started to work right away. That got nothing to with it. Show business has got nothing to do with that. You're doing your act. You're making a living. It's a different kind of-- But at that time, you were financially solvent. I mean, you had plenty of money. Wasn't it more just to take your mind off of things? I've got plenty of money now and I'm working. But you enjoy it. That's right. OK, so at that time was it more to-- what are you going to do? Just sit around. What would you do if somebody died? You sit home and cry? How long can you cry? Cry for two hours? You cry. And you cry, and you cry. Finally there are no more tears. Now you go to work. And you feel bad. Every time you come home, you feel bad because Gracie isn't there. One night, years later, I was sitting in a restaurant in west Los Angeles when I saw George come in. He was with a couple of men and a youngish woman. And they all hovered around him. He had aged so much. He moved slowly and was so tiny that he seemed to be lost inside of the dark suit he was wearing. They all slipped into a red booth and ordered dinner. I think the waiter brought George a martini. When it was time to go, I walked right by him, but I didn't say hello. To George I was always a blip, just another friendly face on the road. Margy Rochlin is a magazine writer in Los Angeles. Act Four, Paw Paw for Jesus. So what we want on the road, many of us, is adventure. And what is adventure but a moment or a series of moments that you never could've predicted before you left home? We have this story about one such moment from Cheryl Trykv. A warning to listeners with children in their car. This story contains a lot of anti-social behavior. It's 1990 and she's wearing a 1977 bleached blond Farrah Fawcett feather do and electric blue Maybelline mascara which contrast nicely with the lime green polyester manager's pantsuit she's got on. And she's telling me, no, not for under $50 dollars a night. Not for under $50 a night will she let me leave my car in the parking lot of her Paw Paw, Michigan Speedway convenience store gas station. This, after an hour and a half of my going in and out, buying chips and juice and cigarettes, wondering what I'm going to do with the Ford Lynx I have borrowed from a friend, which has now got a split valve or something and is busted all to hell and I'm in the middle of goddamn nowhere on the other side of Dowagiac on my way to Kalamazoo for a getaway weekend. I wanted to see America. I ask her why I can't leave my car in the parking lot. She says it's the rule. I ask who makes the decisions about that rule. She says she does. She says, company policy. Well, whose company is it? She tells me it's her company and she doesn't break the rules. Well, you little [BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP] can you be a friend, I'm thinking to myself. I don't say it, but boy I'd like to. Instead I remind her very softly about American hospitality and how Americans are known the world over for their friendly, peaceful, helping nature. I tell her that I noticed on my way in through her charming little town a sweet and simple church with a banner out front that read "Bold yet humble. Paw Paw for Jesus." There are few customers in the store, so I say it again, louder. Paw Paw for Jesus. Paw Paw for Jesus. An older gentlemen with an Abraham Lincoln beard and an Elvis Presley coiffe stares at me blankly. The manager tells me to cut the crap and get out of the store. OK, I say to her. I look at her name badge, Mary Ann. I'll get out of your store. But I ain't never coming back to Paw Paw. And I turn and walk away. As I walk away, I accidentally shove my body against a candy bar display case, knocking over hundreds and thousands of Three Musketeers, Reese's, Special Dark, and Snickers. Sweet Tarts fly and spill. A grand gesture of public nuisance. That's it, missus, Mary Ann says from behind the counter. Your big city ass is cooked. I'm calling the police. You idiot, I think to myself on my way out the door. Do I look married to you? I make it to the highway in no time flat, speed walk backwards with my thumb in the air, calling out to passing cars, Paw Paw for Jesus, Paw Paw for Jesus. A few cars honk and wave, but nobody stops. I can't imagine it might be what I'm wearing, the same jet black cocktail dress I wore the night before. Maybe my lipstick is too blood red for broad daylight in a small town like Paw Paw. Maybe I just don't seem like I belong here. Finally a van pulls over. It's a Chevy van, one with a mural painted on the side depicting what King Arthur and Guinevere might look like in the year 2500. King Arthur wears a gold mesh nuclear cleanup suit. He carries a sword in one hand and a laser gun in the other. Guinevere is nude and amply buxom. Where her pubic hair might be she holds the Holy Grail. The driver leans over and opens the door. It's a man. What a surprise. I get in. He asks how it is he's never seen me before. Maybe because I don't pose nude for Playboy. At the mention of Playboy, he steps on the gas, speeds it to 105. I've never gone 105 in a Chevy van before. it feels pretty good. Faster, I say, and we both start laughing. I roll down my window, stick my head out, and yell Paw Paw for Jesus to the wind. I feel like taking off my top, but I don't. Instead I sit back down into the passenger seat, bucket, severely vinyl, light a cigarette and enjoy as best I can the REO Speedwagon tape he's got blasting. He asks me why I'm hitchhiking, and just as he does, a sheriff's car speeds past us on its way back into town. That's why, I say. Cops. What have I got against cops, he wants to know. Nothing, it's just that I'm allergic to pork. It occurs to me at this point to shut up. I really don't know this man and, in all likelihood, he is brother of Mary Ann, manager of the speedway who is daughter of the Sheriff of Paw Paw and that I am headed for a trap. And in one great, whirling moment of brilliance it becomes very clear to me what I must do and that is sham this vic. It isn't all that difficult. I've seen it in the movies. Just before Treat Williams gets his hair shaved in the woods, Beverly D'angelo steals a four door Ford from an army officer by seducing him down to his underwear. She takes off with this car, his money, and his clothes, which is exactly what I mean to do. To prepare myself for this role of a lifetime, I change the tape to "Hotel California." The vic's neck is nasty with sweat, which I ordinarily wouldn't mind. But it has the stale, sweet taste of a flat Mountain Dew. I force myself to enjoy it. By the end of "A Last Resort," "New Kid in Town," "Wasted Time," and "Wasted Time Reprise," he is down to his Fruit of the Loom and I am wearing dark blue corduroy Levis, a Queen concert t-shirt, and a feed cap with an American flag that reads "Try Burning This One Mother[BLEEP]." Shortly, I create in him the most urgent desire to pull over to the side of the road. And while I'm straddling his lap I somehow open the door with my foot and with my very strong legs kick him out of the van, down onto the asphalt, his stunned, sorry eyes looking up at me in surprise. Did you lose something? 30 miles or so up the road I spot a hitch hiker. Hmm, somebody needs a ride. I pull over. She's a frosty little lezebel with a shaved head and a backpack. She asks me where I'm going. To hell. Want to come? Cheryl Trykv is a writer here in Chicago. Our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Our senior editor for this show, Paul Tough. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann and Sylvia Lemus. To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you know, you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight between Torey Malatia who says, yes, call. Pledge all the money you want to public radio. Just be sure-- Don't pay the check. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. Public Radio International.
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Before he got sick, he pictured the world this way. There are the people who are healthy, like him, and people who are sick, other people. And unconsciously, as we all do, he drew a line between the two groups, the two countries. Then when Paul Cowan was diagnosed with leukemia in 1987, he was struck with the fact that these are not, of course, two different populations, the sick and the healthy. Instead he wrote, "The world is composed of the sick and the not yet sick." He published an account of his illness in The Village Voice. "I want to describe some of what I've seen during the voyage I've made, the journey from being a person who took his health for granted to one who's trying to survive a life-threatening illness. I want to chart some of this wilderness for others who will be here one day." Well, that's the mission of today's radio program, because all of us, you and me both, if we're lucky, if we don't die when we're young, this is where we're heading, heart disease, cancer. Men have a one in two lifetime chance of getting cancer. For women, it's one in three. If you're a man hearing the sound of my voice right now, I want you to look at yourself for a moment. It's you or me, man. Odds are one of us will get it. Or we'll both get it. Two other guys will go off scot-free. So let us chart this terrain where, if we all live long enough, we will be entering. Cowan writes, "During the past five months, I've learned that there's a land of the sick. When you receive a passport, an unwelcome diagnosis, you learn that the land has its own language-- medical terminology-- its own geography-- hospitals, outpatient clinics, blood testing labs, doctors' offices-- its own citizens-- other sick people-- its own pantheon of heroes and authority figures-- doctors, medical researchers, hospital administrators-- its own calendar dictated by the changes in one's body or by the results of medical tests." When you're well, it's hard to remember what it's like to be sick. And after just a brief time in the hospital, Cowan found it hard to remember what it was like for him just weeks before to be active and self-sufficient. His picture of himself changed. He struggled to retain ties to the land of the healthy, to see himself as an exile who would return one day. But he did not return. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Most weeks, of course, we bring you a variety of different stories on some theme. Today we bring you just one story about one person's journey from the world of healthy people into the world of sick ones. Today on our program, Scenes from a Transplant. In 1995, Rebecca Perl had a new baby boy that she and her partner, Tom, named Griffin. She was a health science reporter with National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., where she'd just won a Peabody Award for an investigative series about the tobacco industry. She did a lot of stories about doctors and medicine. Then she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and entered the medical world as a patient. She had six months of radiation and chemotherapy. It didn't work. So in the winter of 1996, as a last attempt to save her life, she and Tom traveled from their home in Maryland to Omaha, Nebraska, to the University of Nebraska Medical Center for a bone marrow transplant and another round of chemotherapy, a round of chemotherapy as much as 10 times stronger than the original. Dan Collison, a friend of theirs and a radio producer, went with them, and he documented what happened. He also interviewed Rebecca a year later. This is her story. Daddy and Dan and I are going away, Griffy, for a little. We're going on a trip. You're going to stay with Grandpa and Grandma, with Pop-Pop and Grandma, OK? Sometimes I worry that Griffin's going to fall in love with some woman who just lays in bed all the time because that's what he sees his mother doing in the first two years of his life. I mean, he's going to fall in love with some woman who lies in bed and eats bonbons or something, or reads or something, because that seems to be what I'm turning into is this person who lies in bed all the time. Or else I lie on the couch and read him books or something. "Once there were three baby owls, Sarah, Percy, and Bill. They lived in a hole in the trunk of a tree with their mother owl. The hole had twigs and leaves and owl feathers in it. It was their house. One night they woke up and their mother owl was gone. 'Where's Mommy?' said Sarah. 'Oh, my goodness,' said Percy. 'I want my mommy,' said Bill." He really likes the owl book, and it makes him feel better that in the owl book, the mommy owl goes away but then she comes back. So I think he understands that. And lots of mothers go away on trips and go off for work for weeks at a time. And I've had to do that. Now the really bad one is I'm going to have to go away for a month or more. And he'll hopefully come visit. But still, it's going to be a really long time. I mean, it happens. And I guess the most important thing is that I get well so that he can have a mother. Bye bye, Griffy. We'll see you soon, OK? Bye bye. You stay with Grandpa and Mama, OK? Say bye bye. OK, OK. You go to Pop-Pop. Want to go to Pop-Pop? No. Yes. They have to go. No. We'll see you soon. You're going to go to the park with [? Marta. Look, Griffy. Bye-bye, Mommy. Bye-bye. Griffy, bye-bye, Daddy. Bye-bye. Bye, Griffy. You'll be OK. Bye-bye. They're coming back. They're coming back. Don't cry. [CRYING] Dada. There are at least three reasons why I was supposed to be exempt from getting seriously sick. First, Tom, my partner of 10 years and the father of our son, Griffin, had a kidney transplant in 1988, so he's supposed to be the one with the health problems in our family. If I ever envisioned myself in a hospital, it was standing at his bedside. Second, about six years ago, my older brother Josh was diagnosed with leukemia. And I don't think anyone expected two serious cancer patients in our family. Third, I'm a health reporter, and though my focus has always been on patients and how they're affected by our health care system, I never thought I would end up as one of these people. And they're off on a big road trip. You got your warm coat? Yeah. OK, and we got lots of turkey sandwiches. Maybe it was a little crazy to drive all the way to Omaha in the dead of winter, but I hate to fly, and Tom likes road trips. I think we were determined to make the trip fun. Driving would give us a sense of where we were going. Plus, we got to stop at The Waffle House. We're in the bathroom of The Waffle House. Did you lock the door? Yeah. And I'm going to give myself an injection of Neupogen. It's just like being a heroine addict. For me, it was the worst part, having to give myself shots. For one thing, it hurt. And it was a symbol of what I was going through. And then the funnest part is you jab it into your leg like so. And then you just push it in. And sometimes it hurts, and sometimes it doesn't. It sort of depends on where you get it in the leg. Voila. And that's it. I used to do it at home when I had to do it for like 10 days. I'd do it at like 7:25, right before Seinfeld. So if it took me more than five minutes to do it, I'd miss Seinfeld. So I'd hurry myself along. Now I'm doing it right before I get to eat at Waffle House. So I give myself a treat afterwards. BLT on wheat. Mmm! Waffle House. Chicken melt. Oh, boy. December 1. After three days on the road, we make it to Omaha. Have a seat, and we'll be with you in just a minute, OK? I'm feeling pretty rotten from the ill effects of my final round of chemotherapy back in Washington. They messed up at the hospital. The line that was supposed to administer the chemo wasn't in the right place, so the drugs went into my belly instead of my bloodstream. Because of this, my bladder hurts and I'm tired. And I'm about to embark on a nasty, exhausting journey. I feel as if I need more strength, but here we go. We're going to do your EKG right in this room. The first week in Omaha felt like boot camp. I shuffled from one test to another. Three more seconds. Keep going. A couple more breaths. Stop. Good. Good test. Endless poking and prodding. OK, Rebecca, you're going to feel a poke and a burn. This is the numbing medication. There's a tiny little poke. I'm sorry. Your skin's a tiny bit tough. One more to go after this, honey. It's not bothering you, is it? OK. I'm just tired of being poked and prodded and pricked and achy and tired. This is supposed to be the easy time. I can't imagine it being any worse. Tomorrow-- don't eat or drink after midnight tonight. Tomorrow at 8 o'clock, you'll go down to the first floor of the hospital to special x-rays. Kathy Byar was my nurse coordinator. She seemed more interested in keeping me on schedule than in what I was going through. We called her my drill sergeant. You know, I would imagine it does feel like that because you lose that control. All of a sudden, you're coming to a strange institution. They're telling you when, where, and what to do. And as a person that's young, independent, used to having her own kind of control, it's very frustrating. I'm a medical reporter, so I was used to asking a lot of questions. And maybe they just weren't used to pushy New Yorkers in Omaha. You've got to get me on a later schedule. I'm too exhausted. And I didn't like Kathy's cheerleading. Positive attitude. Positive attitude. You're not going to feel sick. I just wasn't in the mood, you know? I'd been through a lot already. And I was tired. I remember she would say, positive attitude, positive attitude. And I just felt like hell, you know? I had a positive attitude the first time around, and it didn't work. I mean, now I was going through something even worse. And it was hard for me to keep positive. You're not going to feel sick. Not going to get sick. Not going to get sick. One coping mechanism I did have was to act like a health reporter. I was obsessed with the numbers. It was really important for me to know the odds that the transplant would work. Those odds were about 50-50. So sometimes, sitting in a room with other patients, I couldn't help but think that only about half of us were going to make it. And this made it kind of hard to get close to people. But Graham and his family was an exception. Hi, ?] I'm Graham [? Brazier. ?] I'm here for a bone marrow transplant because of multiple myeloma, which is a disease that was diagnosed in May of '96. Graham was a young father facing worse odds than me. The latest statistics are that three years out from transplant, 35% are disease-free, as they call it. His wife, Lorraine, was playing the support role and caring for their 9-month-old redheaded son, Thomas. Even though I admired Lorraine for being able to be a mom there at the hospital and even though Thomas made me miss Griffin, I was glad Griff wasn't there. He was older than Thomas. He was nearly a year and a half. I was afraid that if he were there with me, he would understand too much. And I didn't want him to have to understand anything. Hi, Griffy! Hi, Griffy! So I settled for the occasional phone call. Hey, Griffy, want me to sing "Macaroni"? I have a little pony. His name is Macaroni. He trots and trots and then he stops. My funny little pony, Macaroni. Do you like that song, Griffy? I don't know. In a lot of ways, I guess I have kind of removed myself from him, because I know I have to go through this and do this. And it's sort of the last thing I have to do before I can really be with him for real or have the energy for him for real. So a lot of times I don't have the energy for him, and that makes it easier to kind of separate from him. Griffy, I miss you. I'll see you soon. I love you. I love you, Griffy. Breathe in. Hold your breath. December 10. We get some bad news. The CAT scan shows the most recent round of chemotherapy back in Washington hasn't shrunk the tumor nearly at all. Julie Vose is my doctor in Omaha. Rebecca still has a mass found on her CT scan. So we're going to administer another cycle of salvage chemotherapy that's a slightly different type, to try and reduce that mass further down before she actually undergoes the transplant. And we've found in the past that this is the best way to try and have the best long-term outcome for patients. The good news is I'm actually feeling much better. So that night, we celebrate. We're even out at a restaurant. Not just any restaurant, but a find of a restaurant, this Catfish Lodge here in Omaha, with the white albino catfish in the tank in the middle. I'm actually feeling good tonight. It's like a miracle. I haven't felt like this. I'm not, like, crying or in pain or something. Two days later, I begin the Omaha chemo. They give you four drugs, and one of them is blue. I kind of like the blue one, because it's just so startling. It looks like blue food coloring kind of color or like blueberry frozen popsicle melted. And you said that you dressed accordingly today? Yes, I wore my blue pants to go with the blue. My electric blue pants to go with the electric blue poison. The American Cancer Society offers classes in how you can look better and feel better. And though it sounded hokey at the time, now I understand why they do this. Getting sick really played havoc with my body image. I felt as if my body had betrayed me like a separate person I couldn't trust. My sexual desire went out the window. I figured I wouldn't mind losing my hair because at least it wouldn't hurt. But looking at myself in the mirror was like looking at a Holocaust victim, all skin and bones. Actually, I've always been tiny and scrawny, but I never minded before. So I avoided mirrors and wore a hat even when the weather got warm. I did break down and let Tom style the little bit of fuzz that was still left on my head. This is the weapon. It's small but very effective. Let's see. I've got to do a little experimental swatch here. Don't be doing the top. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Trust me. Just trust me. Those are famous last words. Breathe in. Hold your breath. I just had a CT scan. They're looking to compare the tumor in the chest to how it was in October, see if it's shrunk. Breathe. The blue chemo hasn't shrunk the tumor either. So finally it's time to get on with the bone marrow transplant. I mean, it's discouraging that the tumor hasn't shrunk any. I was hoping it would shrink with these last bunch of chemos. I'm just anxious to get done. And I'm hoping it's really going to work. And I'm kind of wondering about what's the chances it's really going to work. They can't be as good as they would be if the tumor had shrunk a lot. Is it OK if I go ahead and get your consent form signed today, so we're all ready to go when you're ready to go? Mm-hmm. The consent form is a reminder of what I'm in for. It lists all sorts of nasty things that could and sometimes do happen when you have a bone marrow transplant-- kidney failure, liver failure, heart failure. It sounds really scary, and that's because we have to put every little last thing in here that could possibly happen. That doesn't mean it's going to happen. But we have to let you know that's a rare possibility. It didn't help to see the transplant patients who were a week or two ahead of me. They had just been where I was going, and they looked so weak shuffling into the clinic. But our friend Graham had his transplant two days ago, and he seems to be doing pretty well. Everybody ?] seems to be different. And some people, I understand, end up on ventilators. The worst thing I experienced up there, apart from the nausea, was lockjaw. And that was just a strange sensation, the way your jaw freezes up and your tongue starts sucking down your throat. People on the transplant unit seem to fall into two groups. There are the ones who get their chemo and get out, and there are the ones who get infections and end up on respirators. This winter, a lot of patients have gotten influenza. They're on respirators, and they're taking a long time to recover. There is a shortage of beds, so I wait, spending most of my time inside the clean, cozy apartment we have rented. I sit on the rose-covered couch and watch the sparrows out the window. It's very cold. WOW FM, Omaha-Council Bluffs. Good morning, I'm Mike Bradley. The Omaha metro area, as well as other areas in east central Nebraska, northern Nebraska, and all of southwest Iowa under a winter storm warning for blowing snow and dangerous wind chills, down to 65 to 70 below zero. As we wait, I'm thinking about what's going to happen. Even though they call it a bone marrow transplant, which conjures up images of long, dagger-like needles being jabbed into the spine, actually, they collect the bone marrow, or stem cells, from my blood with a contraption much like a dialysis machine. The machine borrows your blood, culls it for stem cells, and then gives it back. It's the stem cells that produce red cells, white cells, and platelets, all of which will be wiped out by the high doses of chemo. Dr. Ruth Kessinger pioneered the treatment in Omaha. The machine empties the cells into a very important, special bag. We take the bag of cells to the laboratory. And in the laboratory, we freeze them in a liquid nitrogen freezer and save them there. Then the patient can go get his or her high-dose therapy. The high-dose therapy, of course, is intended to kill tumor cells. But the doses are so high that it also hurts the bone marrow. And that's the reason you need to give the stem cells back to the patient so they can grow a new bone marrow. So as soon as the high-dose therapy is finished, and hopefully the cancer is finished too-- it's been killed-- then we get the cells out of the freezer. We thaw them, and we simply inject them back into the bloodstream of the patient. And like a miracle, these stem cells know where to go. They home right to the empty bone marrow space and begin to grow. Hi, can I help you? Hi, I'm supposed to be admitted. Oh, OK. What's the name? Rebecca Perl. Perl? I think of it kind of like a pregnancy, like having a child, like the birth. I mean, no one can tell you what it's going to be like. You kind of know it's going to be awful, or that's what a lot of people say. But nobody can really tell you what it's really going to be like, and everyone's experience is really different. And it's just sort of like, you don't have a choice. You're just going to do it. It's just going to happen. And I just sort of feel like with this it's the same thing. It's like this momentum, and it's just going to happen, and I'm going to do it. I mean, it's scary, but I'm just going to do it. My room looks like you could wash it down with a hose, like a vet's examining room. It's an awful mustardy yellow. It overlooks a graveyard. I'm here for five days while they pour deadly medicines into my veins. I would say in the next four days or so, about three to four days from now, she's going to feel pretty sick to her stomach and maybe have some lose stools and some mouth sores developing once all this chemo builds up in her system. Everybody have fun tonight. Everybody-- --Wang Chung tonight. Everybody have fun tonight. In the hospital, there's the official information that the staff doles out, and there's the unofficial grapevine, tips and advice that patients share with each other. From the veteran patients, I hear that the University of Nebraska Medical Center doesn't like to give out Zofran, an anti-nausea drug that's very expensive but works like a charm when you're getting chemotherapy. So I start to insist on it to everyone I see. I tell the nurses-- I'd like to have Zofran because that's worked for me in the past. --the resident-- But I really do want Zofran, because I know that works for me. --and the head doctor. I just feel like I've said this to so many people so many times. I want to get Zofran every day. Despite my requests, my demands, my begging, the first night, they fail to give me Zofran, and like Graham, my jaw stiffens up, a side effect of a cheaper, less effective anti-nausea drug. It's a reminder of what it means to be a patient. You can ask, but sometimes you have very little power. During my high dose chemo, I find out that Graham is back in the hospital on a ventilator. They think he has pneumonia and sepsis, an infection of the blood that is common in hospitals and quite serious for transplant patients. Tom and Dan keep giving me updates about Graham's condition, but I don't really want to know. I kind of like to be a little bit removed from how everybody else is doing. Why? Because it's scary. It's hard for me to hear every detail of how everyone else is doing because all that could be happening to me. The staff really did try to help me cope, and I did appreciate how genuinely nice Midwesterners are. But sometimes I just couldn't get with the program. Twice, rabbis came into my room and left their business card, and told me if I ever wanted to talk. And it was very awkward because they were there to sort of try to, solicit important things out of me about how I was feeling. And I just didn't want to have any part of it. They kept asking me-- the social worker, when I first went into the hospital, she would say, well, are you involved in any religion? And I'd say, no. And then she would say, well, I don't mean organized religion but just your own spirituality. And I'd say, no. And she'd say, well, what about some sort of mystical or some other culture? Are you involved in-- No. I was just sort of no, no, no to all her questions. And I think she didn't know exactly what to make of that because I don't think almost anybody had ever said, no, no, no to all her questions. What worked for me was to work. One of the reasons I wanted to do this documentary was to have a distraction. It was a way to think of myself as a journalist, a working person, as opposed to somebody who was going through a really terrible, grueling medical ordeal. As a reporter, I had learned to be skeptical about medical breakthroughs and miracles, but as a patient, I had to be a believer. So I put my faith in the science, the numbers, the statistics. And for support, I had Tom, who I call [? Zuli, ?] and he was a huge comfort to me. Somewhere along the line without saying anything, I think we sort of decided when I got sick or something, we just sort of called a truce or something, each of us did. We almost never fight now. Both of us pretty much kind of let things just slide. If I'm pissed off about something, I just sort of say, oh well. He does the same, I think. Of course we did have our moments. If you get upset at me and want me to leave, just tell me to leave. I don't want you to leave, [? Zuli. ?] But this is not about you, so just keep your ego in check. I'm not talking about my ego. Don't sit there and just sulk and glare at me. Just tell me to leave. All right, I will. I just kind of want him to take care of me. And I think he really has sort of, in a lot of ways, or he is learning to kind of just put his ego aside and do it, just kind of take care of me. I think it's really hard for him. She actually said something at that point that was kind of enlightening to me. And that was that maybe she needs somebody to get mad at, to focus her negative or her hostility or her anger about what's happening to her. So that was actually an illuminating moment for me because I can understand that. January 16. My five days of chemo are over. You hear that beep? Tee. Tee, tee. Tee, tee. Well, anyway, that-- May I help you? Can I have my nurse, please? I'll send her in, OK? That is the last bag of my last day of the last chemo in this hospital and hopefully ever. January 20. It's a big day for Bill Clinton and for me too. He's being sworn in for his second term. I'm getting my stem cells back. They call it day zero because the recovery starts here. Tom and Dan keep trying to get me to say something profound like, getting my stem cells back is like getting my life back. It's true without these stem cells I would die. The chemo wiped out my body's ability to make blood cells. But I'm feeling too lousy to wax poetic. I feel nauseous. My stomach hurts. I don't feel like I want to do this. I feel too rotten. This is just dry ice. It's all very anticlimactic. Kathy brings my stem cells up from the deep freeze in a Playmate cooler like she's ready for a beer at the beach. OK, we've got Rebecca B. Perl, 712792. I'll take 75 for the first hour. She thaws out the bags of stem cells like you would a frozen chicken breast and infuses them back into my body through the catheter. There they go. I'm groggy and half asleep for most of it. When I come to, I hear Clinton. Fellow citizens, we must not waste the precious gift of this time. For all of us are on that same journey of our lives. That night I feel a little better. I'm feeling well enough to try some Sugar Smacks. All right. [SINGING] Can't get enough of those Sugar Smacks, Sugar Smacks, Sugar Smacks. Can't get enough of those Sugar Smacks. I could take them home for tea. So remember, all you cancer patients, when you're feeling awful, try Sugar Smacks. Mmm. It's my food of choice. But over the next few days, as the chemo destroys my immune system, I feel as rotten as I've ever felt. This is rock bottom. And without the energy that comes from blood cells, I feel fragile, anxious, and empty. Well, it's January 21. It's day one, ie I had my transplant yesterday. Is that right? Isn't it day two by now? Gosh, they're going slow. But I feel pretty crappy. I feel very nauseous. And my stomach is just very churny. Today I ate what I was sure I could stomach, a piece of rye bread and some ginger ale, and I even threw that up. But I would like to say it was almost pleasant throwing up ginger ale. It's a lot better than throwing up some other things I could name, like orange juice. Blech. There's some comfort in knowing that I'm supposed to feel this way. The chemo can't distinguish between healthy cells and the cancer, so it wipes out everything that grows fast-- the lining of the digestive tract, the blood cells, hair follicles. One patient who has just been through it assures me it will pass. I thought I was going to die two days ago, and now I feel like-- like I said, as soon as you think it's never going to end, it does get better. I know how you feel right now. Dawn is a couple years older than me and has a 10-year-old. Looking at her is like looking in a mirror. Well, and don't you find too that every time you see pictures of your son or whatever, doesn't that make you just even more determined to get better? See, it does me too. Or if I see my daughter, it just makes me more determined. Right, right. Yeah. It just makes me more determined. Every time I think, oh, God, I feel so bad. I just don't want to go on. Then I just think, oh, what's Jessica going to do without me? Then it's like, oh, I've got to kick myself in the seat and get with it. I feel that way about the whole fight, that I probably wouldn't fight half as hard except for Griffin. Well, what choice do you have, really? You don't. I think if my life maybe was different, maybe if there wasn't Tom and Griffin, maybe I would say, I've lived and I've done things, and I just don't want to fight this anymore. I'm tired of it. You know, if you have to keep going through it and going through it. But you can't do that when you have a kid. Or I don't feel like I can do that with a kid. I feel like I have to keep fighting, even though it's a pain in the butt. More of Rebecca Perl's story in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Most weeks on our program, we bring you a variety of different kinds of stories. Today, we're dedicating our entire program to just one about what it's like to be treated for a life-threatening illness. NPR health sciences reporter Rebecca Perl moved to Omaha for extra intensive chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. Do you have any discomfort when you sit forward? No, I just feel a little shaky. I'm not sure if it's real or just fear. Though my recovery was supposed to be outpatient, two days after the transplant, I'm back in the hospital. Well, it's day three. And I'm here because last night at about 11 o'clock, I noticed that my heart was beating so fast that when I was laying on the bed, I'd just feel it going thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump thump-thump. It was beating really fast. Dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun. And I counted like 150 or 160. Her normal is eighty. I said, OK, get dressed. Let's go. So I just kind of got out of bed and started to come in. And I sat down on a chair in the living room for a minute, but I must have fallen over because the next thing I knew I was on the floor. And then I heard a thud. And I came running out. And Bec was spread eagle on her back, just flat on her back, staring up. And I went and looked in her face, looked in her eyes. And she wasn't registering. And I said, Bec, Bec, can you hear me? Bec. And she just didn't register me. Her eyes were blank. And I was just scared [BLEEP] that something had really happened, like she had had a heart attack or a stroke or something. And then within a couple seconds, she came back. And she registered me. And then we walked out to the car. And then we drove pretty quickly to the hospital. And suddenly there were like a million nurses and PAs and internal medicine guys all in here hooking me up to these monitors and seeing what was going on with my heart. And it was beating at like 190. But the thing that stopped it was they gave me this weird drug which they just put into your catheter, and it makes your heart stop for like three seconds. And it was a weird, unpleasant feeling, kind of like an electrical feeling right after it, just like electricity going through your body or something. And I felt really weird. And I still think I feel a little weird from that. But that got my heart rate down to like normal, to like 120. Hi, I just stopped by to tell you the results of the ECHO. And I think you already know. There was no fluid around the heart. The valves are normal. The heart function normal. And then by the end of the day, Dr. [? Taryntula ?] comes in, who's a great guy, a sweet guy. And he says, I don't know what problem is. We may never know. Let's just hope it doesn't happen again. And that's where we have left it. And that's completely unsatisfying, you know? So they don't know. We don't know. They're not even going to treat it, really. I think I'd feel better if they sort of thought it was something and could treat it. You always think medicine is going to be like that, like you'll find the answer and that will be that. But a lot of times you just don't. We're no closer to knowing what the problem is than when we started out, really, except that they think everything's OK. They think it's behind us, and we're not really going to treat it. But I don't know why my heart was racing like that. It was scary. That has stayed with me in a way that nothing else has because it's like losing your innocence or something. I mean, it just seems like this weird thing. My heart isn't supposed to ever stop, and my heart has been stopped. And to me, that represents some sort of loss of innocence, something that just should have never happened. And it sits badly with me. It's almost like everything else is OK, but that really gets me somehow. I wish that hadn't happened. So if we can treat this and get it under control, get the virus gone before your white cells return, then that's the best way to do it. Four days after the transplant, and I'm about to go home to our apartment. I'm busy worrying about Tom having to give me antibiotic injections at home, except I don't have to worry about that because they tell me I have something called RSV. So you won't be getting out of here today, unfortunately. We really need to treat this. For like a week? For a week. OK? The treatment requires I stay in the hospital isolation room for a week. And for 18 hours a day, I have to wear this ridiculous-looking and very uncomfortable mask strapped to my face so I can breathe in an aerosol medicine. Here's something that people forget. It's not just physically grueling being sick. It's boring. It feels tight around my nose. And it feels sort of stuffy. And it just feels like it's hard to sleep in because it's big, and I feel kind of like an elephant or something with this big nose. I can't eat with it on or do anything. I just feel like I have to stay very still. Watching TV is good. Would you like a cup of coffee? What time is it? About 1:30. 1:30? I must get dressed and go. Why? What's your hurry? There's lots of time. Oh, no, there isn't. And I've been quite enough trouble to you as it is. Trouble? You're not what I'd call trouble. That was just miserable because I had to be on this machine for 18 hours for seven days. And I think my overall feeling about that was I was just embarrassed to be stuck with that thing on my face. I couldn't even believe it was happening to me. And also, I was mad. I was mad that they were doing this to me. At one point, the doctor said to me, hey, we're not doing this to you to be mean. He had to kind of remind me. And I mean, I knew that, but I was pissed that they were doing this to me. But that anger kept me from being worried or scared, because their fear was that my lungs were going to clog up with this RSV virus and I would get something similar to pneumonia or I wouldn't be able to breathe. Just down the hall, Graham has been on a respirator for more than a week. After Graham's 8-year-old old daughter, Kelli, plays her flute for him, he seems to show some slight improvement, but the doctors say he's still in critical condition. It was a disconnect for me. I just didn't make the connection that there were all these other people on respirators, and I could easily be one of them in a matter of days. I didn't think it was going to happen. The big question that we're completely avoiding-- and, in fact, I haven't even thought about it until this point, really-- is the cancer itself. We're in the midst of this whole process right now. And you're so encumbered with the daily routine and sucking aerosol and getting your counts done. And so you're totally drawn into the process, and you're not really thinking about the final goal at all. The cancer, we know that it's there. We're here for that. But we're not thinking about that at all. I'm not, anyhow. You did it. Yeah. Now it's just tidying things up. That's really a huge thing, really big. Finally a piece of good news. Dr. Armitage, the head of the Omaha transplant program, drops by my room to tell me that the stem cells they transplanted into me are growing new cells. Knowing that you have an adequate granulocyte count that you made yourself means you've engrafted. The marrow took. You're no longer at risk of sudden lethal infections. That means you've leaped over one other big barrier. And in fact, the truth is, usually, from now on, things are downhill. It was really nice and reassuring to have him say that because we had had a sort of a small setback, where I had had more chemo, and when we looked at the tests, that chemo hadn't done anything to shrink the tumor. And so you worry that the bone marrow transplant isn't even going to work. And he said, really without any information, I'm very pleased with how everything went, with this undertone of, you've probably made it. It's probably worked. You're probably OK. I don't know how he would have known that, or maybe he was bluffing. But it was real reassuring to have him come and say those things. And your blood counts are looking great. Wonderful platelets. I don't know if you saw them today. Day 11. They've just let me out of the hospital, and all of a sudden, it's over. Just as sure as I was locked away, they're going to let me go. What do you say about getting your catheter out and getting home? How's that sound? Yeah. Up for that? Congratulations. Thank you. We just need to give you a nice little certificate saying you're out of here. No. You did a great job. It was weird to me when they said, OK, you can go home. And congratulations. Yay! And everybody clapped and kissed and hugged. I'm so thrilled for you. Yeah. Thanks for helping. Oh, hey. I was like, wait a second. I haven't won anything here. We don't know whether this worked. We know I got through this, but that's little consolation. The really big prize here, the car, the trip to Hawaii, is did the cancer go away? And we didn't know, and we weren't going to know for months. And so it was all very weird, everybody congratulating you and patting you on the back and saying good for you and hey, it's all over now. It seemed very strange to me. You're a doll. You take it easy. We'll see you when you come back in 100 days. Bye. For the first couple weeks I was in Omaha, I felt like I was on an assembly line. You come in through a revolving door. You get on the line. You get your catheter. You get your stem cells removed. You get your high dose chemo. You get your stem cells back. So now I was leaving, walking fast, head up. Suddenly I was the veteran, the old pro. And there was a scared old man with his family who had just arrived for his transplant, looking shaky and small as he sat huddled by the door. You don't feel too good, but, you know, at least it goes by pretty-- what's good is the white cells come back pretty fast, so just a matter of about 10 days there where you're really vulnerable. Then we say goodbye to Lorraine. How's Graham doing? Her husband, Graham, is still on a respirator. She tells us that she's losing hope. It's starting to feel like it's not going to work. Sorry. No. Don't worry. Forget it. Lorraine. I tell her to be optimistic, but I don't know why I'm saying this. In my heart, I know she's right to prepare herself for Graham's death. It's not a good scene. Here I am leaving, getting out of town alive, and Lorraine's world is falling apart. I feel terrible for her, but mostly I want to get the hell out of here. I want to run. Still I hug her, and I tell her not to lose hope. That's pretty scary. That's pretty scary. It's early for that still. It's early, though, for that. I have a weird sense of this whole thing with Graham because, I mean, well, now it looks bad for Graham. But for a while there I was thinking he could pull through and make it and the bone marrow transplant wouldn't really work for me. And I could be down, and he could be up. And I mean, nothing's guaranteed here at all. Bye, Lorraine. We'll call you. Yeah. We'll call you. Take care. Give Graham a kiss for us. Can you get in there to kiss him? OK. Then do. Bye. Bye, Thomas. Bye, Thomas! Say hi to Kelli. Griffy, you've gotten so big. I'm sorry I had to be away for so long. I was away, but I'm back now. Are you my Griffy? Are you my Griffy? I want to believe, and I think I basically do believe that this whole ordeal did not impact Griffy in a bad way. And I think that it didn't. Mommy. Mommy came back. "'Mommy,' they cried. They flapped and they danced and they bounced up and down on their branches. 'What's all the fuss,' their mother owl said. 'You knew I'd come back.' And the baby owls thought-- because all owls think a lot. 'I knew it,' said Sarah. 'And I knew it,' said Percy. 'I love my mommy,' said Bill." Griffy. Griffy. Mommy. Mommy. Griffy. Griffy. Mommy. Mommy. Griffy. Griffy. Mommy. Mommy. And Mommy. Mommy. Hi, is this the seventh floor bone marrow transplant unit? I was trying to reach Lorraine Brazier. I'm a friend of hers, and I was on the unit myself. Rebecca Perl. And I was just trying to find out about Graham. He's not in the room anymore. February 3. I've been home four days when I call back to Omaha to see how Graham is doing. This morning. Did they just take him off the respirator? They didn't. He just-- he wasn't breathing. Oh. Oh, gosh. So weird. I mean, this isn't what you expect, you know? I mean, it's rare that people die from the bone marrow transplant, but I guess it happens. But it's rare when you get your own cells. I don't know. I just feel sorry for Lorraine. Because she's got two little kids. One is just one year old, and one is eight years old. That's a lot. And it's just a lot that they won't have a father. Springtime. The buds on the maple tree outside our bedroom window have begun to sprout, and so has my hair. I call this tree my hair tree because since I've been having chemo, my hair has fallen out and grown back at the same time the tree has lost its leaves and sprouted new ones. Welcome to Omaha's Eppley Airfield. The terminal curb is for the immediate loading and unloading of passengers. April 15. Three months have gone by, and we're back in Omaha. It's tax day and the day I find out if my transplant worked. This time we're only here for two days, and Griffin is with us. That's Dr. Vose. Who is this? That's Griffin. How you doing? You taking good care of mom? The news is good. Dr. Vose tells us the tumor has shrunk significantly. CAT scan looked really good. They said that the mass was shrinking from where it was. Last time we checked in, it was two by one. That's pretty close to being what we would consider normal size for a lymph node. So it's definitely a lot smaller. It's hard to know for sure if it's completely gone. It's definitely not smaller? A lot smaller. A lot smaller. Oh, OK. Well, that's good. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, well, you did all the work. I think we got about as good news as we could. I mean, it could shrink a little bit more, I suppose. And it's possible that what we're seeing, the reason it's somewhat bigger than a regular lymph node is that there's scar tissue. So hopefully that's what it is and we're OK. And so that's nice. It's good. This is the part where we do the Mary Tyler Moore, like take off hat and throw it up in the air. We need that music. [SINGING] You might just make it after all. It's funny when you realize you're going to get your life back, that your job isn't just fighting a disease anymore. Suddenly you have to live. Egad. You can't just sit around and wait to be better. You've got to go back to work or at least do something. Study biology, write a book. That was very strange and difficult for me at first, because for the past year and a half, I'd been doing very little. Reading, resting, looking through catalogs. I was scared to go back to work, to face getting dressed every day, to be busy, on deadline, frantic, to let my orderly life and my time with Griffin get away from me. One year since my transplant. The tumor has shrunk to the size of a normal lymph node, suggesting the disease is gone. I'm back at work, but my energy is still low. I'm tired a lot, and when Griffin gets sick with a cold, I get sick too. And I get it bad. Still, we go on vacation. Tom and I went to Rome this fall. We see friends, make dinner. We even fight. And though my life is pretty good, I don't feel ecstatic, but I feel content. And if I worry, I worry about life returning to the way it was before I got sick. Sometimes, I think, I wonder if it changed me. You know, like Armitage, who's the head doctor in Omaha, said, you don't go through this without changing. And sometimes I feel like I'm really just the same. I still sweat the little details or get mad if the kitchen is a mess or something, things that shouldn't matter to me anymore having gone through something like this. And yet I still get caught up in them. And so sometimes I think I haven't changed. And that scares me because it makes me think that if I haven't changed, then I do everything the same, then I could get sick again. But if I can learn from this and change, then I won't. Scenes From a Transplant was produced by Dan Collison with help from Tom Jennings, to whom this story is dedicated. The story was originally shot on video. Dan Collison is currently looking for funding for a video version of the documentary. Our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder. Senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett and [? Sahini ?] Davenport. This week we are pleased to announce that This American Life now has a website on the internet. The address, www.thislife.org. That's thislife, one word, no space in between this and life. www.thislife.org. On the site, you'll find sound files of most of our programs to listen to whenever you wish. Thanks to Elizabeth Wasserman and KCRW. If you'd like to buy an old-fashioned cassette of our program, call us at WBEZ here in Chicago, 312-832-3380. 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Here's my seventh grade teacher's sad fate-- he trained as a classical musician, loved music, truly loved it. And then every working day, he surrounded himself with 13-year-olds who massacred the living guts out of it. Could not play it and did not care. It made him the angriest teacher I ever saw. He yelled all the time. This is what happens if you believe that music means something, is important, and you're surrounded all day long with 13- and 14-year-olds who demonstrate through their actions that maybe it's not. I told Durrell Daniels about him and Durrell understood immediately. Durrell was once paid to teach band, but he had to quit because he looked at the facts at hand and came to the simple conclusion-- I got out of band teaching because I noticed that all the band teachers I knew had went a little crazy. I mean, no disrespect intended, but you don't find too many, like, totally sane band teachers who have taught band for a long time. And I sort of saw myself going on the edge. And I said, well, no. I don't want to be whistling to myself at a wall, looking at apples that are not there, or something like that. Because it's sort of like-- no instrument sounds good when it's not played well. Trumpet was a pain. Saxophone was a pain. Clarinet was hell. And another thing. The kids, when they get a trumpet, there's a difference between a kid singing and a kid getting a trumpet. You might can't sing, and you might be a little shy. No kid's going to be shy about blowing that horn no matter how bad they sound. As a professional musician, Durrell played jazz and funk and soul, keyboards and vocals. He's toured Asia and Brazil and Canada. He's done gigs in Paris. But four years ago, with kids to support of his own, he returned to a music job in the Chicago Public Schools in an elementary school. And we get these little records, Barney records. And we get up and do a little Barney dance. I'm like, this sucks. And you had already, at that point, you had toured. God, there should be a name for this, like for that moment. Misery. That's the name. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass, coming to you today from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California, thanks to public radio station KQED in San Francisco. Today on our program, Music Lessons. What's frustrating about them, what's miraculous about them. Act One, Papa Was not a Rolling Stone. David Sedaris tells what happens when a parent does not play an instrument and insists that his children take lessons. Act Two. Toccata and Fugue in Me, a Minor. Sarah Vowell recalls all the things that she learned in music class that had nothing to do with music. Act Three, Knockin' on Heaven's Door, in which Annie Lamott provides some much needed spiritual uplift to our program with an example of what we can learn from music now, all of us. Stay with us. So imagine that you're an adult and you decide you want to express yourself through music. And the medium that you have to express yourself is 13- and 14- and 15-year-old kids. That is a very imprecise medium in which to apply your art. This week was especially hard on Durrell. He had to get one group of kids rehearsed to sing at one graduation ceremony and another group ready for another graduation ceremony and then there were some recitals to do. And then the gospel choir, who usually is pride and joy kids, sort of fell apart on him. They were singing badly. They were arguing with him. He sat them down. He told them he was probably going to have to cancel their last concert of the year. But he would decide about it after one last rehearsal. My kids-- I was like, look, I'm tired. I'm tired. I've been working this stuff for you guys. And look, I can't sit here and argue with all you almost-grown kids all day long. All right. Come on. Let's get together. After school Tuesday, the gospel choir gathered in Lindblom's Auditorium, 22 girls and three boys, one boy who never seemed to sing at all. All right, you guys. Let's get into sections. Everybody was on their best behavior. They wanted to show Mr. Daniels that they could do the concert. And they began their practice the way that they always do, with a prayer. Father God, right now in the name of Jesus, God, we come thanking you, O God. We want to thank you for gathering us here, O God. We come against every spirit that's trying to hinder this choir right now in the name of Jesus. And then from the moment that they started to sing, they just soared. They were great. [SINGING] Clap your hands. One, two, three, four! Hey! Teaching music is like any teaching, except that when you fail, it is loud. And failure is so easy. Every note is a chance to mess up. After three songs, Mr. Daniels told the chorus that he would not cancel the concert. Now he just had to get through two graduations, their concert, and a couple of recitals, and he could have the summer to promote his new CD, which, like any real professional musician, he asked me to mention here on the radio. Act One, Papa Was not a Rolling Stone. Children are asked to live the unlived lives of their parents nowhere more than music lessons. There the eager music students and then there are the reluctant music students. This is the story of somebody in the second group. Please welcome writer David Sedaris. My father loves jazz and has a substantial collection of records and reel-to-reel tapes he used to listen to after returning home from work each evening. He might have entered the house in a foul mood, but once he had his Dexter Gordon and a vodka martini, everything was beautiful, baby. Just beautiful. The moment the needle hit that record, he loosened his tie and became something other than a mechanical engineer with a pocket full of IBM pencils embossed with the word "think." "Man, oh, man. Will you get a load of the chops on this guy? I saw him once at the Blue Note, and I mean to tell you that he blew me right out of my chair. You could take a hatchet and cut the man's lips right off his face, and still he would have played better than anyone else out there. That's how good he was!" I'd nod my head, envisioning a pair of lips lying forsaken on the floor of some dressing room. The trick was to back slowly towards the hallway, escaping into the kitchen before my father could yell, "hey, get back here! Where do you think you're going? Sit down for a minute and listen. I mean, really listen." How could you prove you were listening? It was as if he expected us to change color like the fuzz-colored ceramic rabbit our neighbor used to predict the weather. I often thought that my father might have been a musician himself had he not been born to immigrant parents who considered even wax-tipped shoelaces to be an extravagance. They listened only to Greek music, an oxymoron as far as the rest of the world was concerned. Jazz was, in a sense, my father's own personal discovery. Denounced and forbidden by his parents, he hid his 78s and secretly drove into New York City, where he'd sit alive and enraptured at the feet of his heroes. The move to North Carolina was difficult, and he felt cut off with nothing but the Country and Top 40 radio stations Raleigh had to offer in the mid to late 1960s. Limited to his record collection, it became his dream that his children might fill the void by someday forming a jazz combo. His plan took shape shortly after escorting my sisters Lisa, Gretchen, and I to the local state university to see Dave Brubeck, who was currently touring with his sons. The audience roared when Dave Brubeck stepped forth from behind the curtain, and I sat back, pretending those applauds were for me. A person had to do something while standing before a crowd of 600 people. And with this in mind, I'd been secretly working up a little routine. The act consisted of me dressed in a nice shirt and tie and performing a medley of commercial jingles in the voice of Billie Holiday. For my Raleigh show, I'd probably open with the number used to promote our town's oldest shopping center. A quick nod to my accompanist and I'd begin with, [SINGING] "the excitement of Cameron Village will carry you a-way." The beauty of my rendition was that it captured both the joy and the sorrow of a visit to Ellisburg's or JCPenney's. This would be followed by such sure-fire hits as the theme for Winston cigarettes and the catchy new Coke commercial. [SINGING] "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company." I was lost in my fantasy, ignoring Dave Brubeck and coming up for air only when my father elbowed my ribs to say, "are you listening to this? These cats are burnin' the paint right off the walls!" Driving home from the concert that night, he had drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, saying, "did you hear that? The guy just gets better every day! There he was with his kids, the whole lot of them, jamming up a storm. What I wouldn't give for a family like that. You guys should think about putting an act together." The following afternoon, he bought a baby grand piano. It sat neglected until my father signed Gretchen up for a series of lessons. Lisa was assigned the flute. And I returned home from a scout meeting one evening to find my instrument leaning against the aquarium in my bedroom. "So there she is," my father said. "Here's that guitar you always wanted." Surely he had me confused with someone else. While I had regularly petitioned for a brand-name vacuum cleaner, I had never said anything about wanting a guitar. Nothing about it appealed to me. I had my room arranged just so, and it didn't fit in at all with the nautical theme. I stuffed it into my closet and there it remained until he signed me up for private lessons. "But I'm sick!" I yelled, watching him pull out of the parking lot. "I don't want to play an instrument. Don't you know anything?" I lugged my guitar into the music shop, where the manager led me to my teacher, a temperamental midget named Mr. Mancini. A fastidious dresser stuck in a small town, Mr. Mancini wore clothing I recognized from the young boys department at Hudson Belk's. Some nights he favored button-up shirts with clip-on ties, while other evenings I arrived to find him dressed in flared slacks and a snug turtleneck sweater, a swag of love beads hanging from his neck. His arms were manly and covered in coarse dark hair, but his voice was high and strange, as if it had been recorded and played back at a higher speed. My fascination was both evident and unwelcome. He didn't ask my name, just lit a cigarette and squinted against the smoke. Like my father, Mr. Mancini assumed that anyone could play guitar. He had picked it up during a single summer spent in what he called "Hot-lanta, G-A." "Now that," he said, "is one classy city. You know what I mean? The girls down on Peachtree are running wild 24 hours a day." "That's great," I said. He seemed to know that I was nothing special but just a type, another boy whose father had his head in the clouds. "Let me show you what this instrument's all about." He climbed into his chair and began playing "Light My Fire." The current Top 40 version was performed by Jose Feliciano, a blind man whose plaintive voice served the lyric much better than Jim Morrison, who sang the song in what I considered to be a bossy and conceited tone of voice. The was Jose Feliciano, Jim Morrison, and then there was Mr. Mancini, who played beautifully but sang "Light My Fire" as if he were a Webelos Scout searching for a match. He finished his opening number, nodded his head in acknowledgement of my applause, and moved on, performing his own unique an unsettling versions of "The Girl From Ipanema" and "Little Green Apples," while I sat in my seat, a fault smile stretched so tight I lost all feeling in my jaw. My fingernails had grown a good three inches by the time he hit his final note and called me close to point out a few simple chords. Before leaving, he gave me some purple, mimeographed handouts which we both knew were useless. Back at the house, my mother had my dinner warming in the oven. From the living room, I could hear the aimless whisper of Lisa's flute, which sounded much like the wind whipping through an empty Pepsi can. Down in the basement, Gretchen was either practicing piano or the cat was chasing a moth across the keys. I was at the mall with my mother, afternoon, when I spotted Mr. Mancini reaching up to order a hamburger at Scotty's Chuckwagon, an open-air fast food restaurant located a few doors down from the music shop. He was standing on his tiptoes, and even then his head failed to reach the counter. Once he'd gotten his food, he carried his tray towards a vacant table facing the escalator. The passing adults shifted their gaze or smiled politely while their children were decidedly more overt. Toddlers ambled up on their chubby, bowed legs, embracing my teacher with their ketchup-smeared fingers. It suddenly became clear that Mr. Mancini hated children. The only thing worse were the adolescents, the boys my age who sat at the surrounding tables poking fun and regurgitating their Scotty fries in laughter. Watching this scene from a distance, my first thought was hey, that's my midget. Hands off! The man was my discovery, not theirs. I'd always thought of him as a pocket Playboy, but watching him dip his hamburger into a puddle of mayonnaise, I broadened my view and saw him as a vulnerable loner, an outsider who scoffed not only at Raleigh but at the entire state of North Carolina. It was a persona I'd thought of adopting myself. Looking at it this way, it seemed that Mr. Mancini and I actually had quite a bit in common. We were both men trapped in boys' bodies. There was no reason I shouldn't address him not as a teacher but as an artistic brother. If things worked out the way I hoped, maybe I could even use him as my accompanist. The following evening, I showed up for my lesson. And this time, when asked if I'd practiced, I told the truth, saying in a matter-of-fact tone of voice that no, I had not touched the thing since the last session. I told him that I had absolutely no interest in mastering the guitar. What I really wanted to do was sing in the voice of Billie Holiday, mainly commercials, but not for any banks or car dealerships, because those are usually choral arrangements. The color ebbed from my teacher's face. I told him I'd been working up an act and could use a little accompaniment. Did he know the jingle for the new Sara Lee campaign? He acted as though I had instructed him to do something unspeakable perverse. "You want me to what?" I was certain he was lying when he told me he didn't know the tune. Doublemint gum, Ritz crackers, the themes for Alka-Seltzer and Kenmore appliances, he claimed ignorant on all counts. I knew that it was queer to sing in front of someone, but seeing as he'd been doing it for weeks, I started in on an a cappella version of the latest Oscar Mayer commercial hoping he might join in once the spirit moved him. With a total disregard for his company, I sang the same way I did at home when alone in my bedroom. My eyes shut tight and my hands moving in a useless and crippled fashion. [SINGING] "My bologna has a first name. It's O-S-C-A-R. My bologna has a second name. It's M-A-Y-E-R. Oh, I love to eat it every day. And if you ask me why, I'll say that Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A." I reached the end of the tune, thinking he might take this as an opportunity to applaud or maybe even apologize for underestimating me. But instead, he held up his hand, saying, "hey guy, I'm not into that scene. There were plenty of screwballs like you back in Atlanta. And I don't know, I guess it's your thing, or whatever, but you can definitely count me out." My father was disappointed when I told him I wouldn't be returning for any more lessons. Luckily my sisters were as fed up as I was, and we approached him together, saying that the Sedaris trio had officially dismantled. He offered to find us better teachers, adding in that if we were unhappy with our instruments, we could always trade them in for something livelier. "The trumpet or saxophone or hey, how about the vibes?" He reached for a Lionel Hampton album, saying, "let me play you a little something I think you're going to love." We told him, no Dad, don't bother. But still, he readied the stereo, holding the record to the light and examining it for dust. "I'm telling you that this record is going to change your life. And if it doesn't, I'll give each one of you $5. How do you like that?" It was a tough call. Five dollars for listening to a Lionel Hampton album. Yet we knew that there were certainly strings attached. We looked at each other, my sisters and I. And then we left the room, failing to respond as he yelled, "hey, where do you think you're going? Get back in here and listen!" We joined our mother at the TV and never looked back. The music was his great fantasy, not ours. That night, as was his habit, our father fell asleep in front of the stereo, the record making its pointless, silent rounds as he laid back against the sofa cushions dreaming. Thank you. David Sedaris is the author of several books. His book of stories, Naked, just came out in paperback. Coming up, Sarah Vowell marches, Anne Lamott prays. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of different writers and performers to tackle that theme. Today we come to you from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California. Today's program, Music Lessons. What makes them so great, what makes them so terrible, what we really, really, really learn from them. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Toccata and Fugue in Me, a Minor. As a teenager growing up in Montana, Sarah Vowell was not casual about music lessons. She was not reluctant about music lessons. Music became her life. She was in marching band, band 1, symphony band, jazz band, pep band, orchestra, and the Bozeman Recorder Ensemble. She's now a music writer and one of our contributing editors at This American Life. Please welcome her. It was autumn in America, a fine, hot, Indian Summer day. Pretty high school girls sat on bleachers with the sun shining on their pretty hair, watching handsome high school boys play football. And then it was halftime, which is where I came in. I was standing in line in my silver spats down past the end zone waiting to go on. I was in 11th grade. I was in marching band. I had a foot-tall, fake fur, black hat with the vaguely-processed-food-named shako strapped under my chin that not only prevented me from breathing, it prevented me from balancing, so that even though my job was to march around as some kind of sick metaphor for teenage military precision, I moved through time and space with the grace and confidence of a puppy walking on a beach ball. Because of my double shortage of strength and coordination, I barely passed gym. But somehow I was supposed to lift a baritone horn that measured twice my body weight, blow into it while reading microscopic sheet music, step in a straight line while remembering left foot on beats one and three, right foot on beats two and four, and maneuver myself into cute, visual formations like the trio of stick figures when we played the theme from My Three Sons. And then, halfway through the halftime program, I had to break formation, drop my baritone horn on the field, and sprint to the 50-yard line, a long haul, with everyone in the band, everyone in the bleachers, everyone on the sidelines watching and waiting, silent and still. And then I picked up my mallets. This is what they had been waiting for, a xylophone solo on a little Latin-flavored number called, "Tico-Tico." My polo-shirt-clad nemesis, Andy Heap, stood up in the stands screaming, "Vowell, Vowell, woo, woo!" as the laughter of his friends-- at me-- drowned out the horn section. This was the same Andy Heap, I might add, who earlier in the week in music history class had delivered an oral report on Tchaikovsky's mistress and referred to her as Mimi throughout, even though her name was Nadia. Andy Heap was apparently smart enough to publicly humiliate me during "Tico-Tico," he just wasn't smart enough to know that the abbreviation M-M-E-period stands not for Mimi but the title "Madame." Anyway, I only had a second to stick out my tongue at Andy when I finished because I had to let go of the mallets, rush over to my baritone-- again the freeze-framed spectators, the loneliness of the long distance runner, --and I'm back in formation with the low brass for the finale. And I was getting academic credit for this. I was getting graded to wear that uniform, to play those songs. Which begs the question, what exactly was I supposed to be learning? What was marching band supposed to teach me? And marching is not a particularly applicable skill in later life. And ditto all the other handy things music classes taught me-- the E-flat minor scale, the alternate fingering for D-sharp. Here, then, some of the lessons, actually useful ones, I accidentally learned while pursuing music. Accidental lesson number one-- Marxism for 10th graders. Once a week, the best band kids played with the orchestra. I played the bass drum in orchestra, which meant that I never got to play. My participation ratio was something like 75 measures of rest per one big bass wallop, which gave me plenty of time to contemplate the class warfare of the situation. And here's what I figured out. Orchestra kids wore tuxedos. Band kids wore tuxedo t-shirts. And the orchestra kids, with their brown woolens and Teutonic last names had the well-scrubbed, dark blond aura of a Hitler youth brigade. These were the sons and daughters of Humanities professors. They took German. They actually played soccer. Dumping the fluorescent t-shirts of the band kids into the orchestra each week must have looked like tossing a handful of Skittles into a bowl of Swiss chocolates. But nothing brings kids together like hate. And the one thing the band kids and the orchestra kids had in common was a unified disgust for the chorus kids, who were to us merely drama geeks with access to four-part harmony. A shy violin player wasn't likely to haunt the halls between classes playing "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" any more than a band kid would blare "Land of a Thousand Dances" on his tuba more than three inches outside the band room door. But that didn't stop the choir girls from making everyone temporarily forget their locker combinations thanks to an impromptu, uncalled-for burst of "Brigadoon." Andy Heap? Chorus. Accidental discovery number two. Where's Walter? My junior high had an electronic music lab. We made tape loops and learned words like quadraphonic. In my spare time, you know just for fun, I checked out all the books on electronic music from the library. My favorite records for a while there were Walter Carlos' concept album "Switched-On Bach" and its sequel, "The Well-Tempered Synthesizer," which offered what I thought were hilariously witty covers of Bach classics performed on-- get this-- a Moog synthesizer. In my readings on electronic music, something puzzled me. Every time I'd look into Walter Carlos, the information would just stop and someone named Wendy Carlos would turn up. I got to school early one morning to ask my electronic music teacher what happened to Walter, and was Wendy Walter's wife or daughter? And my teacher kind of didn't answer for a long time. And then he blurted out, "uh, Wendy is Walter." What did he mean? "Uh, Walter-- Walter had a sex change operation and changed his name to Wendy." "What's a sex change operation?" Now, I know it's hard to capture now, here, in San Francisco-- --what a shock this was. I knew absolutely nothing about sex. We didn't talk about sex in my house and Sex Ed wasn't scheduled until spring. I was a wholesome, small town, Christian kid engaged in wholesome, small town, Christian pursuits. And suddenly, bam, I'm standing at the corner of Sodom and Gomorrah and where's my street map? That Walter Carlos. I hadn't even recovered from the shock that Bach could be messed with. Number three, biology as destiny. In seventh grade, I started band. I wanted to play the drums. My parents, who lived with me, as was the custom in Montana, did not want me to play the drums. So I picked the next loudest instrument, the trumpet. How I loved my trumpet, the feel of it in my hands, its very volume and shine. You know what I especially loved? The spit valve. In eighth grade, a teacher told me about this good old trumpet player I might like, so I went out and bought one of his records. And every night for over a year I went to sleep listening to it, the same songs over and over, trying to figure out why Louis Armstrong was so funny, so moving, so good. And I got caught up in this superstar talent of his right around the time I was beginning to suspect that I didn't have it, talent, I mean. And there was another problem too, which I discovered about three years into my trumpet career. I found out the reason I was getting a shoddy tone and I had trouble hitting the high notes was because of the shape of my jaw. The shape of my jaw. I felt the world was more or less over. I was outraged that a person's fate could depend on something as arbitrary as the angles of her teeth. And not only that, I had to switch to a brass instrument with a bigger mouthpiece, the baritone horn. The baritone horn. Like, trumpets are played by Miles Davis and baritones are played by-- nobody. Lesson number four, when doves cry. From the time I was 12 until I finished high school at 18, my poor parents' calendar was blackened by an ambitious roster of concerts and recitals averaging at least one per month. They were always so gushy in their support it never dawned on me that they might have preferred to avoid junior high school gymnasium performances of the theme from Rocky. They acted as though their world revolved around my sister and me, and that's what we believed. But I remember one night after an eighth grade band concert, I caught a glimpse of pencil marks on my father's rolled up program. He told me that he checked each movement of each piece off as they ended. Obviously because he was counting the seconds until he could go home. And at the time, I took it badly. I was offended that he had so little regard for the seriousness of our interpretation of "What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?" But now I see those pathetic little check marks as heart-shaped symbols of his love. Everyone says that love requires the utmost honesty, but that's not entirely true. Once I knew that my father was suffering for my sake, really suffering, I learned that love, especially the parental kind, requires the heartwarming sacrifice that can only accompany fake enthusiasm. Number five, birth of cool. So I was doomed at the trumpet, acceptable at the baritone, shaky on this xylophone, and putrid on the piano. But there is one instrument for which I had an innate knack, an instrument I could play with some semblance of grace. It was, unfortunately, an instrument which was already on its way out during the lifetime of J.S. Bach-- the recorder. I taught myself to play it when I was 11, and by 14, I was perhaps the youngest member of the American Recorder Society, reading their journal, The American Recorder, and practicing the Elizabethan and Baroque music I special ordered with my babysitting money. I found out about an amateur ensemble that met once a week in my town playing mostly Elizabethan standards like "It Was a Lover and His Lass" at a tempo marked on the metronome as "Post Office slow." The members of the Bozeman Recorder Ensemble, as we were called, included a retired high school music teacher, two math professors, and a number of housewives, one of whom had a daughter in my grade. I was the only member under the age of 40, and most of them would have been eligible for the senior citizen discount at the music store. I played with them for a couple of years until my pals Margaret and Leota and I broke off to form our own trio. The three of us just plain liked each other, liked playing. At school, in all those hours of actual classes with actual teachers, music felt more like a job. Playing with Leota and Margaret was the first time, the only time, I actually enjoyed playing music. And here's a little Elizabethan song we used to do called "Willow, Willow," which-- this is actually my first public performance since the Reagan administration. Which I was kind of looking forward to. And on my way here, I was walking down Market, and there was this guy on the street playing the recorder. And I kind of got a glimpse of what that looks like. I'm a little less sure. So this is "Willow, Willow" from a manuscript in the British museum. Now, imagine playing that on the street with your two friends who happen to be older than your parents. And you look up from your music stand and notice one of your schoolmates staring on in horror-- Andy Heap, for instance. But you know what? You don't care. You might even smile at him. And this is the most important lesson of marching band, of public displays of recorder-- to withstand embarrassment. Maybe even seek it out. To take nerdiness to its most dizzying, "Willow, Willow," "Tico-Tico" extremes-- --and stand before my peers with my head held high, to stick out my tongue at the Andy Heaps of the world, run back to the baritone horn of life, and blow mighty and proud. (HOST) SARAH VOWELL: Thank you. Sarah Vowell is the music columnist for the online magazine Salon and the author of Radio On. One, two, three-- Act Three, Knockin' on Heaven's Door. In this act, we turn from formal music lessons to what it is that music can actually teach us today now, outside the classroom. Anne Lamott is the only writer in our show today who actually lives in the San Francisco area. The author of many books, please welcome her. Thank you. So there I was on a plane returning home from St. Louis. Or rather, there I was in a plane on the runway at the airport in St. Louis, with, I think, the not unreasonable expectation that we would be in the air soon as our flight had already been delayed two hours. I was anxious to get home, as I had not seen Sam in several days. But all things considered, I thought I was coping quite well, especially because I am a skeptical and terrified flier. In between devouring Hershey's chocolates and $13 worth of trashy magazines, I had spent the two hours of the delay trying to be helpful to the other stranded passengers. I distributed all my magazines and most of my chocolates, I got an old man some water, I flirted with babies, I mingled, I schmoozed, I was Geoffrey Rush in Shine. I had seen what may have been a miracle at my church recently. I had been feeling ever since that I was supposed to walk through life with a deeper faith, a deeper sense of assurance that if I took care of God's children for God, He would take care of me. My only hope was that nothing else go wrong, that once we were on board, everything runs smoothly. My idea of everything running smoothly on an airplane is that once it is in the air, A, I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists. And that B, none of the other passengers try to talk to me. We finally got to board. I was in row 38 between a woman slightly older than I with limited language skills and a man my own age who was reading a book by a famous right-wing Christian novelist about the apocalypse. A newspaper had asked me to review it when it first came out because this author and I are both Christians, although, as I pointed out in my review, he's one of those right-wing Christians who think that Jesus is coming back sometime next Tuesday right after lunch, and I am one of those left-wing Christians who think that perhaps the author is just spiritualizing his hysteria. Also, I suggested in my review that he has the tendency to be a little rigid. "How is it?" I ask, pointing jovially to his book, partly to be friendly and partly to gauge where he stood politically. "This is one of the best books I've ever read," he replied. "You should read it." I nodded. I remember saying in the review that it was hardcore, right-wing paranoid, anti-semitic, homophobic, misogynistic propaganda. Not to put too fine a point on it. He smiled and went back to reading. I couldn't begin to guess what country the woman was from, although I think it's possible that she had one Latvian parent and one Korean. She sounded a little Latka, the Andy Kaufman character on Taxi, except when things began to fall apart, when she sounded just like the space men in Mars Attacks! "Ack! Ack! Ack!," she'd cry. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As we sat there on the runway, the man reading the book about the apocalypse commented on the small gold cross I wear on a necklace. "Are you born again?" He asked as we taxied down the runway. He was rather prim and tense, maybe a little like David Eisenhower with a spastic colon. I did not know how to answer for a moment. "Yes," I said, finally, "I am." My friends like to tell each other that I am not really a born-again Christian. They think of me more along the lines of that old Jonathan Miller routine when he said, "I'm not really a Jew. I'm Jew-ish." They think I'm Christian-ish. But I'm not. I'm just a bad Christian. A bad born-again Christian. And certainly, like the apostle Peter, I am capable of denying it, of presenting myself as a sort of leftist, liberation theology enthusiast, and maybe sort of vaguely Jesus-y bon vivant. But it's not true. And I believe when you get on a plane, if you start lying, you are screwed unto the very Lord. So I told the truth, that I'm a believer, a convert. I'm probably about three months away from slapping an aluminum Jesus fish on the back of my car. Although I first want to see if the application or Stickum in any way interferes with my lease agreement. I just love the guy. I just love Jesus. It's that simple. Anyway, as the plane taxied out to the runway, the man on my right began telling me about how he and his wife were home schooling their children. And he described with enormous acrimony the radical, free-for-all, feminist, artsy-feely philosophy of his county school system. And I knew instantly that this description was an act of aggression against me, that he was telepathic onto me, could see that I am the enemy, that I will be on the same curling team in Heaven as Tom Hayden and Vanessa Redgrave. But suddenly the plane braked to a stop. We all looked around for a moment, and then the captain came on the PA system and announced calmly that two passengers wanted to get off the plane right then and there. We were headed back to the gate. "What?" we all cried. The good news was that this was only going to take a minute or so, since in the past two hours we'd only gotten about 500 feet. The bad news was that FAA regulations dictated that all of the stowed luggage had to be gone over by security to make sure these people had not accidentally left behind their pipe bombs. The Latvian woman stared at me quizzically. I explained very slowly and very loudly what was going on. She gaped at me for a moment. "Ack," she whispered. Eventually, the three of us in row 38 began to read. And an hour later, the plane finally took off again. We, the citizens of row 38, all ordered sodas. The Latvian woman put on a Walkman and began to listen with her eyes closed. The Christian man read his book about the apocalypse. I read The New Yorker. Then the seat belt sign came on and the pilot came back on over the PA system. "I'm afraid we're about to hit some really heavy turbulence," he said. "Please return to your seats." A moment later the plane began bouncing around so hard that we had to hold on to our drinks. "Ack! Ack! Ack!" said the Latvian, grabbing for her Sprite. "Everyone take your seat!" the pilot literally barked over the PA system. "We are in for some rough going." My heart bounced around like a jumping bean. The plane rose and fell and shook, and the pilot came back on and said sternly, like an angry dad, "flight attendants, sit down now!" And the plane hit those waves and currents of air on the choppy sea of sky, and we bounced and moaned and gasped. "Whoa," we all said, as one, like we were on a roller coaster ride. We're going down, I thought. I know a basic tenet of the Christian faith is that death is really just a major change of address-- --but I had to close my eyes to squinch back tears of terror and loss. Oh my god, I thought. Oh my god. I'll never see Sam again. This will kill me a second time. The plane bucked and shook without stopping, and the Christian read calmly, stoically, rather pleased with himself it seemed to my tiny, hysterical self. The Latvian closed her eyes and turned up her Walkman. I could hear it playing softly. And I, praying for another miracle, thought about the one I had just seen. It took place at my church, where one of our newer members, a man named Ken, is dying of AIDS, disintegrating before our very eyes. He came in a year ago with a Jewish woman who comes every week to be with us, although she does not believe in Jesus. Shortly after the man with AIDS started coming, his partner died of the disease. A few weeks later, he said that right then and there, in the hole in his heart that Brandon's death left, Jesus slid in and had been there ever since. This man has a totally lopsided face, ravaged, emaciated. And when he smiles, he's radiant. He looks like God's crazy nephew Phil. He said that he would gladly pay any price for what he has now, which is Jesus and us. There's a woman in the choir named Renola, a beautiful black woman who is smart and jovial and sweet and as devout as can be but who has also been a little standoffish towards Ken, if you ask me. She's always looked at him with confusion, when she looks at him at all, in his goofy, ravaged joy. Or she looks at him sideways. She was raised by Baptists in the Midwest who must have thought that his way of life, that he, was an abomination. Maybe it was hard for her to break through this. Maybe on the most visceral level, she was a little afraid of catching the disease. I'm not sure. But anyway, Kenny has come to church almost every week for the last year and won almost everyone else over. He missed a couple of Sundays a while ago because he was too weak to come. And then a month ago, he came back, weighing almost no pounds, his face even more lopsided, as if he's had a stroke. But during the Prayers of the People, he talked joyously of his life and his decline, of how safe and happy he feels these days. So on this one particular Sunday, for the first hymn, the so-called morning hymn, we sang "Jacob's Ladder," which goes "every rung goes higher, higher." But Kenny couldn't stand. But he sang away, sitting down, with a hymnal in his lap. And then when it came time for the second hymn, the fellowship hymn, we sang "His Eye is on the Sparrow." I noticed that Ken still couldn't stand up to sing. The pianist was playing and the whole congregation had risen. And only Ken remained seated, holding the hymnal in his lap. And Renola watched him rather skeptically for a moment. And then her face began to melt and contort like his. And she went to his side and bent down to lift him up, lifted up this white rag doll, this scarecrow. She held him next to her and he was draped over and against her like a child. And they sang. And it pierced me. I can't imagine anything else but music that could have brought about this alchemy. How is it that you have a chord here and then another chord there and then your heart breaks open? I don't know the answer. Maybe it's that music is about as physical as it gets. Your essential rhythm is your heartbeat. Your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise. And when you add the human heart to this mix, it somehow lets us meet on a bridge we couldn't get to any other way. Back on board, little by little, the plane grew steadier. And the pilot came back on to say that everything was OK. I was so excited that we were not going to crash and that I might actually get to see Sam again that I started feeling mingle-y. I suddenly wanted to be new best friends with a Christian man. But just when I opened my mouth, the pilot came back on the PA system and asked if there was a doctor on board. The woman behind us who turned out to be a nurse got up and went back to investigate. The Christian man prayed. I tried to rubberneck but I couldn't see a thing. I went back to thinking about Ken in my church, and how on that Sunday Ken, of whom Renola had been so skeptical, was trying to sing. But then he and Renola both began to cry. Tears were pouring down their faces, and their noses were running like rivers. But as she held him up, she suddenly lay her black, weeping face against his feverish white face, put hers right up against his, and let all those spooky fluids mingle with her. He looked like a child in her arms who was singing because tiny children just sing all the time because they haven't made all the separations between speech and music. So he sang and she held him up. And she sang and he held her up. When the nurse sitting beside us returned to row 39, it was with the news that a woman in the back was having a heart attack. A heart attack. I ask you. But there were doctors on hand and the nurse thought the woman was going to be OK. "Good lord," said the Christian man. We looked at each other and sighed. We shook our heads and continued to look at each other. "God," I said, "I just hope the snakes don't get out of the cargo hold." The prim, apocalyptic Christian man smiled. Then he laughed out loud. The Latvian woman started laughing then, although she still had her Walkman on. And while I hate to look like I'm enjoying my own jokes too much, I started laughing too. The three of us sat there in hysterics. And when we were done, the man reached over and patted the back of my hand, smiling gently. The Latvian woman leaned in close to me, into my Soviet air space, and-- --she beamed. I leaned forward so that our foreheads touched for just a second. I thought, I do not know if what happened at church was an honest-to-God little miracle. And I don't know if there has been another one here, the smallest possible sort. But now I felt like I was sitting with my cousins on a plane eight miles up, a plane that was going to make it home. And it made me so happy that I suddenly thought, this is plenty of miracle for me to rest in now. Anne Lamott is the author of Bird by Bird, Operating Instructions, and most recently, Crooked Little Heart. Singing from Renola Garrison and the pianist is Anne Jefferson, both of them from Anne's church. Our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Senior editor Paul Tough. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Engineering by Joe Hunter. Our show was produced for the stage by Kate Boyd and the Solo Mio Festival. Addition music by David Riera. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. It has been such a thrill being here. Back next week with more stores of This American Life. Today's program was first broadcast in 1998. This American Life was distributed by Public Radio International. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Here's an editorial from a newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, The Clarion-Ledger, from October 6, 1957. "If you want an insight into how Negroes in Chicago are trying to establish social equality," it begins, "there are three paragraphs from an authentic report of a meeting of the Negro Improvement Society in that city." And then it quotes from the report. "To those who failed to attend our recent quarterly meeting, I can say you missed a real treat. At the last minute, we were able to get Mayor Daley as speaker. He presented a very interesting talk. The highlight of it was a discussion of the forthcoming campaign 'Take a Negro Boy Home Tonight,' which all agreed was a fine step forward in human relations. It is to be inaugurated soon in the city's high schools. Mayor Daley told us that he had been advised by an outstanding sociologist that the vicious hates and fears rooted in racial prejudice and fascist bigotry could best be combated by closer and more intimate relationships between Negro boys and white girls. Therefore this new campaign will encourage white high school girls to volunteer to take Negro boys to their homes for dinner and date them afterwards. These girls will get higher marks and other privileges for promoting interracial harmony. This will show the white parents that it's all right to have these associations. Now we must all do our part. Make sure that Negro boys invited to the white folks' houses take a bath first and put on a white shirt. Then he will prove that he's a good companion for the white girls and socially acceptable. Please cooperate to make Mayor Daley's campaign a success." And then after that, the editorial continues. "So that's the way they're trying to establish racial equality in Chicago, equality with miscegenation, mixed marriages, wholesale adultery, bastardy, and mongrelization. It is happening in Chicago. It will be tried in Mississippi if the NAACP ever gets a foot in the door." Well, you know, the most interesting thing about this campaign, "Take a Negro Boy Home Tonight," is that it is complete fiction. No such campaign ever existed in Chicago. And if it did, you know, it's unimaginable to any real Chicagoan that the late Mayor Richard J. Daley would have endorsed it. These kinds of articles appeared in Southern newspapers at least as far back as the 1920s. Lies made up by segregationist forces to scare white people about this threat, racial integration. And the lies worked for a while. And then integration came anyway. Which brings us to today's radio program. Today we bring you two stories of people who tried, in one way or another, to bring a Negro boy home for the night. Act One is a story about intermarriage. Act Two is a story about trying to take a kid out of the ghetto and put him into the Ivy League, and why that's so difficult. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. "October 30, 1966. Hello, home. Well, I went to have the tire patched--" This is a typical letter home from college. There's chitchat about a tire that needed to be fixed and senior class pictures, how much they should cost, and should she pay for better ones so her grandmother could have a better one? And then slowly, the woman writing this letter gets to the whole point of the letter. "I went to a good play last night, Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw. A friend of mine was in it, but he wasn't any good. I went with Richard Robinson." Oh! "A track runner, singer, dancer, all-around good looker, religious, and liked by everyone. He's one of the nicest people I know. And he's Negro. I had to tell you. I've never kept any secrets from you and this wasn't going to be one. I hope you're not angry. Even you would like him. No one minded. Bill Crowell was there and real nice to both of us. I don't know why there has to be a racial problem anyway. I had so much better time with him than I do with Bob or David [? Kiechle ?] or Bill Crowell or Roger Heckerman and he treated me like a queen. Sad, isn't it? Please don't think I'm being a rebel. I love you both very much and am proud to be close enough to my parents to tell them everything, whether or not I know they will disagree with me. I'm sure it makes us all better people. I love you, OK? Love, Julia. Well, the narrator of our first story is not actually this woman. It's her son named Rich Robinson, one of the three children she had with the Negro boy after she brought him home for the night and married him. She and her husband got together in that period in the '60s after the passage of the Voting Rights Act and before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And they lived the dream of interracial marriage for 12 years. And then, around the time that our nation started edging away from the goals and ideals of the Civil Rights Movement, they split up. The woman, Julia, has remarried to a white guy named Jan. The man, Richard Sr., remarried to a black woman named Debbie. And each of them returned to their separate, segregated worlds, leaving the kids to figure out what to make of the whole experiment. To what degree did race push them apart, destroy their marriage? And for that matter, to what degree had race brought them together in the first place? Well, a few months ago, their son, Rich Robinson, went to figure all this out. And they were subjects that he had never discussed, incredibly had never discussed, with either of his parents. Here's his story. When I started working on this story, I didn't realize there was a question about my life-- my life today-- at the heart of it. Then one Sunday morning, I got into this discussion with my roommates. And the topic switched from my parents to mixed marriages in the '60s to me. I was saying that I date both white and black women. They were saying I was crazy. OK, Sam? She was half. She was half Venezuelan. That's not-- She was white. She was white all through-- She was white. --and through, my friend. They start listing all the women that they know I've dated, about seven of them. Sam was half Colombian, Julianna, who's Brazilian, Amanda-- Amanda. Can you get any whiter? She's more white than the white people that I know. I don't know. Who else? Pam? Amy? Can't get any whiter than that. Julianna. OK, I'll give you a 10% darkness over there. Why are you so worried about this thing? Are you worried that you're going to end up marrying a white girl? First of all, I'm never going to marry a white girl. Why? Why is that? It's just a bad idea. Why? Because they'll never understand. I hadn't put a lot of thought behind my answer to their question. I just knew in my mind that I had an answer, though I had never said this out loud to anyone. I always just assumed I would never marry a white girl, that those relationships don't work out, probably because I watched my parents' interracial marriage end. I assumed that race had something to do with it, that my blond-haired, blue-eyed, Indiana farm girl mother and my black, Brooklyn-born father were doomed from the start, destined to end up in separate worlds. Now that they're divorced, my parents' integration is completely undone, except for my sisters and me. Though, if you ask my white grandmother, my mother's mother, my sisters and I aren't proof of anything. I said you don't sound like a black person than you aren't black, because I'm white and you're my grandson. So black people should sound a certain way? They do. I don't know why they should or not. Do all white people sound alike? Well, they don't-- there's a few them that may sound a little black or a little like they're from the South, I should say. But I don't know. No no, no. Of course they don't all sound black. But you sure don't. Well, what does black sound like? Well, I want to know why you didn't have many black friends in high school. I never saw you with a black person in high school. Are you about to tell me that you had some black friends in high school? Would that make me black? Well, I just wonder. I'm just getting back at you. You're almost like you're accusing me. So how do you see your grandkids racially, then? White. I really do. Why is that? Because I'm white. I don't-- I can't help it. I just can't see you being black. I just can't. Really. Is it embarrassing to think you have black grandchildren? Not to me, it isn't. I don't think I got any black grandchildren. Not at all. So my grandmother has an issue with me being black, my parents have issues with each other, and I have issues with white girls. But that's today, when everything is already messed up. Let's go back to a simpler time, before it all began. Both my parents went to Indiana University in the '60s. That's where they met. Mom had been valedictorian. She was in college on scholarship. She was going to be a foreign language major, and when she graduated, she was going to be a translator for the UN. Part of the plan was to go to Europe for a semester. When she came back, her roommate had been assigned to someone else, and she had gotten a new roommate, a black girl named Clara. And that was my first experience of really mixing with the black kids, because Clara and I would go to lunch together, or meals together. And I would sit at a table with black kids. And so that was really kind of how it happened. And then I started going to functions with Clara. Clara would go to the black fraternity and sorority parties and I would go. I don't know if I would have done that before I went to Europe. I think going to Europe had something to do with it just because it broadened my way of thinking, perhaps. If I hadn't gone to Europe and been assigned a black roommate, I don't think it would have happened. Well, I used to go watch him practice track a lot, which was over here. You want to go over there? Because that was-- My mom and I drove around the Indiana University campus. She showed me where she and my dad met, where they lived, and where they went to parties and dances at my dad's black fraternity, Omega Psi Phi. You know the other thing that was just kind of hard for me to get used to was that their parties never started until 10:00 at night. At least 10:00, maybe later. And we had dorm curfews then. And I was still a pretty good girl. I didn't stay out all night. So I had to stay out all night with him because I couldn't get back into the dorm. And that was an annoyance to me. I always thought, why can't they start the parties like normal white people do? And this is the other thing. Everybody else would be gone on their dates already. And I would be the only person left in the dorm waiting for this black party to start! Me and the black girls left in the dorm. All the white girls are gone already. My mom was so white to me at that moment. Growing up, I just thought of her as my mother. But as she told me this, she seemed like the whitest white person in the world. I asked my mom how she met my father. She said they met in a cafeteria. She said Clara and her were getting lunch. I remember exactly how this happened. We were standing in line at the cafeteria, and Richard was so many people in front of us around the corner, like we could see him maybe 30 feet away. And I said, "Clare, I want you to introduce me to him. He is gorgeous." And he has something about his legs. Because he used to wear these faded, almost threadbare corduroys that fit him like a glove. And his muscles were so defined from track that his leg muscles would just bulge through these-- [GIGGLES]. And I wanted to meet him because of his legs. This is terrible. It was totally lust. What attracted you to Mom? I think it was the times that we were going through, in terms of Martin Luther King era, in regard to looking toward being open to any race and thinking things were going to change. And then everybody was going to be accepted as anyone else. That's about as far as my father goes when he talks about dating my mom. He doesn't talk about her. He talks about the openness of the '60s and the attitude of the era, as if the '60s had been dating my mom instead of him. My mom also recalls being caught up in the times. I remember very clearly believing that it was going to be a different world, and that-- you know, John F. Kennedy and then Martin Luther King-- that the world was going to change and that we wouldn't live in a racially divided country anymore. And so I had no doubt at that time that my kids would live in a totally different environment than I had grown up in, that there wouldn't be any racial prejudice when you guys were growing up. Neither of my parents was an activist. They weren't trying to change the world. But clearly half the fun of finding each other was the thrill of mixing with someone of the other race. After a year of dating, my mom got pregnant and they decided to get married. The ceremony was small. Both my parents' families disapproved of the marriage. In fact, my father's sister Bernice remembers my white grandmother call my black grandmother on the phone before the wedding to propose that they form an interracial coalition to stop the marriage. Neither grandmother admits to remembering this, but neither came to the wedding either. Oh, this was written the night of our wedding. "Tonight is the night, as I guess Janey has told you. We talked to Pastor Stefan Tuesday evening and decided to arrange things for this weekend since the next two weeks are going to be full of study for final exams and moving, we hope. I'm going to wear that pale blue cocktail dress, size 11, it fits me again, and a white mantilla and black patent shoes. Daddy, I'm sending you my tax statement. Would you rather I fill out the forms? I'm taking Personal Finance next semester which will teach me all about insurance and taxes and things like that. Have you told Grandma and Grandpa yet or Janine and Buddy? Is it all right if I write to the aunts and uncles? Whatever you want me to do is OK, but I'd rather tell everyone now. That's all for now, I guess. I'm so sorry that this is so hard for you to understand and accept. I know it will be an uphill road from now on, but we could do it. Much love, Jul." And after I was married to him, it didn't take me very long to realize that it was going to be a fairly successful marriage because his value system was very close to mine. He's very family oriented. He came from a middle-class upbringing which valued education. And so I didn't think it was very difficult to be married to him, even though I hadn't planned to, because the things that I wanted out of a marriage, he wanted too. And just little simple things, like going to the grocery store and being able to pick out food that I knew he was going to eat. I didn't have to cook chitlins, which-- I guess it was easier than I expected. That's a stupid example. But I didn't have to change anything about the way I already was. Church. He went to church with me every Sunday. He fit right in. When he was in his fraternity, him and his group of fraternity friends, he was very outgoing, funny, loud-- like you are. People laughed when he made jokes. And he could sing really good. And a lot of the fraternity functions, they would have what they called a line. And he was in this little quartet with Arthur-somebody from New York. And John Brooks was in the quartet and somebody else. And they did all these little Temptation numbers where they would dance together. And so most of the time when I was with him, he was fun to be around. But what was lacking, I guess, the jump between that and getting married was that we never had any conversation. I didn't know him at all. Other than the fact that we had sex together all the time, it wasn't like you'd sit down and have long conversations getting to know each other. Because he doesn't talk. You can't get to know somebody who doesn't talk. Bernice and Grandma said they were both surprised when he said he was getting married. And one of the reasons was, "Cause he don't talk!" That's right! It would be the same-- This is the thing about my father, he doesn't talk. Everyone in the family knows this. It's an established fact, an elemental property of my dad. My grandmother says he learned this from her. That's the best way. Don't you think? When you talk so much, you get in trouble. With who? Those think it best you don't talk so much. Oh, yeah? Yeah. The long-term plan after graduation was to move to Brooklyn, back to my dad's hometown. My mother wrote home about it. "Robby is so excited about going back. All his friends are there and I don't think he ever wants to live anywhere else. I want to have a house in the country, but--" God, I can't believe I thought I was getting a house in the country near New York! Jesus! That's awesome. "Say hi--" I'm telling you, Rich! You don't understand. I was so small-towny. Had you been to New York? No. Obviously not. It turns out my dad romanticized some things too. Brooklyn had changed a lot since he grew up. Now there were bums in the park, abandoned stores, and riot gates. At the school where my dad worked, the kids were breaking windows and starting fires and attacking teachers. My dad hated that there was nowhere he felt safe letting us kids run around. And my mom hated sharing a kitchen with the cockroaches. Their apartment was right next to the El, so it was loud and everything-- furniture, clothes, kids-- was always covered in a fine layer of soot. And they were real poor. My father's substitute teaching job barely paid the rent. In Indiana, my parents had fun together. It wasn't like that in New York. Everything was all about working and struggling to survive. Finally, someone threw a brick through their window, breaking glass all over the living room where my sister and I had been playing only a few minutes earlier. Within a week, my parents packed up a U-Haul and drove straight back to Indiana. They lived in Brooklyn only six months. If there's a tragedy in this story, it begins here. As hard as things were in Brooklyn, I think my parents' marriage could have made it there, with my dad living in a world he was used to, surrounded by friends and family, and my mother happily exploring a different world. But Indianapolis ate away at my father. At first, it was just like he wanted. The streets were wide, clean, and empty, with trees on both sides and grass that was always greener. A canal meanders through the city. Indianapolis was the opposite of Brooklyn. It made parenting easy and fun. We flew kites in the summer and built snow forts in the winter. I found an old reel-to-reel tape of my father, my sister, and me in those early days. What did we make yesterday? Snowman. Which one? A Mama or a Daddy snowman? Today, we made a snowman [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Today, I'll go make a Daddy snowman. That's great. We'll make a Daddy snowman today. We spent Christmas that first year at my grandparents' 80-acre farm with my mother's family. Dad saw how beautiful it was there, how perfect for us kids to run around and explore. We went back for Easter and then Thanksgiving and Christmas again and every year for the next eight years. We practically had forgot about my dad's family in Brooklyn. That's how my dad's sister, Bernice, remembers it. And we didn't see Richard again for about 10 years. The only thing we knew is-- we called every now and then. And we knew that he had moved into a trailer and he had bought a house and then he sold that house and he was somewhere else. We just kind of casually kept in contact with him. And that was it. We'd get a Christmas card. And maybe once a year, we'd get a phone call. That was it. He was completely detached from the family. In this new world, no one was black except my father. He never saw his family, he didn't make any friends, he didn't keep in touch with his old college friends. I asked my dad who he hung out with in Indiana when my parents were married. I don't know whether you'd say hang out. There was occasions that you'd go to in terms of gatherings, but I didn't hang out with anyone. Huh. Who hung out with your friends? I had things to do. I was pretty much on my own or pretty much an entity within myself. It was just mainly children, my children. It wasn't many friends at all. I used to think then, I used to think it was very sad. I remember feeling this way. The few times that we went back to New York, he would flip into a whole alter person, second person-- like a schizophrenic personality, a totally different person. We'd go to New York. He'd be hanging out with Poke, laughing. His brother, laughing. His sister, laughing. Drinking a lot, partying, just like I remembered him in college before we got married. It was like all of a sudden, we're back in this fraternity party mode again, real easy about everything, never uptight, never with this, you know the stand that he does with his hands across his chest where he looks like he's holding everything in, being tough? He never stands like that in New York. And so he was just back to his normal self. And then we'd come back to Indiana and he'd go back into this person again, like he was this black man living in this white world kind of thing, that he wasn't himself. Your dad never took me to a black function. Everything we did was in my world. So I don't think that was fair. I didn't marry into that. When I was dating him, the thing I liked about him was that I was living in another culture environment. You have to understand, I'm a foreign language major. I like cultures. It's important to me. So he kind of deprived me, or our marriage I think, of that cultural experience because he didn't contribute to it. My father became someone else in Indiana, a completely different person. And this new face he put on is the face that I recognize and that I picture when I think about him. I can't imagine my father dancing and drinking or laughing with a posse of black friends. My father is someone who never took a sick day from work, who was always home and always responsible. He is a withdrawn and lonely father of three in a white city. No, it didn't pan out that well for myself. No, I didn't have much of anything. I just kind of walked away from all I knew and everything that was a part of me. If there was a personality change, it might have been as a result of that. So how did you survive? Well, I didn't think about. I just worked and raised the children. At the time, that was what was important. I stood face to face in a doorway with my father talking about this for an hour. Neither of us moved. Neither of us sat down. And as we unearthed this, I felt sorry for him and I understood why he had become who he was. It wasn't exactly that race destroyed their marriage, but it added to his isolation and subtracted from his person. And that, in the end, destroyed what they had together. Before I started doing this story, I never talked to my parents about how their marriage failed or what their divorce was supposed to mean for me, expressly about who I choose to marry or not marry. Getting my dad to sit down for one last round of questions about this wasn't easy. You have to talk to me. Do you know what my story is, Dad? Well, I'll talk, but I don't want to talk forever and ever. Well, let me ask you if you know what my-- do you know what I'm doing a story on? I'm doing a story on my parents. You and Mom. I'm trying to use-- I mean, I'm not saying I'm using you as an example in my life, but I'm trying to get a message from you on what I should do, because you never, I don't know. You never say anything. So I'm just trying to figure it out. And here's what I see. You got married to a white woman, in whatever, '67. You guys got divorced, and all of a sudden, you're over here in a completely-- now, you're in an all-black world, right? Well, I work with white teachers. Well, all your friends, your family. You're happy now. And she's over there in an all-white world. I mean, is that a lesson? I do think it's very important not to go into something-- marriage, as you're saying, as you asked me about mixed situation-- if you're very, very young. Well, what about if you're old? If you're older and you've got your structure, you've got your friends, in terms of-- So you don't think it's a mistake at all. I think you can do all right. And where you live is still kind of important, in terms of the state. If a person were in New York or perhaps even California-- and there's probably other places that I don't know about, then it doesn't really matter what. This is not the answer I expected from him. He thinks intermarriage can work so long as you're not isolated from your own race the way he was in Indiana. It's not the answer I wanted. You know what my-- I have this Asian friend. Girlfriend. Well, friend-girl. You know what she said to me about mixed marriages? She said, you can never marry a white girl because she'll never understand. Well, I don't know what there is in back of that thought, in terms of what she's saying, other than if she's saying that they'll never understand where you're coming from in terms of your history, or something like that, if you haven't felt it, tasted it, lived it, I don't know. So some things will probably go beyond explanation. You just know. If you have to start explaining this, it don't work. Impossible. His answer is sort of ambiguous, but the way I take this, and the way I want to take this, is that he agrees with me, that a white woman will never understand. Did Mom ever understand? I don't know if I could say she understood or not understood. But I think that she is a product of her upbringing. And I am a product of my upbringing. And that doesn't mean it's bad, but it is somewhat different. Again, his answer is blurry, but that's just the way he talks. I'm pretty sure what he's saying is that she didn't understand. My mom disagrees completely. When I call her up to talk about this, I tell her that the lesson I take from their divorce is that interracial marriage doesn't work. Would I agree with that? No. Not at all. No, I really don't think that it had anything to do with race. I think it had to do with other things. I always thought that our marriage was like anybody else's marriage. You talk about the same things. You talk about money or your kids or what you're going to do on the weekend or whatever. The color of skin was the only thing that was different. But the falling apart had nothing to do with that, I don't think. At least not from my point of view. It may have from your dad's. But it didn't for me at all. Well, since college, I kind of changed my opinion. I don't think I'm ever going to-- I don't think I'm going to marry white. And one of my friends was telling me, and she kind of gave me the good reason in my head, she said, "You can never marry a white woman because she'll never understand." Well, that's probably true. I'm not going to be upset if you marry a black girl, for sure. I don't care one way or the other, as long as you're happy. These are issues like religion. Everybody has their own personal feeling about it, and you don't have to agree. I ask my mom what I asked my dad, if she thinks a white woman can understand a black man, specifically me. If you are open I think they can. When people get married to each other, they're supposed to be intimate with all of their thoughts. And if you are, then you can understand another person. I don't think the race gets in the way of that. Well, why do you think it makes a difference to me then? Maybe you're more conscious of it because you're neither. It's not true. I don't know. Do you feel uncomfortable in both worlds in a way? Yeah. And I don't really want to lose either part. Well, that's one of those human dilemmas. You just have to work on it for the rest of your life. Here's what I figured out doing this story. I still can't imagine marrying a white woman, but not because I believe race destroyed my parents' marriage. I don't really believe that anymore. but because I realize I'm used to crossing between two worlds, and I want someone who can do that with me. And for better or worse, right or wrong, I just can't imagine having a blond-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend standing next to me at the Black Poets Society. As for my parents, my mom says she barely knows any black people anymore. And with each passing decade, she says, her world has gotten whiter. Meanwhile, my father's going to dances again put on by the Kappas, the same fraternity that threw most of the parties while he was in college. But this time, when Marvin Gaye comes on, the woman he's dancing with is black instead of white. And I can picture him later in the night off in some corner of the room singing "My Girl" in a line with his brothers. Rich Robinson in New York City. The number of interracial marriages in the United States was 1.1 million couples in the 1990 census. That's three times more than in 1970, but still less than 2% of all marriages. Coming up, another person attempts to do what drove fear in the hearts of segregationists not that long ago. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's program, Bring a Negro Boy Home Tonight. And if that seems like a strange title, then you're just going to have to start listening to these shows from the beginning. The show is stories of people defying some of the oldest codes of behavior in our country by mixing races. Act One of our show was about intermarriage. Act Two is about economic integration, about trying to make the leap from one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country to where our nation's richest people live. Cedric Jennings went to Ballou High School in a poor, black neighborhood in Southeast Washington. It was the kind of school where honor students do not like it to be known that they're honor students. There aren't many of them, and when they spot their names posted on the big honor roll bulletin board by the main office, they would rush, some of them, to ask to be taken off. When administrators wanted to hold an assembly to give out academic awards, they would keep the purpose of the assembly secret even from the teachers because the teachers would then leak the information to the honor students who would then simply not show up. Well, although I was really proud of my accomplishments, I didn't want to actually see my peers respond to me in a negative way so I just avoided the assembly. Honor students at his high school were teased. They were called whitey. They were ostracized. They were threatened with physical violence. As an honor student, Cedric was constantly taunted. He ate lunch alone in an empty classroom. He went to church, never socialized with other kids, fearing it would make him lose focus. When a person says that they want to be successful, they have to realize that there will be opposition. And despite what opposition says, when someone says you can't, I had this defiant side of myself. When I said, oh, I can't? No, I think I can. Cedric bet everything in his life as a teenager on the hope that he would get a scholarship to a top college. Reporter Ron Suskind started following him around when Cedric was just 16. He stayed with him for two and a half years, published stories about him in The Wall Street Journal which won a Pulitzer Prize. Cedric's first serious encounter with the elite universities that he wanted to enter came after his junior year in that summer, a summer program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a program designed to attract minority students to MIT. The program was called MITES, M-I-T-E-S, the Minority Introduction To Engineering and Science, 50-some kids who supposedly came from neighborhoods like Cedric's. Making it into the program was Cedric's dream. It was the first foothold in this new world he was trying to enter into. But when classes began, Cedric found that he could barely keep up. And even worse, he was just as isolated at MIT as he'd been back at Ballou. Calculus, physics, chemistry were are filled with kids from middle-class backgrounds, good suburban schools, private schools. Some of them had seen this material before back home. It was really a disappointment. And it sort of made me feel inadequate during the process, when I'm taking all the notes and they're just nodding their heads like, oh, yeah. OK. Oh, yeah. That one. Seen that one. Yeah, I've heard that before. And we should say that at your high school back in Washington, in the public school, you were in the most advanced classes they offered. Right. And even in the most advanced classes they offered, I had done above and beyond. So I thought that that would be enough to prepare me. And I guess it wasn't. There's this moment in this part of the story which is just completely heartbreaking to read where you get back your first test and you get a 4 out of 26 in your physics class. So bad. And a 68 out of 104 in calculus. And you're a student who's used to getting all A's, ends up being the star of every class. Well, it was a learning experience. It was disappointing, first of all. Physics was just ridiculous. I thought I was just going to go crazy. And I thought I was just going to go crazy. In physics, 4 out of 26. That is just ridiculous. There was nothing that anyone could say to make me feel better about that. Ron, let me ask you to talk a little bit about why the MIT program was set up in this way. At one point, you met with Bill Ramsey, the 68-year-old African American who heads this program to get minorities into MIT. And he talked to you about why so many suburban kids were in the program and so few city kids. Ramsey was a great guy who had been an MIT grad in 1951, when there were almost no blacks at MIT. And he was hopeful for better. He wanted what I think is the bigger and, in some ways, more important thing to occur in this MIT program when he took it over seven or eight years before Cedric got there. He wanted kids like Cedric, 50 kids like Cedric instead of one or two. And what he realized early on is that it would run into all manner of dilemmas that go right to the core of some of the problems with the notion of Affirmative Action. MIT sponsors the program. MIT wants as many of these kids as possible to eventually end up in their freshman class to make that freshman class look like a rainbow, as they say. And as people might mention, you can make the Ivy League, or any great college, look like a rainbow nowadays without ever having to go to the ghetto. You don't have to go there. There are plenty of middle and upper-middle-class black and Latino kids to fill those programs, kids who will eventually succeed at a top university. It's the other kids, kids like Cedric, for whom the distance is so vast to travel that for them, the failure rate is untenable for a place like MIT. Just reading your account of it, it seems like part of his concern too was that kids would come in without any preparation, or without enough preparation, to go as fast as MIT would want them to go. And then MIT had no infrastructure to bring them up to speed. And so it was just setting them up for failure. Absolutely. And they often have very big dreams, and they often come pushed forward by a whole community for whom they're the one who's going to make it. And that's a pretty heavy burden to carry to a place like MIT and then have all of that come crashing down on their head. Look, as Ramsey said, he said, look, the suicide rates up here are high enough as they are. So Cedric, at the end of your time with MIT, you're informed that you weren't ready for MIT just yet. And you headed back to DC and put in a lot more work and a lot more effort. And after you graduated from high school, you end up at an Ivy League school, Brown University. And let me ask you to describe, first of all, who your roommate was and what he was like. What was his background? My roommate's name was Robert and he was from Marblehead, Massachusetts. And he was a white guy. He was cool. I think both his parents were doctors. He went to private school. He went to a private school. What else? He had a sister that went to Harvard. But I think for the most part, we did get along. And I think that because we came from different backgrounds, that's where a little bit of the conflict came in. I think he came from a home where I think his mom pretty much waited on him hand and foot. And I came from a home where I was pretty much independent. I had to do things for myself, cook for myself, was for myself, those sorts of things, clean up behind myself. And one of the problems that we had was that he was at times, we were both messy at times, especially with me, especially when there was a lot of work. But for the most part, there were times when he would get really, really, really messy and outrageous and just be funky, so to speak. This reminded me of when I've been in Chicago high schools, how you'll see the white kids, the way they'll keep their clothes is they'll just dress like whatever and they'll look kind of bummy. Whereas the black kids, again, it's like everything always has to be neat and perfect. And even your clothes have to be just so perfect all the time. It's like they're from two different countries. This is true, but it's one thing if your clothes just look bad and then if your body just stinks. That's just a whole nother thing. And I think that sometimes he just was funky, man. And that's just not something that I wanted to put up with. And I wasn't willing to put up with that. There just was not much communication between us. Ira, they just had utterly distinct ways of doing everything. Cedric's general heightened hygiene of having grown up in often squalid places, where Cedric was cleaning all the time. Cedric was always careful about how he looked and that he himself and his person was very clean. It was the opposite from Rob who never worried. This was just one of 1,000 things like that that immediately gripped the two of them in the room until the point where they almost came to blows. And Cedric, there were times that you were really isolated there. Yeah, at Brown? Yeah. I think especially in the social arena. I grew up in church and everything. And just putting myself out there and getting involved, it went against some of what I was taught from church. Can I ask, when's the first time you actually drank? I've never drank. You still have never had a beer at college? No. Now, no. But the thing, Ira, if you go into Cedric's church and you go into Cedric's environment, the only reason Cedric has got where he got is because he didn't taste of any of the plates at the buffet table of adolescent life in Southeast. Most of those plates are poisoned. Ron, let me ask you to read from page 197 in your book. At one point, you talk about just this clash of cultures. OK. "Clearly, some East Andrews residents are spending serious time and energy having fun. Despite Brown's self consciousness about each student's individuality, the four preferred pastimes are the same here as they are at almost every other college-- drink beer, smoke pot, dance to deafening music until you drop, and on the rare occasion, get naked with some other warm body. Possibly the best explanation why Cedric Jennings is in Brown's class of 1999 is that he managed to steer clear of the buffet table of adolescent experimentation, believing rightly, it turns out, that in his neighborhood, most of those dishes were poisoned. This was an extraordinary feat, considering how peer pressure at Ballou was backed up by violence. And the almost irresistible urge for teenagers to salve deep despair with sex, drugs, and music. Cedric knows all this, just as he knows his resistance was made possible back when by his mother's fierce code. But eventually, something else took root. Cedric, needing to justify his monkish routine in high school night after night, developed a genuine belief that sacrifice, hard work, and extremely clean living would lead to rewards, including a scholarship to a top college. But now that he's made it, the guideposts are gone. And all around him, smart kids are getting high, getting drunk, and screwing. Even the real smart ones, kids who can eat Cedric's lunch in almost any subject. Sitting alone on his bed one Saturday night, there's a knock on the door, and a few kids from down the hall crowd in, rosy with anticipation of a night of some drinking, an off-campus party one of them has heard about, and then, who knows, maybe some late-night pizza. 'Hey Cedric, come on,' one of them says. 'Naw,' Cedric says, declining nicely, trying to show he appreciates their asking. 'I just don't do that kind of stuff.' And everyone nods meaningfully, though Cedric can tell they don't really understand. In a moment, they're gone. Just as well, he thinks, half-meaning it. I can't change now." Cedric, in your view, do you feel like the biggest difference between yourself and the people who you were meeting at Brown, do you think it was racial, or do you think it had more to do with class? I think it had more to do with class. I mean, obviously race. I was among a few minorities. But obviously class. Explain that more. Even within a minority community, most of my peers in the minority community had gone to private schools. They were pretty much from middle-class, upper-class homes. Mothers and fathers, who were both college educated in a lot of cases, were both living at home with them. It was just totally the opposite of where I had come from. And in a lot of ways, I just felt isolated all over again, like being at MIT. Did you find in any way it was easier to be close to black kids from middle-class homes than it was to be close to white kids from middle-class homes? Yeah. There actually was a difference? Yeah. We had more in common. We had more in common. We were working toward the same thing, pretty much. It's interesting thinking about this in terms of just the history of integration. Putting together this show, I was talking to one of my producers, and we were talking about how towards the end of Dr. King's life, one of the things that he looked at and started to think about was the question of OK, now under the law, blacks can go anywhere. But moving towards economic integration, moving people out of poor neighborhoods and up into the middle class seems so much more difficult. And reading the account of you at Brown trying to make that class jump just reiterates how hard it is. It's extremely hard. It's hard to see with my mother and everything. At first, I must admit I was a little ashamed of her coming to Brown because I knew that she was not like any of the other parents in terms of what we had. I mean, when I look back on it, I actually was ashamed because I knew that the other parents, they had a lot of advantages and they had things in life. And a lot of them had it easy. They got it easy. And my mother, we come from welfare. She's on welfare. She had dropped out of high school and gotten pregnant at an early age. And she got a GED. She wasn't college educated. So sometimes I was ashamed of the fact that my mother wasn't on the same level as the other parents. Did you ever talk to her about that? No. Because I've been ashamed to admit that to her. For a long time, I had been in denial about that. But I'm not ashamed of her anymore. I've grown out of that. I'm proud of her, as a matter of fact. I'm proud of her. Well, yeah. I mean, look how far, look how much somebody had to push to make that happen. That counts more than a college degree. When you look at your situation now, you're finishing your junior year right now-- Oh, it's finished. It's finished. OK. Sorry. I'm a senior, man. I'm a senior. Do you still feel like you're between worlds? Oh, yeah. All the time. All the time. In one setting, the community where I come from, it's about not become white. And then at Brown, it's like not becoming-- yeah, it's the same thing, sort of. Not becoming white, remaining black in both worlds. Except it's sort of-- But at Brown, it's like being black but in their world. Being black but in their world. Yeah. Do you feel like you're in this kind of no man's land? Sometimes. Sometimes. Like when? This is difficult. It's hard. I've never really given it a lot of thought. I don't know. I get a lot of grief when I come home, especially from people in my church, people in my community, about going off to this white man's land. And it's just, you shouldn't do it, they're going to eat you alive. I mean, I still get that sometimes. And it does isolate me at times. And yeah, sometimes I do, I feel alone. I guess that's what you asked me. Do I feel alone, isolated in terms of my decision of going to Brown, venturing out? Yeah, I do. I do feel alone. Do you feel less alone, though it sounds like you're feeling more alone when you go back home to Southeast Washington? Do you feel less alone now when you're up at Brown? And in that world? I do. Because I've grown more comfortable with Brown. In terms of feeling at ease in the new world that you have moved into, if we would consider somebody like your roommate Rob, who kind of grew up in that world, as being completely at ease, he's 100% at ease, where would you say your percentage is now? 80%. What's the 20% that still isn't there? I still have a lot of growing up to do. I've come from Ballou High School, which is considered one of the worst high schools in DC. I've gone off to one of the best universities in the country. And I'm still not happy. When you say you're not happy, you mean you're not happy in a day-to-day way, or you're not happy with how far you've come? A combination of both. I mean, I guess I could imagine the day-to-day part of it because it just seem like it's so much work-- It is. --to keep things going. This is really difficult for me to talk about. So you've got to bear with me here. Plus I haven't given this much thought. Success is a trip. Because we push people, especially blacks, to be successful, minorities to be successful. And then once they get there, and once we get there, for some reason, we pull each other back. You're thinking specifically about things that are happening now that you're back home for the summer? Yeah. My biggest problems are at home. My biggest worries are at home. All these people who just bombard me with what they-- for some people, me going to Brown is like I've given up, or turned my back to the fact that I'm black, which is totally not the case. And this is people who you respect saying this to you. People in your church. People that I respected. People that I thought were really behind me. That's the toughest part. And that's what's hard. That's what I'm trying to deal with. Success is almost as worse as failure. Ron Suskind's great, great book about Cedric Jennings is called A Hope in the Unseen. You know, before our interview ended, I told Cedric about the story in the first half of today's show, about a black who said that he would date but never marry a white woman. That's interesting because I think the same way. Somebody asked me, first they asked me, would you marry a white woman? And I said no. And they said, well, would you date a white woman? And I said, yeah, I would date a white woman. The way the other guy on the show explains it, there's a part of him which doesn't believe that a white woman could completely understand him. True, I guess. But I don't know. When two people bond in love, I think that they definitely understand things about each other, like more than what he's giving them credit for. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder. Senior editor Paul Tough. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett and birthday girl Soyini Davenport. If you want to buy a cassette of this program, call us at WBEZ here in Chicago, the phone number 312-832-3380. 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] Or you know, you can listen to nearly any of our action-packed programs for free on the internet at our website www.thislife.org. That's "this life," one word, no space. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who makes us love him by strutting around all day in his-- --faded, almost threadbare corduroys that fit him like a glove. Yes, indeed. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And for this week's program, for Father's Day, everybody on our staff sat around and we talked about what it is that one really wants to hear on Father's Day, or near Father's Day. And Nancy, one of the producers on the show, said, what you really want to hear is parents and kids actually having an honest moment together. Talking about whatever. And so we tried it. We asked this 18-year-old named Chana Wiliford from Waco, Texas, and her father, if they would be willing to have a conversation on tape in which each of them got to ask the other all the questions they had never asked before. And it's interesting what happens when you do that. One of the first things I wanted to start with, Dad, was like when you and mom got together. For example, I know that-- I think, anyway-- you guys met in a bar. And then like two weeks later, you were married. Yeah. It was a very short romance. You know, what made you guys get married so quickly? Yeah, it was kind of a whirlwind thing, you know? I know in my-- from my side of it-- I was looking for somebody. I needed someone in my life. And I guess, you know, she basically was in the same situation. So we both just were looking for somebody, and we ended up hooking up. Yeah. All through this conversation, Chana goes back and forth between being her father's daughter, his child, and being his peer. And what's so amazing to listen to, is that. That is the end of the long process of parenting. A process that takes decades. The biggest project most of us ever embark upon. This is how you know it all worked out OK, when you can talk to your kid as an equal. Well, what was the family reaction? I know Nana couldn't have been entirely pleased. I don't know, you know. I really don't know. You know, I never really asked anybody. Of course, you know, I was in the Marine Corp., and I didn't really care what anybody thought about anything. Well, yeah, you were how-- you were how old? Like 25 at the time, right? 25. Yeah. I was 25. And I had always told myself, you know, that I was going to live hard and party till I got to be 25, and then I was going to get married. So you stuck with it. Sure enough, that's the way it ended up. Today on our program, what happens when fathers and kids sit down and talk-- actually talk-- and what happens when they don't. It's kind of an amazing little show today. We have four acts. Act One, Pandora's Box, in which Chana and her dad, as we said, ask each other all the unasked questions they've stored up over the years. Act Two, Mack Daddies. In the building in which 18-year-old Sanantonio Brooks lives, in the Chicago public housing projects, most of the fathers are under 25 years old, and they became fathers as teenagers. He talks to some of his friends about whether they are better fathers than their own fathers were. Act Three, Bond, Dammit, Bond, in which a new dad, writer Dan Savage, laments how long it is taking him to truly bond with his baby boy. Act Four, Age of Enchantment. Writer Lawrence Weschler and his eleven-year-old daughter, Sara, tell a true story of parental love, betrayal, fiction, deception, and more love, that happened to the two of them. Stay with us. Act One, Pandora's Box. So I already explained the premise for Chana's taped conversation with her dad. A few quick words about them before we start. Chana grew up in Waco. But unlike most of the people who she knows there, Chana left Texas, went to college in Philadelphia, where she just finished her freshman year at Temple. Her dad works at the phone company installing big switching systems, stuff like that. He and her mom have been married and divorced and remarried to each other three times. One of my original questions, when first asked to interview you, basically was-- the first thing that just popped into my head, that I've never asked, that every kid wants to know, is where was I conceived? Where were you conceived? If you even remember. Yeah, I think I remember. If I remember correct, I believe it was out at Lake Athens. Lake Athens. Yeah. It was late, you know, one or two in the morning, whatever. And I [UNINTELLIGIBLE] in that old maroon pickup truck, if you remember that. I had like a blanket or something because we ended up in the bed of the truck. And that's-- Maybe that was the wrong question to ask. Well-- And as far as, like, me growing up, and things like that, you know, just-- I don't know. You know, going which way I want to go now. How has that been for you to watch me? You know, kind of like not be like everybody else where I grew up? Well, truthfully, I'm glad. You know? And there's some of it, you know, that has scared me. I mean, just the fact that you're in Philadelphia still scares me. Because I worry about you, and I worry about, you know-- Well, of course. --something happening to you, and all that kind of stuff. But I don't know. I enjoy watching you, you know? I mean, it's-- I don't know. There's nothing in this world that's ever pleased me more than you. You're great, you know? I just can't tell you. I just couldn't be prouder. Well, kind of back to the history thing. You know, of course, you guys got divorced last May, I guess. I don't even really remember. And then you got remarried in what? December? Yeah, I believe that's right. Yeah, I think. So that's got to seem a little strange to every-- well, to yourself, too, I'm sure. But it definitely seems strange to everyone around you. I can assure that. Well, it is. It definitely is. And even to me, you know? I don't know how else to look at it, Chana. I've thought about it over and over and over. All's I know is I love her. And I can't live with her and I can't live without her. You know, that old saying. I don't know. I'm just not sure. You know, what the problem is or what the-- even myself, I can't figure it out. At this point, I can't swear it won't happen again. If it does, it's not going to be my fault. Well, do you think that the last time was your fault? Yeah, I guess, in a way it was. Because, you know, I got in trouble again. My drinking thing. And I don't know that the divorce was actually my fault. Because I told her, we should just slow down and get a look at the big picture, it's not that bad. But she was determined to make her point. And so she did what she did. She filed for divorce. We did the divorce. And then I guess she did realize it wasn't that bad. And so we ended up getting back together. Well, you know, on my end of the deal, I was just kind of confused, you know? I don't know. I think I was, not happy, but more relieved, at the fact that you guys were splitting up. Just because of all the problems that I've seen over the years. And then it just kind of-- I don't know. I was disappointed. Maybe just with the situation in general, kind of with you. Yeah, I know you were. But I've got to be happy, too. Or at least whatever I think's happy. Well, I'm not going to say I didn't want you to be happy. But you know, I kind of thought that maybe you could finally find your happiness somewhere else. You know what I mean? Yeah, but I don't know that-- that wasn't working out. I just couldn't-- I don't know. It's weird, you know, when you're married for that long to be not married. And I really didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to go about it. And I feel a lot more comfortable, even if I'm not totally happy, I feel safe when I'm married, you know what I mean? And, you know, it always goes back to the fact that I love the girl. I don't know what else. I don't know. I just worry about you, you know what I mean? Really? Yeah. I want to make sure that you're happy, for the most part. Oh, I'm going to get happy. You know, I mean, one way or the other, I'm going to get happy. I've got the biggest thing there is, right there in you. And Wes, and Leah, and these grandkids, you know? That's my reward in life. Y'all are. You know? Y'all are it. That's what dads do. That's what I do, anyway. Bob Wiliford and his daughter, Chana. When it came time for him to ask his questions of her during their interview, there was this little technical problem in the taping. Maybe you noticed the buzzing all through their interview on the tape. Anyway, his voice was only recorded over the phone line to the studio where Chana was sitting in Philadelphia. And he basically just had one question for Chana. Of course, you know, a dad's-- one of dad's main concerns is your love life. Your situation with sex and how that situation is-- I don't know how to put it-- coming along, I guess. Is it a problem or are you just handling it? No, it's not a problem. Of course, I'm sure you can just kind of-- My major concern is you're being safe. Yeah. Well, definitely. Act Two, Mack Daddies. Sanantonio Brooks is 18, lives in the public housing projects here in Chicago. 4120 South Prairie. There's a lot of young fathers in the building. So they don't really celebrate Father's Day like other people celebrate Father's Day, because they're young fathers. Like, what happened last year? I know a lot of fathers got together. They got a lot of beer. They smoke weed, so they all gathered around in one room, and they was just sitting there chilling. Just talked about, you know what I'm saying, things that they did in their childhood. Like that, what was going on around the building in the day, what they going to be doing all later in the future, and stuff like that. This is a part of our program about dads who have not gotten quite so close with their own children. Two thirds of African-American children are raised in single parent families, usually by their mothers or grandmothers. Sanantonio did a story for our program a year ago. And when Father's Day was coming up this year, he told us that he'd like to interview some of the young fathers in his building. Guys his age and just a little older. Guys he's known since he was a kid. He wanted to talk to them about their relationships with their kids and their relationship with their own fathers. Some guys, hearing this, tried to avoid him. Some people did more than avoid. They literally dodged me. And why do you think that is? I can't say for sure. It was like, a lot of them just didn't want to really be interviewed about Father's Day. Hold up [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. You ain't got to give your name. A lot of people, they didn't want the environment that I have for them. So I had to catch them at their time. What did you think when you first found out that you was having kids? First I wanted to go crazy. Then at first-- then after that, when I seen them coming into the world, I changed. I enjoyed it. You enjoyed it? Mm-hmm. You know how people, when they young and they ain't got no kids, they want to party all the time. Pfft. When you get kids, partying stops. The money-- the little money you do have, got to go towards them kids. Kids deserve everything you can possibly give them. Love, everything. How often do you see your kids? Every weekend. How often do you buy your kids something? Whenever I get some money. Some of them, they straight with their kids, they take care of their kids. Then the other ones, they-- they don't even-- it's like they claim their kids but they don't do nothing for them. It's like they play the father role every now and then. Do they give money to the mom? Nuh-uh. It depends. Now, because most of them, they not working. So they downstairs, serving drugs or whatever. And many times-- mostly they ain't making too much money, you know what I'm saying? To take care of themselves. So most of them ain't really looking out for their kids. Yeah, you should probably explain that. I think most people around the country, when they think of people selling drugs, they think of what they've seen in the movies and that they're making a ton of money. Nope, not all of them. Most of them's just down [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And when they be down there, they just make-- barely make enough to eat from day to day. Just down there hustling. So you talked to those five guys, and what did most of them feel about their fathers? Most of them, I'd say, they had feelings for their fathers, but it wasn't too deep. Because they felt that their father was not around. So they really had a lot of regrets and then a lot of hostility built up inside. Was your father around when you were coming up? No, he wasn't. My father was gone. Just put it like that, you know what I'm saying. Bad childhood. So I didn't basically see my father but maybe three times in my life. So how did you feel about that? Actually, you want to know the truth? I'm a devil in disguise. So it's like I had to see it in person, see him in person, for me to react on that. But at the same time, my feelings now, I'd probably kill him. Everybody I grew up with, it's like their fathers either left at an early age or they passed away, or something like that. Basically, their fathers dropped in and out of their lives just like mine did. The thing I was going to ask is, I mean, you know, their fathers drop in and out of their lives, but now they're doing that to their kids. Right. It's a cycle that-- everybody in our building, they-- they pay-- I see it. They pass it on from generation to generation. It just stays in the building. It's like, they don't know how to take those steps to change it. How do you feel about your father? I can't explain. My father left and he hasn't been back since. What do you think your kids are going to think of you? My kid sees me and my kid smiles all the time, every time my kid sees me. Would you say you played a positive role in your child's life? Yes. Are there any father figures in your life left? No. What did you think when you first heard you were going to have a baby? Man, it was wow. But at the same time, I was bogus. Because I could have been there when he was born. I ain't going to trip though. How often would you say that you see your kid? When I get a chance. I got to say that. When I get a chance. But at the same time, I know you're well taken care of. How often do you buy your son something? As often as I can. That's the same-- that's just like asking the same question. I can't buy him nothing unless I'm around him. I'm going to ship it in the mail? I'm not rolling like that. So when I get a chance to, that's when I do what I can. Because the little things I do do, at least I did it. And I can't say nobody made me do this, because my father wasn't there for me, when I was growing up. So therefore, the little things I do, I do appreciate, and he do-- Jeremy do too. How do you feel as a father? I feel great. What do you think your kids are going to think of you? Daddy did the best that he can. And he's going to keep on doing the best he can. It's interesting, because most of the guys you talked to felt like-- even though most them only would see their kids like once a week, or maybe twice a week-- they all felt like they were doing a decent job, or doing a better job than their fathers did. What do you think of that? I think, compared to how their fathers treat them, I feel that they're doing pretty good for themselves if they're seeing them two times a week, if they only seen their father once, twice a year. In a way, it just goes to show you just how far things have gone. That once or twice a week would seem like a lot. Yes. Well, to them it does seem like a lot because-- it's hard to explain. In my situation, if my father came to see me two or three times in a week, I think it would have made a difference. So I think, basically, they're making a difference in their kids life. How often have you seen your father? How often do I see my father? I seen my father-- the last time I seen him-- it's been, I'd say, three years ago. Then before that, it'd been at least two. So he'll pop in like every two, three years. What kind of difference would it make if you saw him two or three times a week? It probably would have made a lot of difference. I know I probably wouldn't have growed up the way I growed up now. There's just a lot of things, but I really can't say for sure. What do you think your kids are going to grow up thinking of you? Well, my son often tell me I'm a surv-- daddy, you're a survivor, ain't you? Yeah, I'm a survivor. Because I've been out here too long. You know what I'm saying? I don't want to work, do things like that. So only thing they basically can say is I was out here bogus, but I also was a survivor. I did what I could for him, as well as for anybody else. But I basically had to live for myself. Because that's all I got, actually is self. You know, it's interesting when you talk about your father. You don't sound angry. You sound more sad than angry. It is, like, you really can't be angry with them because you know them. And then you still love then. But you're disappointed in the way that he left you. And in some ways, you probably know why he left, but then you want to get the understanding out of his mouth, why he left. And that's something that, my father, he hasn't done yet. I asked him-- he knows I know why he left, but he-- it's like he won't explain why he can't come into my life now, even though I'm getting older. So, it's still-- I'm upset, and then in a way I'm mad, but mostly upset. Because right about now, I feel that if he really wanted to be in my life, he would've-- it's coming down to graduation. He would have asked me, was I graduating? What it is I'm doing? He ain't even call for that. So I'm not letting none of that bother me or worry me. You're graduating like this week? Yes. So for you to call him, it's like-- it's a matter of pride. Yeah. As a matter of fact, that's what it is. Because I feel that if I make-- if I call up there-- for me, it will seem like I'm making the first move. And I feel I shouldn't have to. Because that's my father and I'm the kid. You know what I'm saying? Like he won't reach out to me, so why should I reach out to somebody that doesn't want to reach out to me? Do you think these guys just forget how it feels? Probably. You see, I had to see myself as a daddy. A father is one who is able to take care of their child. I'm not there yet. So I don't recognize myself as a father. Since that interview and that story, Sanantonio Brooks graduated from high school here in Chicago. His father wasn't there. Act Three, Bond, Dammit, Bond. Now another case study of a dad who is waiting to feel closer to his kid. Dan Savage has done a number of stories for our program. He writes the syndicated sex advice column, Savage Love. He and his boyfriend Terry spent months and months trying to adopt, and finally did adopt a baby boy just recently, from a teenage mom named Jessica. And now Dan is waiting to feel like the dad that he wants to be. When I first held the baby, 20 minutes after he was born, I was surprised that I didn't feel an instantaneous rush of anything. The baby was doing his part. He was tiny, he was cute, his eyes were open. But I couldn't hold up my end of the deal, the dad end. When I looked at him, no instant this-is-my-son bonding took place. Bond, I said to myself. Bond, dammit, bond. What was wrong with me? Why was I having to will myself to feel something I assumed would happen on its own, like magic? I had to bond. In two days, my boyfriend Terry and I would be taking this baby home. We were going to be dads. This moment has been coming for two years. We'd been to seminars, read stacks of books, written stacks of progressively larger checks. Had social workers tramping in and out of our house, and opened our bank accounts, police records, and skulls for inspection by the adoption agency. We'd been talking about this moment, the moment we would become dads, for a long time. For so long, in fact, that it had come to seem like just so much talk, one big abstraction. Maybe I was just a little numb when the baby was finally handed to me. Later that night, the four of us-- me, Terry, Jessica, and the baby-- were hanging out in Jessica's room. I had the honor of changing the first poopy diaper, filled with what looked like Hershey's syrup. And pretty soon I was starting to feel something. Not quite a dad feeling yet, but something more than babysitter. But the feelings were tenuous and I didn't focus on them for fear of squelching them. Terry, on the other hand, says there was nothing tenuous about his feelings, even right from the start. So when did you first feel a bond? When we went up to the birthing suites at the hospital, you know, hours after he was born. And watched him get all his reflex exams and his first bath. It was like, you know, I felt attached to him. I felt like watching him every moment because this was our-- this was it. This was the one. You know, he was so pretty and he was so beautiful. He was just this like perfect little baby boy that had been put in our lives. You want to hear the horsey song? Giddyup, giddyup, giddyup-- Here's how bonded Terry is to the baby. He's made up a burping song so involved that it not only has two choruses, but a bridge and a key change. We love you so when you ride out yonder on our little knee. We love you so when you ride out yonder and you go bleh, whee. Little boy, little boy, little boy, DJ. Little boy, little boy, little boy, horsey. Little boy, little boy, little boy, little boy. Did you write that yourself? I did. That's an original. With most biological parents, the bond is instantaneous. Baby books reassure biological parents who don't feel an instant bond not to worry, the bond will come. So there must be some who don't feel it right away. But doing an adoption, we had some options. And when and how to bond, when to decide that we were officially fathers, was among them. Driving to the hospital that day, we knew we could walk away from this baby at any point and for any reason before we signed the placement papers. Club feet, cleft palate, bad hair, we wouldn't have to give a reason. We didn't talk about it, but this was rattling around in some corner of our brains. It's taboo in some adoption circles to acknowledge these things. We're supposed to toe the line and say that adopting a baby is just like having one of our own. That our feelings for the baby, from the moment we first laid eyes on him, were no different than if the kid had been our own biological child. But it is different, fundamentally different. Perhaps I should stop here and acknowledge something that some of you may be thinking as you sit listening to me talk. For some of you, I am your worst nightmare. A homosexual sex writer and sometime drag queen, who, with his boy-toy boyfriend, has adopted a vulnerable little baby boy. You fear we intend to put him in leather diapers, hang a mirrored ball over his crib, teach him to dance to YMCA, and slowly draw him into our perverted lifestyle. Or maybe you think worse. When we were still doing our paperwork, straight friends would ask if I was excited about becoming a dad. I would say, yes, Terry's gotten so loose. And this I know is the fear. The fear that's led two states to outlaw gay men and lesbians adopting children, and made it nearly impossible in most other states, even if it is technically legal. Yet if I wanted to have sex with children, which I don't, there are easier, less expensive, and less emotionally taxing ways to arrange for that. I could join the priesthood or coach Little League or-- well, I'm going to stop taking these cheap shots in the spirit of being a role model. I am a dad now, you know? At least officially. What's funny about the whole evil, disco dancin', gay, baby-raping nightmare is that the truth of why gay men want to be dads is actually so much more disturbing. When I fantasized about becoming a dad, I didn't picture myself having sex with my children. And even now, though I don't quite feel like a dad yet, I'd cut the heart out of anyone who so much as laid an ill-intentioned finger on our kid. No, in my dad fantasies, I saw myself going to work, making money, coming home to Terry and the kid. I'd help with the homework, take the kid to ball games, McDonald's, and camping. My dad fantasies are straight-- straight out of the '50s-- with Terry staying at home and taking care of the kid. Just like a '50s mom. I do see that. And I don't mind it. I love staying home with him. He's so wonderful. He's so great. And he's so much fun to stay home with and play with and watch smile all day. And now that he's beginning to coo and make all sorts of funny sounds, it's just great. People ask Terry how it's different to have the baby and he answers, now I have two people to pick up after. That's our family. I go out and make the donuts. Terry stays at home and picks up after us. We're taping every episode of the Teletubbies. We don't have sex anymore. We're typical American parents. When Terry imagines what it'll be like when the kid is five, he sounds an awful lot like June Cleaver. Making cookies and going to PTA meetings and volunteering for being a chaperone, going to the zoo. Being a kindergarten volunteer. Helping kids cut and paste and keep things out of their mouths. But Terry doesn't see this as being the mom. This is being a dad like his dad was. Well, in my family, I mean, my dad did everything. My dad cooked, he cleaned. He made pies in the summer. He built houses. He reroofed garages. But he also helped with homework. And I feel like I'm doing the same amount of work my father would have done. I kind of feel like I'm sort of following in the footsteps of my own father. Terry's following the footsteps of his father and I'm following in the footsteps of mine. Not completely connected to the kid, not around as much, sometimes leaving before he wakes up in the morning and getting home after he is already asleep at night. Doing all the mom things, Terry feels like a father already. I'm doing all the dad things, and I don't feel like a father yet. But I think it's coming. When rude people ask adoptive couples who the real parents are, we're supposed to say that the real parents are the people there in the middle of the night, the people the kid comes to when he needs something. And most importantly, the real parents-- the real dad, in this case-- is the person the kid calls dad. The kid turned three months old just before Father's Day. He isn't calling us anything yet, but he will. Soon he'll understand that he has parents, two dads, and he'll come to me and he'll call me dad. And that's when I think I'll finally feel like a father. I hope. Writer Dan Savage in Seattle. Coming up, a father, a daughter, a lie that lasted half a year. Four inch high human beings and how a child can solve parenting problems when parents cannot figure them out on their own. That's all in a minute from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle that theme. Today's program, for Father's Day, we bring you stories about fathers who do not get close to their kids, and about fathers who do, as we listen to them talk with the kids. Lawrence Weschler is an author and journalist, a writer at The New Yorker magazine. And this story is about an odd sort of breach of trust between father and child. A breach of trust done without meaning to and what happened next. He and his 11-year-old daughter, Sara, went into a radio studio in New York City to tell us the story. It begins simply enough, when she was little and he would read to her. She would get into very active conversations with the characters in the books while we were reading. So, for example, when we were reading Little House on the Prairie, there would be these moments where she would interrupt my reading and say, wait a second, I want to talk to the Indian. And we'd have to go look for a picture of the Indian, and she'd say to the Indian, "Look, Indian, in a few pages you're going to meet Laura. But you've got to be-- understand, I know she's taking your land, but it's not her fault. She's just a kid. Now let me talk to Laura." And we'd go back and we'd talk to Laura. And in these things, I would take on the role of the Indian, and I'd say things like, you know, who's that talking? And so forth. And we would have these incredibly elaborate conversations. Do you remember that, Sara? Yes. Anyway, this sort of thing would go on all the time, and at a later point we began reading The Borrowers series. The series of wonderful books by Mary Noble. Norton. Norton. By Mary Norton, that's right. And should Sara describe what the book is about, maybe? Sure. Sara, explain what the Borrowers are like. Well, the Borrowers-- it's about these little people who are, I think, like four inches tall. And they live under the floorboards in the house. And what they do is they take things from people, little things that they can use around their house. So what kinds of things do they take? Well, they take pocket watches, and stamps, for like pictures on the wall. And part of the point about Borrowers is that they're not allowed-- are they allowed to talk to people? No. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Well, because they think that people can really hurt them, because according to the book it's happened before. Right. So anyway, we were reading this book. And one day I came home and Sara was incredibly excited. Her face was just glowing, and she said, "Daddy, you won't believe it! We have Borrowers here in our own house!" And my memory is that-- maybe you remember this differently, Sara-- but my memory was that she went to a particular place in the basement and she pointed at this little kind of hole in the wall in the basement, near the floor. And she said, "I was coming down the stairs and there was one of them standing right there, a little girl, and she was wearing a pink taffeta skirt." That's what you said. "And I froze, and she froze, and we looked at each other. And I knew I wasn't supposed to talk to her, and that she shouldn't talk to me, but we just looked at each other. And after about 30 seconds, she kind of waved her hand, just slightly, and she ran away. And it was right there." And Sara took me to the place where it was. And Sara, let me just ask you, what do you remember of this? Well, I remember having seen-- well, you see. It's like-- it's sort of strange to say this, because like-- I feel like I'm betraying the Borrowers. But I still believe in them. And like if I ever actually got to meet one, I'd never tell anyone. And I do remember having seen something. And it wasn't really for 30 seconds. It was like for maybe 10 seconds. And then it ran away. And even now when you think about it, you can picture-- you can picture seeing-- Yeah, yeah. I didn't imagine it. It was definitely there. And it was a little girl. Yeah, I think. And then, over the next few days, Sara began leaving things for this Borrower. And the first thing in the morning she would race downstairs to see whether the things had been picked up. Do you remember what kind of things you left? I left like-- sometimes I'd leave like toothpicks or pieces of food. What do they use toothpicks for? Oh, just like to dig with, and you know? Kind of an all-purpose tool. Yeah. Walking stick, things like that. Anyway, so she would leave these things there, and she would be so disappointed. And disappointment verging on desolation that they weren't picked up. And she'd have long conversations with me. She'd say, "You know, why aren't they picking them up? Don't they know that I'm giving it to them?" And I would try to explain that maybe, maybe they were scared or nervous or something. That's how Borrowers are. But she was so sad. And this went on-- I figured this would end-- but at a certain point, this went on for a week. And I don't know why I did it because it began a cascade of consequences. But one night I picked up the stuff and put it in my pocket. And the next morning she came bounding up the stairs saying, "Daddy, you won't believe it! There are Borrowers, just like I said! They took the stuff! They took the stuff!" And she was transported with delight. And I figured that would be the end of it. But it wasn't. Well, what happened next, Sara? I started writing to them. I started writing letters. OK. Why don't I ask you to pull out one of those letters and let's hear what you wrote for the first one. I'll read the first one. OK. Now you were six at the time, right? Seven. Dear Borrowers, I have seen you but I want to meet you. If I do, I will not tell anyone without your permission. Agreed or not agreed? And then this says, Borrowers-- Well, then-- just one second. So what happened is that that note, on a little yellow Post-it, lay by the hole for several days. And for several mornings, Sara would be completely devastated that it had not been answered. So I went through several days of not quite knowing what to do, because she was getting more and more sad about this, and more concerned. And so then I figured, well, it won't do any harm to pick up the piece of paper and write a little tiny message back. Which I did. Do you have that there, as well? Yeah, it's on the same piece of paper. OK, so? Dear Sara, gosh, this is strange. Who are you? How do you know about Borrowers? I thought no human beings ever knew about us. My dad says it's too dangerous for Borrowers to meet a human being. And he even says I mustn't write to you. But maybe at least I can write. Will you write back? I hope so. I will keep it a secret from my dad. Signed, Annabellie. P.S., I am 11. How about you? And so you got this. Do you remember getting this letter? Mm-hmm. Do you remember that morning, what you said when you came up the stairs? No. What did she say? Do you remember? Oh, she was just, "They are-- I told you! I told you! And she answered, she answered! And she wants me to write back!" And she was over the moon. And she wrote back immediately. Yeah. So, Ren, did you conceive of your Borrowers as being descendants of the Borrowers in the book? Well, it was unclear. I mean, it was a possibility. And it was up to Sara to keep dredging and find out more. And so there-- a large part of the correspondence is Sara doing genealogical work on the family. And asking all kinds of questions. Yeah. I would ask like, what was your grandmother's name? And it turned out that her grandmother was Arrietty, which is the main character. The main character in the book? Yeah. And she says that she calls her dad Pea, like as in a peapod. Because in the book the dad is Pod. And then she calls her mom Hommy, because in the book the mother is Homily. How long did the letters go back and forth? How many letters were there? I think there were-- well, there were over 17. Because I didn't finish counting, but I counted up to 17. And there came to be a crisis in the midst of all this, which was that we were going to be moving about half a mile, 3/4 of a mile. And she got into a darker and darker mood, and was really, again, almost desolate. And one day she said, "Daddy, we can't move. What about the Borrowers? What's going to happen to them? They'll starve to death! I've been feeding them for weeks. What are we going to do?" And so what we ended up doing was my dad said, "Well, they can move with us." And then what I did is I made a map of how to get to our house. She did this very elaborate map. And Sara said, "But they're not going to be able to do this all in one day." And so what she did is she found-- what did you do? Well, there's this restaurant called Villa Nova Equals E in Pelham. And there's this kind of like radiator thing on the outside, I don't know exactly what it is. But there was a hole there big enough for a Borrower to get through. And so what I did is I put some cloth in there to make it comfortable. And well, I told them that they could rest there. Because they could probably make the first half of the trip during the first day. And then it was really close to 5th Avenue, which is our busiest street in Pelham. So that when they had to cross 5th Avenue to get to the other part of Pelham, they could do it in the middle of the night. Why would that be important? Because the cars wouldn't be going back and forth. It was going to take them like an hour to get across the street. Not an hour. Like 15 minutes. OK, excuse me. So suddenly the whole project of moving went from being a near disaster to being a delight. And every time we moved Sara would run downstairs to see whether they had, in fact, brought some of their stuff over, because they had to do it in several different trips, right? Yeah. And each time, it would turn out that they had brought some stuff over, right? Yeah. Parenthetically, it was fairly easy to know what they had because it had all been in my pockets, as I'd been picking it up over the many months of the correspondence. I had a whole shoebox full of stuff that Sara had been leaving for the Borrowers, so I just kind of transported little sprinklings of it each time we moved some of our stuff over. And Ren, during this time, were you frightened about where this was all going to lead? That at some point you would get found out? Well, it was getting strange and actually kind of nerve-wracking. And I would do things like-- I kept on figuring that Sara was going to grow out of this. Or that Sara would associate-- would make the association that this was kind of like what we used to do when I would read about the Indian, or about Laura. I kept on thinking that she would just kind of enjoy that. But she was getting more and more into it. And it was becoming more and more involved. And the more involved, the more I could see how invested Sara was in it. I mean, it really was the main thing going on in her life during that season. And as she began telling friends about it and so forth, the stories had to get more and more elaborate to include all the stray bits of details that were seeping into things. And I didn't quite know where it was going to go. I would do things. I would send the Borrowers on vacations. You would send them on vacations? I would send them-- I would just have them suddenly disappear for a while. And they'd be gone for a while. And I would hope that by the time it was over, Sara would have forgotten. But on the day-- you know, I'd say they'd be gone three weeks. Three weeks later on that day there'd be a note for them from Sara. I'd send them into the woods. There was a little park nearby and for them this was a huge national park. And there was a stream and this was the equivalent of the Mississippi for them. And I would send them off and hoping that Sara would get over it, would move on. And Sara, did you suspect at that point? No, no, I-- But what was really funny, Sara, is that you would say things sometimes like, "Daddy, it's really weird. Annabellie uses the same kind of pen as you do." And then you'd say, "Yeah, I guess she must have stolen one of your pens." And then one day I heard her talking to her friend, Megan. She said, "Annabellie's handwriting is just like my dad's, only really tiny." She would say things like this and yet not put it together. I really hadn't-- like, the second I suspected it, I was almost sure that it had been him. And I just went up and asked him if it was him. Why is it that you started to suspect? Do you remember what happened that made you suspect? I think it was sort of the fact-- not his handwriting, actually. It was that I would tell my dad, for instance, that I was in the basement and I stuck my finger into this hole and I felt something sort of like silky or something. It was probably just some like old piece of cloth that was stuck there. But I felt it and I told my dad-- and it sort of slipped away from my finger. I told my dad about it. And then in the next letter, I'd hear-- Annabellie would be saying, oh, I think that-- was that you who touched me when I was wearing my silk dress? And so I started to think, like I tell my dad things that sometimes I'd exaggerate a little bit. Because when I was younger I exaggerated some things. I made things a little bit more exciting than they might have really been. And then like I read the letter and it had that exaggerated part in it. And so I'd say, like, well, that didn't really happen. I was just like sort of adding that to my story. And so that's-- That made you suspicious. Yeah, and I asked my dad-- So what happened there was, We had moved to the new house. We'd been there for a couple months at that point. And I was down in the basement moving some boxes around. And Sara came down there and-- And how old-- She's now eight. In this story? At this point in the story, yeah. And she-- and she began looking-- her lips were trembling. Her lower lip was trembling. And she looked at me very firmly as she is quite capable of doing. And she said, "Daddy, I'm going to ask you a question now. And you have to tell the truth because it's a sin for daddies to lie to their daughters." And my heart just sank. And she said, "Daddy, are you the one who's been writing Annabellie's notes?" And I looked at her, and she looked at me, and there was like silence for five or six seconds. And then I said, "Um, it's kind of complicated, can we talk?" And she said, "Daddy, it's not complicated. It's simple. Are you the one?" And I said, "Well, can we talk about it later?" She said, "No, just tell me. Are you the one or not?" And I took a big breath and I said, "Yes, it is me." And she broke into-- I was crying. Oh god, she was sobbing. I was so sad. She started sobbing. It was easily the most wrenching thing that had happened in my parenthood up to that point. I mean, I had totally blown it. I just felt like a total disaster. And I was crying and she was crying. And you know, we were both kind of clutching each other and holding each other. And we were really in a trap there. We were down the hole at that point. We were in big trouble. And suddenly this kind of calm came over Sara's face. It was kind of like the sun rising in the morning. And her forehead stopped being furrowed, it became smooth. And she just looked at me and she said, "Daddy, don't you realize? You ruined everything. Because there are Borrowers! And you were taking the letters before they were able to get them." And it was a way of-- she had solved everything there. Because among other things, that was what she was going to be able to tell her friends. And they could all chortle about what kind of a crazy father she had. And it was amazing. She found a way of getting us out of this disaster that I suppose I had fashioned for us. Because I remember saying that you should have left it there. Maybe they would have really written back. You shouldn't have done it because maybe they would have actually written back to me finally at some point. Like I said earlier, I still believe in them. And I know that might sound really babyish to some kids who might listen to this. But I still believe in them. And when I told Megan, my friend, when I told Megan that it had been my dad, she stopped believing in them. And she was just like, whenever I'd talk about it from them on, she'd laugh at me and tell me, "Oh, Sara, stop being a baby." Because she's a year older then me, so she-- at that time, she still considered herself really superior to me, even though we're best friends. And she said, "Oh, Sara, stop being a baby. It's not true. It's just not true." And I said, "But I've seen them." And she said, "No, you haven't. You just imagined it. And it's not true. And you can just stop imagining it and stop telling me about it because it's not true." How do you feel about it now when you look at those letters? I don't know. Like sometimes when I read them, I still sort of can think that, you know, I wonder why this happened to her? I wonder why that happened to her? I wonder why she would say that? Even though I know that it was my dad writing to me, I still sometimes sort of think of there being an Annabellie somewhere out there. When we pulled out the box last night, of letters, did it bring you pleasure to look at those letters? Did you-- Well, actually I look at it a lot. You do? You look at it a lot? Yeah. And what do you think when you look at it? Well, I just think it was sort of-- now looking back, it was sort of nice of him to do. Because I remember, when it was happening, and after I'd figured out that it was him, I had asked him, well, can we still sort of write to each other? We never really actually wrote to each other after that, but I just sort of thought after a while that it was a nice thing. And that even though maybe there was no Borrower writing to me, there was maybe-- having my dad make up this whole family was maybe just as special, or maybe almost as special as having actually been writing to a Borrower. Sara, can I ask you, what do you think the lesson of this story is? That is, if parents hear you tell this story, you and your dad tell this story on the radio, and if another parent gets into this kind of situation, what's your advice for them? Should they go along with it? Should they write letters and should they pick up stuff? I don't know. Because like it was really fun for me to have this kind of experience. But when I found out that it was my dad writing, it was really upsetting. And so I just don't know. I think that if I were a parent and I had that kind of thing, I would not pick it up. You would not? No, I would keep encouraging my kid, my child, to keep on writing to the Borrowers and trying to get them to write back, but I wouldn't pick it up. What if they keep coming to you, so sad every morning, the way you were sad coming to me, and just pleading, I wish, I wish, I wish they would come. Can you imagine ever picking it up? No. Really? It's just-- I don't think it's fair to lead someone on like that. Ren, as far as you're concerned, what's the lesson of the story? If you had this to do again, if you would get into this situation again, or if you could go back with the benefit of hindsight, what would you do? Would you have left the letters? I mean, I'd like to say that had I to live it over again I wouldn't do it this way, but I'm not sure. Because it started so naturally. And in the end, by the, way, what I'd have to say is probably the most poignant, closest, amazing moment I've had as a single-- you know, the moment I'll remember of a particular phase in my life, is the holding onto each other in the basement, both of us crying. But Sara not running away, and Sara saving us. And that kind of cemented our relationship in a really kind of wonderful way. So I mean, I don't-- It might not end that way for everybody. Yeah, it might not end that way for everybody, that's true. I continue to puzzle about it. And it is unresolved for me as my answer is indicating, I suppose. It's interesting to me that the way that you view the lesson of the story is that Sara saved the two of you, that as a parent you got yourself into a moment where you literally didn't know what to do. And that she finally said the thing that made everything OK. Yeah, I absolutely feel that. Has it affected our relationship, do you think? Do you not trust me in a way you used to trust me? No, no, no. I still trust you. Sara, do you view this as one of the moments when you were closest to your dad? Well, I'm very close to my dad. So I don't know. Yeah, I guess so. But it's not like much closer than I am usually. Because I'm very close to my dad like all the time. But yeah, it is one of the times that I was closest, I guess. Yeah. So my heart is in my throat. Hey, Sara, if you still think they exist, have you tried to spot them? Have you tried to wait for them and spot them again? Well, I have seen-- well, I'm not sure, because I've seen them in the shadows. The only time I'm absolutely positive I saw one was downstairs in the basement of my old house. But I have seen them since. Sometimes I'll go and I'll sit at the basement steps and look around. And sometimes I'll be making, let's say, a cake. And I'll leave a little bit of dough wrapped in some paper by the staircase, at the basement, in the basement, for them to take. And do they take it? Well, I don't know. Because I don't find it, but then again, who knows what that might be. It could be-- Right. It could be bugs. Mouse. Dad. A mouse or a dad. This child is afflicted. The house is crawling with them. Lawrence Weschler is the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders and Calamities of Exile. Sara Weschler just graduated from elementary school this week. When we spoke she said that she would be listening to our radio program this weekend in the car. I don't want us to listen to it at the house. Because if there are still Borrowers in our house, I don't want them to hear that and think that they can't trust me. Because it's right now, I'm like telling their whole story. So I feel like I'm sort of betraying them, you know? And I just like wanted to make sure that they knew that, you know, if I actually did meet one, I wouldn't tell anyone. I would never tell a single person in the world. Well, the program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder. Senior editor, Paul Tough. Contributing editors, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and consigli Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett, Sylvia Lemus and [? Sayuni ?] [? Davenport. ?] Thanks today to Street Level Youth Media. Happy Father's Day to my own dad, Barry Glass, in Baltimore. If you want to buy a cassette of this program, call us at WBEZ here in Chicago. 312-832-3380. 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] Or you can listen to any of our programs over the internet for free-- for free-- at our website. www.thislife.org. That's thislife, one word, no space in it. This week, you'll also find at our website some of Sara's Weschler's correspondence with the Borrowers, right there. Well, This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Also from Double Take magazine. If you enjoy This American Life, you may also like Double Take. Documenting everyday life through reporting, fiction, photography, and poetry. For your own sample copy, that's your very own, you can keep it forever, the toll free number is 1-877-4DOUBLE. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who we have a plan for. I have to say a big, big plan. Put him in leather diapers, teach him to dance to YMCA, and slowly draw him into our perverted lifestyle. Indeed, we will. Well, I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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What's history good for anyway? A couple of years ago I went with a group of Chicago eighth-graders on their class trip to Washington DC. And their teacher, Mr. Perlstein had all these ambitious plans for the trip. And one of the most ambitious involved us going up to the top of the steps at the Lincoln Memorial. And we had brought with us this boom box, this massive boom box, like, 20 D cells in this thing, just for this moment at the top of the stairs. And Mr. Perlstein had to get special permits from the US Park police just for this one moment. The class was all African-American and Mexican-American kids from the west side of Chicago. And Mr. Perlstein had this idea that we would sit there on the stairs right near where the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King gave the "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. All right, listen up. Dr. King spoke from the marble stairway to the right, approximately where that gentleman's walking up with the red backpack. Look out into the distance, you can see, first, the reflection pool. Do you remember the picture I showed you of people standing in the trees? Those are the trees over there on the left. Remember, they were up in the trees with the signs? Mr. Perlstein talked for a while, trying to evoke that day of 1963. A cassette of Dr. King was queued up in the boom box. Sit back. Transport yourself into the past. (SUBJECT) MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. The class listens, staring out in the distance over the reflecting pool toward the Washington Monument. A few passing tourists stop and stand and listen with us. Dr. King's voice reverberates out over the stairs. And, afterwards, I ask the kids about it. And it turns out you don't get to be a 14 year old, minority kid in the public schools in America without having heard the, "I Have a Dream" speech a few times. Most of the kids were like, that speech? Again? It wasn't emotional or anything. We just had to sit there and listen to it, the same old speech. You know, I thought it was going be real moving or something like that, but it was just listening to him talk, you know? And you've heard that speech before? Thousands of times. Thousands of times. To be fair to these kids, what exactly is somebody supposed to do on the tourist sites of our own history? How exactly is it supposed to touch us? On our national holidays we pack up our children and we drive to Gettysburg and Williamsburg, to the Alamo and to the grassy knoll near the Dallas book depository, to the house where Richard Nixon grew up and to Al Capone's cell in Alcatraz. And we stand there, thousands and thousands of us, maybe even right now people standing there staring at the historic sites, trying to imagine what it was like back then, trying to absorb something, some lesson, some feeling, into ourselves. It's not easy. Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But, you know, the opposite is also true. Those who can remember the past are also condemned to repeat it to their children on summer road trips. But, besides repeating it to someone else, what are you supposed to do with history? Especially history as ambiguous as that of our beloved United States of America, a history that's alternately murderous and heroic, money grubbing and idealistic. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, on our program, we try to make some sense out of the past. Writer Sarah Vowell and her twin sister, Amy, head out on the road to visit the site of a historic tragedy, one that involved part of their own family 160 years ago. Stay with us. Sarah and Amy were born in Oklahoma, where our story ends and where it also begins. They're part Cherokee. That's an important element to their story. We're going to be devoting our entire program today to their trek through history. It's a story of the past and what to make of the past today. Being at least a little Cherokee in northeastern Oklahoma is about as rare and remarkable as being a Michael Jordan fan in Chicago. I mean, who isn't? I'm 1/8 Cherokee on my mother's side, about 1/16 on my father's. It goes without saying that my twin sister, Amy, is too, except that I have dark eyes and dark hair and she's a blue-eyed blond. And so our grandfather nicknamed me "Injun" and her "Swede." Here's Amy's take on all this. I must point out that, while my sister and I don't really look alike, we sound almost exactly alike. A hint for listening to this story, I'm usually the grouchy one. Here's Amy. I mean, those roles were assigned to us-- you know, Indian and Swede-- because of the way we looked, but it was also more like the things we were told about ourselves. And she was the one who was given the Cherokee language book, and I was the one who was always told how much alike I was to our Swedish grandmother. And I think I was probably six, or seven, or something before I realized that I was Cherokee too. We're a little French and Scottish and English and Seminole too, typical American mutts, but the Cherokee and Swedish sides of the family were the only genealogies anyone knew anything about. Here's what we knew about ourselves, Ellis Island, Trail of Tears. And I think, to a kid, "trail of tears," the Cherokee's forced march from the East to Oklahoma where we were born, seemed enormously more interesting, just as a name. Even the smallest children know what tears mean, and I think in my earliest understanding of where I came from, I pictured myself descended from a long line of weepers with bloodshot eyes. The Trail of Tears, between 1838 and '39 the US Army wrenched 16,000 people from their homes, rounded them up in stockades, and marched them across the country. 4,000 died. Every summer when we were children, our parents would drive us to a place about half an hour from where we lived called Tsa-La-Gi, which is the Cherokee word for Cherokee. Tsa-La-Gi is the tribe's cultural center. There's a re-created colonial village, a museum, and-- this was our favorite part-- an amphitheater which staged a dramatic re-creation of the Trail of Tears. Every summer we watched Chief John Ross try like mad to save the Cherokee land back east. We saw his hot-head rival, Stand Watie, rage off to the civil war. We especially loved the Death of the Phoenix, a noisy, magenta-lit interpretive dance in which the mythic bird would die only to rise again. We would get these programs, or brochures, and Sarah was kind of in charge of them. And sometimes she'd let me look at them. She had a whole little file, and we would look through them. And I did take it to heart. It was a story that was really tragic. I have a sort of reverent feeling towards it, and I think it's because of this play. Because this play was so serious and told such a detailed story, that it kind of took this place of significance, like it was really important and it really mattered. Here's the measure of how important the amphitheater show was to Amy and me. Our father and our grandfather used to show us photographs of Cherokee leaders in books, but, even now, when I imagine Stand Watie, I picture the actor at Tsa-La-Gi. So all my life I knew I wouldn't exist but for the Trail of Tears, and it struck me as a little silly that most of the things I knew about it were based on an amphitheater drama I haven't seen for nearly 20 years. At first, I thought I'd read some books about it, which I did. But then I wanted to see it, feel it, know how long a trek it was. I wanted it to be real. I enlisted Amy. Perhaps she'd like to do all the driving? A historical tragedy and five 14-hour days behind the wheel? Who could pass that up? And so I fly from Chicago, she from Montana. And one spring morning we find ourselves in a rental car on our way to northwestern Georgia, the homeland of the Cherokee before they were shoved out to Oklahoma, the place the Trail of Tears begins. The Cherokee territory once encompassed most of present-day Tennessee and Kentucky as well as parts of Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Even before contact with the Europeans in 1540, they were a proto-democratic society. They built these enormous council houses, big enough to fit the entire tribe inside, so everyone could participate in tribal decisions. We're barely on the road an hour when we spot them, Injuns. Ceramic ones, three feet tall, at a shack on the side of the road. Amy drives past them. We do a double take, and we don't even discuss whether or not to stop, she just backs up immediately and parks. Are you of Native American descent? I'm a Mexican. I'm from Texas. From Texas? And what brought you to Calhoun, Georgia? The work. The eight little Indians he's selling are of the kitschy, teepee-toting, Plains Indian, squaws and braves variety, which are probably a lot easier to sell than the stereotypical image of a Cherokee. A tired out old woman tromping through the Trail of Tears in rags, who wants that as a lawn ornament? Who buys these statues, these Indian statues? People here from Calhoun, around Georgia. People here around Georgia love Indians. Really? Uh-huh. Well, after they got rid of them? [LAUGHS] That's right. [LAUGHS] That's true. You're telling the truth there. Thank you, very much. Uh-huh. The Cherokee, especially the mixed bloods, were always your nerdy, overachiever, bookish, sort of tribe. And, in the early 19th century, they launched a series of initiatives directly imitating the new American republic. In one decade, they created a written language, started a free press, ratified a constitution, and founded a capital city. New Echota was that capital. Now it stands in the middle of nowhere, a Georgia state park with a handful of buildings across from a golf course. Can we follow you in this car? Drive on in. New Echota was founded in 1825. To call it the Cherokee version of Washington DC is entirely applicable, given the form of government the tribe established there. They ratified a constitution based on that of the United States, dividing into legislative, judicial, and executive branches. Its preamble begins, "We, the Representatives of the people of the Cherokee Nation in Convention assembled, in order to establish justice, ensure tranquility, promote our common welfare, and secure to ourselves and to our posterity the blessings of liberty." Unlike Washington, New Echota is cool and quiet and green. Site manager, David Gomez, showed us around the grounds. And Amy and I were unprepared for the loveliness of the place, for its calm lushness, its fragrance. Everywhere, honeysuckle was in bloom. I like it here. It's nice. It's peaceful and it's right. The atmosphere is right for what was going on in the story that we tell here, you know? It's a story that's sad in a lot of ways, but there was a lot of great things happening with the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee, along with the other Southeastern tribes who suffered removal to Oklahoma-- the Chickasaw, the Creek, the Chocktaw, the Seminole, are one of the, so-called, five civilized tribes. It was in 1822 that the Cherokee hero, Sequoyah, developed an alphabet, inventing the sole written language of any North American tribe. Only six years later Cherokee editor, Elias Boudinot, founded The Cherokee Phoenix, a bilingual English-Cherokee newspaper published at New Echota. Many Cherokee, especially the mixed bloods, practice Christianity. And, because many of these lived as civilized Southern gentleman of the early 19th century, they owned prospering plantations, which meant they owned black slaves. More than any other Native American tribe, the Cherokees adopted the religious, cultural, and political ideals of the United States, partly as a means to self-preservation. By becoming more like the Americans, they hoped to co-exist with this new nation that was growing up around them. They weren't allowed to. Georgia settlers wanted their land and their gold, which was discovered near New Echota in 1829. They were really progressing so fast at this time period. The printing operation was going with their newspaper here. Things were moving so fast forward and for a short while here that it looked very promising. But because of gold and the big demand for land, the fate had already been really sealed for them in earlier years. The tribe allowed Christian missionaries to live and work among them and to teach their children English. The most beloved of these was the Presbyterian, Samuel Worcester, who built a two-story house at New Echota which functioned as a post office, school and rooming house. It's still there, and David Gomez walks us through. All right, we've got some steep steps here. You all hold on when you go down. I don't want you all to have a broken leg on the rest of your trip. The state of Georgia, which of all the Southern states treated the Cherokee with the most hostility, passed a number of alarming laws in the 1820s and '30s undermining the sovereignty of the nation. One of these laws required white settlers within the boundaries of the nation to obtain a permit from the state of Georgia. Samuel Worcester refused to apply for such a permit, arguing that he had the permission of the Cherokee to live on their lands and that should suffice. Georgia arrested Worcester and imprisoned him for four years. Worcester appealed to the Supreme Court, and the case, Worcester v. Georgia, became a great victory for the tribe. The Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled that the Cherokee Nation was just that, a sovereign nation within the borders of the US and, therefore, beholden only to the Federal government, i.e., not under the jurisdiction of Georgia state laws. And the Cherokee nation was elated, you know. They thought, all right, the highest court in the land of the United States, this government that we're trying to copy, they've ruled in our favor. This is going to be good. But, of course, Andrew Jackson, who was pro-removal-- from the early years, he had campaigned on that issue-- decided he wasn't going to back the Supreme Court ruling. On hearing of the ruling, the President is said to have replied, "John Marshall has made his ruling, now let him enforce it." Think about that, what that means, a breakdown of the balance of power in such boasting, dictatorial terms. Jackson is violating his own oath of office to uphold the Constitution. In the 20th century, when people bandy about the idea of impeachment for presidents who fib about extramarital dalliances, it's worth remembering what a truly impeachable offense looks like. It didn't happen, of course. I refer you to the face on the $20 bill. Anyway, the state of Georgia was thrilled when Jackson thumbed his nose at the Court, and immediately dispatched teams to survey the Cherokee lands for a land lottery. Soon, white settlers arrived here. They show up two years later in 1834-- you know, with a land lottery deed and with the Georgia soldiers saying, "I've got this land from the lottery. Get off of it." One small constitutional violation that was part of the land grab, Georgia seized the Cherokee printing press so they couldn't publicize their cause and win political support in states up north. The tribe was divided about what to do-- stay and fight, or demand cash for the land and head west. No one exploited this split more than Andrew Jackson, and no one annoyed Jackson like principal chief, John Ross. Ross was a Jeffersonian figure in almost every sense, a founding father of the Cherokee nation in its modern legal form. It was Ross who cribbed from Jefferson in writing the Cherokee Constitution. Like Jefferson, he preached liberty while owning slaves. An educated, gentleman planter, Ross was only 1/8 Cherokee, just 1/8, even I'm more Cherokee than that. But he was their Chief from 1827 to 1866. In his later years, he corresponded with Abraham Lincoln. In his early years, he was such a believer in the inherent justice of the American system that he lobbied relentlessly in Washington DC, believing that once the Congress and the President understood that the Cherokee were a virtuous, sibling republic, that they'd treat the tribe fairly, as equals. Once the state of Georgia began evicting the Cherokee and John Ross among them, Ross wrote, "Treated like dogs, we find ourselves fugitives, vagrants, and strangers in our own country." The vast majority of the tribe wanted to stay put and supported Ross. But around 100 men-- including Phoenix editor Elias Boudinot and his brother Stand Watie, 100 in a tribe of 16,000-- met at Boudinot's house in New Echota and signed a treaty with the US government. They had no authority to do this. Called the Treaty of New Echota, it relinquished all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for land in the West. They figured, Georgia was already seizing Cherokee land, this might be the only way the Cherokee could get something for it. John Ross, whom the Georgia militia arrested so that he could not protest, was stunned. He accused the treaty party of treason. The rest of the 16,000 Cherokee signed a petition calling the treaty invalid and illegal. Congress ratified the treaty by only one vote, despite impassioned pleas on behalf of the Cherokee by Senators Henry Clay and Davy Crockett. The tribe was given three years to remove themselves to the West. Now we're standing at the site of Elias Boudinot's house, where the infamous New Echota treaty was signed. Yeah, well, the spring of '38 rolled around about like right now, and nobody was going anywhere. So Georgia and the Federal government thought they were going to have some problems. And you had about 7,000 troops come in to forcibly remove the Cherokees from their farms, from their houses. And initially rounded up into what were known as forts or stockades, and then moved up into eastern Tennessee and northeastern Alabama to three immigration depots, where they were then transferred and then moved out on the Trail of Tears as everybody knows it. So, technically, this is the starting point for the Trail of Tears. For the individual Cherokees, it really started at their front door or wherever they were rounded up from, though. Amy and I want to step on it, this patch of grass where the treaty was signed, but we hesitate. "It's not a grave," Gomez tells us. But that's what it feels like. We tiptoe onto it, this profane ground. And then we tiptoe away. Perhaps we should be embarrassed by certain discrepancies between our Trail of Tears and theirs. We're weak. We're decadent. We're Americans, which means road trip history buffs one minute, amnesiacs the next. We want to remember, except when we want to forget. We register at the Chattanooga Choo Choo, the Chattanooga Choo Choo. It's a hotel now. A gloriously hokey, beautifully restored Holiday Inn in which the lobby is the ornate dome of the old train station, and the rooms are turn-of-the-century rail cars parked out on the tracks. We're in giggles the entire night for the simple reason that the phrase "choo, choo" is completely addictive. We try to work it into every sentence. "What should we do for dinner? Stay here at the Choo Choo?" We end up going out for barbecue, saying, "This is good, but I can't wait to get back to the Choo Choo." We watch The X-Files in our train car, commenting, "Is is just me, or is this show even better in the Choo Choo?" I send email from my laptop just so that I can write, "Greetings, from the Chattanooga Choo Choo," exclamation point. Number of times I just said "choo, choo," seven. Number of choos, 14. Day two, sadly, we check out of the Choo Choo and drive across town to Ross's Landing. It used to be where John Ross's ferry service carried people across the Tennessee River. But, in 1838, it was one of the starting points for the water route of the Trail of Tears. I stand on the sand and read a weathered historical marker. "Established about 1816 by John Ross, some 370 yards east of this point. It consisted of a ferry, warehouse and landing. Cherokee parties left from the landing for the West in 1838, the same year the growing community took the name Chattanooga." And I'm sure there's no connection at all between those two points. That sounds so nice. They just left for the West. Bye-bye. Bon voyage. I haven't mentioned that Ross's Landing also functions as Chattanooga's tourist center. Up the hill from the river is the gigantic Tennessee Aquarium and an IMAX theater. The place is crawling with tourists. A crowd so generic and indistinguishable from one another, they swirled around us as a single T-shirt. 160 years ago, thousands of Cherokees came through this site. In the summer, they were forced onto boats and faced heat exhaustion in a drought that stranded them without water to drink. In the fall, they headed west by foot, eventually trudging barefoot through blizzards. Either way, they died of starvation, dysentery, diarrhea and fatigue. A quarter of the tribe was gone. And here, in the shadow of the aquarium, the Trail of Tears is remembered by a series of quotations from disgruntled Native Americans carved into a concrete plaza. One of the citations, from a Cherokee named Dragging Canoe, is from 1776. "The white men have almost surrounded us, leaving us only a little spot of ground to stand upon. And it seems to be their intention to destroy us as a nation." Good call. We're moving diagonally across the sidewalk. And Andrew Jackson, in 1820, "It is high time to do away with the farce of treatying with Indian tribes as separate nations." We'll step on that one. These cracks in the sidewalks, they are symbolic of broken promises. [LAUGHS] Are you making that up? No, it says right here, "Some of the pavers are cracked to symbolize the broken promises made to the Indians." Hm. Most Americans have had this experience. Most of us can name things our country has done that we find shameful. From the travesties everybody agrees were wrong, the Japanese internment camps or the late date of slavery's abolition, to murkier partisan arguments about legalized abortion or the Enola Gay. World history has been a bloody business from the get-go, but the nausea we're suffering standing on the broken promises at Ross's Landing is peculiar to a democracy because, in a democracy, we're all responsible for everything our government does. This is the letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. "A crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokee of a country. For how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations, our country any more? You, sir, will bring down the renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy, and the name of this nation, hitherto, the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world." And the path ends with a quotation from an unknown survivor of the Trail of Tears who said, "Long time we travel on way to new land. People feel bad when they leave old nation. Womens cry and make sad wails. Children, and many men, and all look sad like when friends die. But they say nothing, and just put heads down and keep on go towards west. Many days pass, and people die very much. We bury close by trail." That last passage, especially the part about when friends die, bring us to tears. And we just stand there, looking off towards the Tennessee, brokenhearted. Meanwhile, there are little kids literally walking over these words, playing on them, making noise, having fun. We sort of hate them for a second. We ask a teacher who's with a group of fourth graders why she isn't talking to them about Cherokee history. And she says normally she would, but it's the end of the school year, and this trip is their reward for being good. It sounds reasonable. I ask Amy if she thinks these kids should share our sadness. Well, I think it's a sad story. It's like, I mean, it's sort of like the holocaust. You don't have to be Jewish to think that that's definitely a sad part of history. And I think the Trail of Tears is America's version of genocide. And, I mean, really, it started right over there. You look like you're about to hit something. Still, I can't take my eyes off those children. I envy them. I want to join them. I'm an IMAX person. I had been to an IMAX theater just weeks before. I wanted to come on this trip to get a feel for this trail that made us, but standing here at Ross's Landing, it hits me how crazy that is. Suddenly, the only thing I get out of it is rage. Why should we keep going? I don't know. I don't know why. I don't know why we're here. I seriously don't. Like, I know it's an interesting story and yes, we are always interested in our past, but sometimes I wonder what good comes of that. I don't think it makes me a more contented person at all. In fact, I think I feel really haunted by all of this, and I feel very weighed down by the pain. Part of me thinks this whole thing is a mistake. And maybe I feel more knowing about it, but it's not like this is a story where the more you know, the better you'll feel. It's just the opposite. The more I learn, the worse I feel and the more hatred I feel towards this country that I still love, and therefore, the more conflicted. I just feel all this anger at everything. And we're standing next to this stupid aquarium building and talking to coast guard guys. And there are ducks around. And now there's a calliope? I mean, I don't know. Now I just feel like-- I feel worse. I feel worse. There are only so many hours a human being can stomach unfocused dread. I was tired and confused and depressed, and I needed the kind of respite that can only come from focused resentment. In the Trail of Tears saga, if there's one person you're allowed to hate, it's Andrew Jackson, the architect of the Indian removal policy. And since the Trail of Tears passed through Nashville anyway, we stop at his plantation, The Hermitage. Sarah Vowell and her sister entered the enemy's bedroom. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, so close to the Fourth of July, a program about the past and what to make of the past. We continue with the story of Sarah Vowell and her sister, Amy, retracing the path of the Trail of Tears. They have just arrived at the home of the president responsible for the trail, someone they hate and intend to keep hating in a very un-public radio way, Andrew Jackson. The house and museum are closed to the public when we arrive because of astonishing tornado damage. Part of me wanted to destroy Andrew Jackson and everything he represented. Seeing all those hacked up trees made me feel like someone had beaten me to the punch. God, look at it. All the trees are down. Yeah. The wrath of God. Inside, there's no display mentioning Indian removal because, remarkably, there is no display about Jackson's presidency. Carolyn Brackett showed us around the house, a columned antebellum mansion that looks like a cross between Graceland and Tara. Unfortunately for my spite spree, I liked Carolyn Brackett. I felt bad for her. Like, she would point into the library and say Jackson subscribed to a lot of newspapers before his death, and I'd say, "Was one of them The Cherokee Phoenix?" She wasn't sure. She wanted to show off the mansion's painstaking restoration. All of the rooms that have original wallpaper, all of the paper was conserved and had to be cleaned with an eraser the size of a pencil eraser. So that was quite an undertaking. The portrait of Jackson was finished nine days before his death. I don't think he shows the wear and tear of his life in that portrait. The one over the-- Hey. He looks like he's sticking his head out a car window. I guess he wasn't worrying about his hair much by then. Carolyn guides us past the flower garden planted by Jackson's wife, Rachel, and into the family graveyard. There are a few piddly headstones and one Greco-Roman monstrosity with an obelisk rising from the center. Let me guess which one of these graves is Jackson's. [LAUGHS] Here he is. He actually had this designed for Rachel and left room for himself. And these are other family members. I pull a book out of my backpack, a book with the subtitle, Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. Carolyn and Amy exchange a worried look. Well, so I'm standing here on Andrew Jackson's grave. And there is part of me, as a person of partly Cherokee descent, that wouldn't mind dancing on it. [LAUGHS] You know? I would like to-- there's a letter that Jackson wrote about the removal of the Southeastern tribes. And-- can you hold that, Amy-- this is his opinion on the Southeastern tribes leaving their land. "Doubtless, it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers. But what do they more than our ancestors did nor than our children are doing? To better their condition in an unknown land, our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions." And then it ends, "Can it be cruel in the government, when, by events which it cannot control, the Indian is made discontent in his ancient home to purchase his lands, give him a new and extensive territory, to pay the expense of his removal, and support him a year in his new abode. How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions?" I mean, there's something sort of nutty about Old Hickory in this passage. You know, just the fact that he just thinks-- well, to compare the removal of Indians from their land with the opportunity of his generation to just go out west. I mean, what do you make of that? Can you help me understand that mindset? Probably not. I mean, the interesting thing about that era was that they really felt that they were preserving. This is how they justified it in their own minds was that they were actually having preserve it, that this was inevitable. It was sort of the early thought of manifest destiny, that it was inevitable that this would happen. Interestingly, to me, is they never seemed to think that we were going to settle the country all the way to the West, all the way to California. So, if they just kept moving everybody further away, they would suddenly get to a point where there wasn't going to be any settlement, which, of course, didn't happen. We drive on into Kentucky towards Hopkinsville. When the Trail of Tears passed through southern Kentucky in December of 1838, a traveler from Maine happened upon a group of Cherokees. He wrote, "We found them in the forest by a roadside camped for the night under a severe fall of rain accompanied by a heavy wind. Canvas for a shield against the inclemency of the weather and the cold, wet ground for a resting place, after the fatigue of the day, they spent the night." "Several were then quite ill, and an aging man we were then informed was in the last struggles of death. Even aged females, apparently ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back, on the sometimes frozen ground and the sometimes muddy streets with no covering for the feet except for what nature had given them. We learned from the inhabitants on the road where the Indians passed that they buried 14 or 15 at every stopping place." John Ross's wife died in a place like this, in winter, of pneumonia. She had one blanket to protect herself from the weather, and she gave it to a sick child during a sleet storm. There's more. It gets worse. I always knew the Cherokee owned slaves, that they owned them in the East and that they owned them in the West. Only in the course of this road trip did it occur to me that the slaves got to Indian territory in the same manner as their masters, on the Trail of Tears. Can you imagine? As if being a slave wasn't bad enough? To be a slave to a tortured Indian made to walk halfway across the continent? Day three, Hopkinsville. We stopped here because it was on the map, but pulling into town we saw signs for a Trail of Tears Memorial Park we didn't know about. It seemed like a good idea to go there. Good morning. Do you work here? Yes, I do. Mind if we bother you a second? What you need? Can you tell me about what the origin of this place is, and why there's a park here, and how it came about? Hopkinsville was a ration stop along the way on the Trail of Tears, and the Cherokee camped here. They were here for a week or so. While they were here, two of their chiefs died, and they're buried up on the hillside. You should start here and walk up to the grave area. There are three bronze plaques on each one of the posts. The last one, just before you enter the grave area, tells you about the two chiefs, Whitepath and Flysmith. The plaque nearest the graves says that Whitepath was one of the Cherokee who fought under Andrew Jackson in 1814 at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Jackson even gave Whitepath a watch for his bravery. In that battle, a Cherokee saved Jackson's life, which hints at the level of Jackson's betrayal of the tribe. Had a Cherokee not saved his life then, Whitepath and Flysmith might not be buried here beneath our feet. The graves are up on a little hill. You can hear the highway down below, but still it's serene. Up until this moment, all the graves along the trail had been metaphorical. All through Tennessee Amy and I kept saying, "We're driving over graves. We're driving over graves." But, even then, we just imagined them there, under the blacktop, off in the woods. But here, the skeletons suddenly had faces, specific stories. The graves were real. It took the Cherokee about six months to walk to Oklahoma. We're doing it in five days. Every 10 minutes, we cover the same amount of ground they covered in a day. We drive with the sun in our eyes on back roads through Kentucky. We duck into a remote section of downstate Illinois Chicagoans fear to tread. A plaque marks the spot where thousands of Cherokee camped, unable to cross the Mississippi because of floating ice. We cross it in under a minute. I know we're going fast, but it doesn't feel fast. We plod through most of Missouri stopping at yet another Trail of Tears State Park. There's actually a name for what we're doing, it's called heritage tourism, which sounds so grand, like it's going to be one freaking epiphany after another. But, after a while, we just read the signs without even getting out of the car. At the end of every day we fall into our motel beds, wrecked. Day four, in the morning, we plow through Arkansas. We get to Fayetteville in the afternoon. We have lunch with two old roommates of mine, Brad and Leilani, who take us to a little Trail of Tears marker next to a high school parking lot. That looks plaque-like, huh? "On this site, in the summer of 1839, there camped 1,000 Cherokees, men women and children en route to their new home." The sign's facing a semicircular arrangement of boulders. Anyone who's ever been to high school would recognize it immediately as the place students go to sneak cigarettes or get stoned. And, once again, it's striking how the two American tendencies exist side by side, to remember our past and to completely ignore it and have fun. Look at how we treat all our national holidays. Don't we mourn the dead on Memorial Day with volleyball and sunscreen? Don't we, the people, commemorate the Fourth of July by setting meat and bottle rockets on fire? Which makes a lot of sense when you remember that a phrase as weird and whimsical as "the pursuit of happiness" sits right there in the second sentence of the founding document of the country. The most happiness I find on the trip is when we're in the car and I can blare the Chuck Berry tape I brought. We drive the trail where thousands died, and I listen to the music and think what are we supposed to do with the grisly past? I feel a righteous anger and bitterness about every historical fact of what the American nation did to the Cherokee. But, at the same time, I'm an entirely American creature. I'm in love with this song and the country that gave birth to it. Listening to "Back in the USA" while driving the Trail of Tears, I turn it over and over in my head. It's a good country. It's a bad country. Good country, bad country. And, of course, it's both. When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife. Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy he sure can dance. "Welco to Oklahoma, Native America." Huh, I don't remember the signs used to say that. Do you? No. I think, didn't they used to say, "Oklahoma's OK?" Well-- I think that's about right too. Eh, it's OK. Across the state line, we're in the Western Cherokee Nation. And the maddening thing, the heartbreaking, cruel, sad, cold fact is that Northeastern Oklahoma looks exactly like Northwestern Georgia. Same old trees. Same old grassy farmland. The Cherokee walked all this way, crossed rivers, suffered blizzards, buried their dead, and all for what? The same old land they left. We breeze through Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital. Even though the Trail of Tears officially stops there, our trail won't be over until we get to our hometown, Braggs. It's about 20 minutes away, and we plan on spending the evening with our aunts and uncles there. Come inside girls. Hi. Hi. [LAUGHS] Oh, hi. Oh, it's so good to see you. Hi, Amy. How you doing? Oh. Hi uncle. I wanted to talk to my uncle, John A, my mother's brother. At 74, he's my oldest living relative. I asked him about his great grandfather, Peter Parson, who came to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. He was 12 years old, and he grew up here from 12 years old. And he was a stone mason, and some of his work is still around Tahlequah. If you're going up to the village tomorrow, you'll see two big columns. He built those? He helped build those two columns. See, they built that right after they came up here. I didn't know that. The columns he's talking about, and there are actually three instead of two, are the great symbols of the Cherokee nation in the West. For years, I've had an old photograph of them stuck on my refrigerator door. They're all that's left of the remains of the Cherokee Female Seminary, the very first public school for girls west of the Mississippi, which my great-grandmother attended. Everything about the journey until now has been a little world-historical. Hearing that our ancestor helped build the columns is the first time I felt an actual familial connection to the story. I asked John A about our family and the Cherokee presence in Oklahoma. I ask him a lot of off-topic questions about his service in World War II, mainly because I was dying to. I was never allowed to ask him about it when I was a kid. And then I asked him a mundane, reporterly question about whether he thinks the state of Oklahoma has done a good job educating its students about American Indian history. He says yes, then jumps into a non sequitur about his own education that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since. I just wish that I could've, maybe, went to school a lot more. Yeah, I didn't get no education, and that was one of my big faults. But, when I was growing up, it took everybody to make a living, so I had to work. There's Hoy, he's got a Master's Degree in Education, and I got to third grade. [LAUGHS] Did you know that? No, third grade? That's all I went, to the third grade. Duke was about third or fourth grade. We didn't get no education. So what you learn you can't afford to forget, you know? On this trip, I've been so wrapped up in all the stories of all the deaths on the Trail of Tears, sitting there listening to my uncle ask what if, I realized that there are lots of ways that lives are pummeled by history. If the Trail of Tears is a glacier that inched its way west my uncle is one of the boulders it deposited when it stopped. He had to work the farm, and the farm he worked was what was left of his grandfather's Indian allotment. And then came the Dust Bowl, and then came the war. All these historical forces bore down on him, but he did not break. Compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it. It's good to know where you're from, to know where your beginning is. It really, probably, don't amount to all that much, only just to one's self, you know? It has nothing to do with you getting out here doing what you're going to do tomorrow or a week or two from now. But, at least, if you want to look back, you can look back, maybe on this trip, and say well, I was down in the area there where some of my ancestors originated from, you know? Day five, Tsa-La-Gi. Do you remember this, Amy? What? Do you remember this? Yeah, don't you? Yeah. I mean, we came here once a year. Those columns are a lot smaller than I remembered. I remember them just being these arrows into the sky, and they can't be more than, what? 20 feet tall? Oh, I think they're taller than that. Oh, look. Now we're at-- this is the amphitheater entrance. [SIGHS] Oh, here's where you'd get your program. Walk up here, and there's the statue of Sequoyah. Over there's where the Phoenix would rise again. Over there, isn't that-- oh, down there, on the right, that's where I remember Stand Watie was always throwing a fit. [LAUGHS] I always thought he was over there. Oh, really? Mm-hm. Unfortunately, due to loss of funding, the drama here at Tsa-La-Gi won't be performed this summer. Amy and I sit in the chairs where we first learned about the Trail of Tears and talk about our trip. Our experiences were different. She minored in Native American studies in college. She not only owns a copy of Black Elk Speaks, she could quote from it. And, for her, the trip was about empathy. You know, I've been pretty close to tears sometimes just thinking about the pain, or whatever, like what the kids must have been thinking. When we were driving, I just kept imagining the kids saying, "Where are we going? Where are we going?" You know, like, "What is happening?" I guess I've been thinking about what it really must have been like. I've been thinking about those kids too. But the person I identify with most in this history is John Ross, the principal chief during the Trail of Tears, because he was caught between the two nations. He believed in the possibilities of the American constitution enough to make sure the Cherokee had one too. He believed in the liberties, the Declaration of Independence's promises, and the civil rights the constitution ensures. And, when the US betrayed not only the Cherokee but its own creed, I would guess that John Ross was not only angry, not only outraged, not only confused, I would guess that John Ross was a little brokenhearted because that's how I feel. I've been experiencing the Trail of Tears not as a Cherokee, but as an American. John Ridge, one of the signers of the treaty of New Echota, once prophesied, "Cherokee blood, if not destroyed, will wind its courses in beings of fair complexions, who will read that their ancestors became civilized under the frowns of misfortunes and the causes of their enemies." He was talking about people like my sister and me. The story of the Trail of Tears, like the story of America, is as complicated as our Cherokee-Swedish-Scottish-English-French-Seminole family tree. Just as our blood will never be pure, the Trail of Tears will never make sense. Sarah Vowell, she's put a version of her story about the Trail of Tears into her book, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Nancy Updike and Alix Spiegel. Senior editor for this show, Paul Tough. Contributing editors, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere, Sarah Vowell. Production help from Pat Hannah, Laura Doggit and Sylvia Lemus. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our shows for free or buy tapes. Or, you know, you can download audio of our show at audible.com/thisamericanlife where they have public radio programs, bestselling books, even The New York Times all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatea, who today is hearing our program from Chattanooga and asks. Is it just me, or is this show even better in the Choo Choo? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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At three years old, children have a hard time telling fantasy from reality. By five or six, they operate in both worlds. By the time they're 10, we expect children to be able to distinguish what's real from what isn't real. The process of becoming an adult, you could argue, is the process of learning to tell the truth about the world. But telling the truth is not always so easy. When she was 10 years old, Claire switched schools, moved to a rich suburb. Her family didn't have much money. She became best friends with a girl whose family had immigrated from Chile. Claire started to become obsessed with her. It wasn't really like when we would hang out together that I would idolize her, or that she was like the boss. But like, I'd go home and I would make up these songs about her, and I'd like make up songs about the letters of her name. She had like a really Spanish sounding name. And her phone number, I would just dial it over and over and over again. And I'd make songs about her phone number. Because it's just like everything about her was like golden to me. It was just like absolutely perfect and beautiful. Claire dressed like the Chilean girl, wore only the modest jewelry that a Catholic mom would allow, demanded to go to Sunday School and get First Communion like the Chilean girl did. And then Claire started to tell people that she was Chilean herself. She'd say that her family fled a dictatorship, started over in America. That her family was like her friend's family. I think it was because she was really poor. Like my family was really poor. But she was like such a different kind of poor. You know, she was like the good, righteous poor. You know, it wasn't her fault or her family's fault that they were poor. It was like political oppression and circumstances that made them poor. And they were good, you know, people. And in my family, it was like there was violence and there was drinking and their family-- her mom kept a good house and my family always had like a really messy house. They just-- it wasn't her fault that she was poor. We were poor because we were bad people. Why do you lie? Sometimes you lie because you're powerless to do anything else. And who was more powerless than a 10-year-old child? It definitely carried me through that time. It definitely gave me a sense of like, a sense of pride. It's so weird, you know, that you can like feel pride in something that you're not. And there was just no other way except to lie about it. There were things that were just totally unmoveable and unchangeable. Which was, you know, because I was a kid and my family was the way it was. And there was nothing I could do about it. One summer, Claire went to a Bible retreat in Wisconsin with her mother and her brother. She befriended a girl from Venezuela. It was so natural, Claire says, you know, her being from Chile and all. Yeah, so I told her that I was from there and that I didn't Spanish very well because I wasn't actually born there. That I came here when I was a baby or something, but that my family was from there. So obviously she was going to meet my mother and my brother, who spoke not a word of Spanish and didn't look at all, you know, Central or South American. But I remember hearing that like lots of Nazis moved down there and that, yeah, well, my mom, you know, she has blond hair and, you know, she looks the part, so yeah. That's what happened. And I kind of just decided that like my mom was a German descendant of a relative of some Nazi or something, and that that's where we were from. And that we moved back here because of political oppression. This is how far it went. It was preferable for people to think that they were Nazis than to think they were low income people just living in a rich suburb of Chicago. And one of the most important things about these lies is that Claire says they didn't feel like lies at the time. She said she felt like she was telling people about a part of herself, a real part of herself. You know, if I could convince somebody else for just a little while then I could believe it, too. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Truth and Lies at Age Ten. Today we bring you two stories about people lying to themselves, people lying because they thought they had no choice. And how they slowly came to face the truth, which took decades. Stay with us. Act One, I, Danny. How to deal with rejection. With something so primal as being told no. Being told you're not wanted here. You know, people spend years sometimes going over what happened, thinking it through, turning it over and over in their heads, wondering if they could have done anything differently. Trying to make sense of it. Well, Dan Gediman got a kind of cataclysmic rejection when he was a boy and, powerless to do much else, he lied about it. In this story he returns to the scene of the crime as much as you can and tries to make sense of what happened to him. This is about a lie. A lie I tell almost to this day but not after this day. Anyway, I'm Dan Gediman. Danny. And I was in the first cast of the TV show Zoom. Chances are, Zoom is either something you've never heard of or something you can't forget. And it's probably the only TV show remembered for its address. Zoom was a public TV show for kids in the '70s, produced by WGBH in Boston and aired all over the country. For those of you who've never heard of Zoom, here's a little context from television historian David Kleeman. Zoom was really the first children's television program to put children at center stage, to tell them that their ideas, their works, their creativity was very important. It gave them a chance to submit ideas for the program, to submit art works, to submit pretty much anything that they thought was important in their lives. And then it might appear on the air. But one interesting thing about Zoom as a generational identifier, it's one of those programs where, if you walk up to people who are of that age, who did grow up with Zoom, and say the name, they'll sing the theme song back to you. OK, here goes. [SINGING] Come on and zoom, zoom, zoom-a, zoom. Come on and zoom-a, zoom-a, zoom-a, zoom. We're gonna-- I remembered constantly singing the theme. People who know it show great enthusiasm. They're willing to do the Bernadette Butterfly thing or risk singing the ZIP code. Boston, Mass., 02134. I still have it! It was such a big part of my life and I remember-- like the first time I ever saw a kayak was on Zoom. And I was just dying to be friends with the kids on the show. Or be one of them. [SINGING] Oh come on and zoom, zoom, zoom-a, zoom. We're gonna zoom-a, zoom-a, zoom-a, zoom. [INTERPOSING] That was as much a playground litany as "Ring Around the Rosies" for me growing up. 02134. Yeah. 02134. Send it to Zoom. You know, I haven't sung that in years. [SINGING] Come on and zoom. Come on and zoom, zoom. Come on and zoom. OK. So, suffice it to say, for the purposes of this story at least, Zoom was a big deal. And if you were a cast member of Zoom, you were famous. Zoom was a given every week and I don't ever recall watching it with you, though. Now that I think about it. I don't recall ever watching that show with you. Maybe it was too painful. Did you watch it? Yeah, I watched it. That's my best friend, Adam. And he's right. It was painful. I guess I better tell you my lie now. I wasn't really on the first cast of Zoom. I was almost on the first cast of Zoom. They actually cast me and then they cut me. I can't tell you how horrible this was for a 10-year-old kid, but I guess I can try. That's what I'm doing here. Here's what happened, or at least what I think happened. Memory can protect you from the truth sometimes. I'm sitting in the dining room of my parent's house talking to my parents about Zoom. And I'm sitting around the dining room table. To reconstruct my memory, I tried talking to my parents first. Now I think he told me that he liked certain qualities that you had, one of them was being very forthright. Here's my dad, telling me what he recalls about how I talked to the Zoom producer, Chris Sarson, during the audition process. But some of the things that you said, whether they ticked him off or not, I don't know. But the two I remember is, that you said that they were wearing rugby shirts and when he asked you what did you think of the rugby shirts, you said, they suck. That was what-- 12? How old were you? 10. Well, in those days that was very precocious. I don't know. Maybe it was popular then, too. In any case, I was embarrassed when I heard. Not because of the word, but just I thought, oh gee, there goes the farm. And the other one was the name of the show. And apparently you had told this Chris that you thought that Zoom was not a very good idea, that it was kind of corny or one thing or another. And you suggested, I don't know if you gave them another idea, but you suggested they change the name of the show. And those are two things I remember. My father apparently remembers me as somewhat of a pain in the ass. And I suspect he's right. I was a bit of a-- shall we say-- a show-off. I certainly liked attention. I'd gotten the Zoom audition in the first place through a Sherlock Holmes skit that my dad, my brother, and I did around the family tape recorder. Oh, Holmes! I'm John Alfafa, don't you remember me? Of course, yes, I remember you very well from the club. Yes, yes, yes. How are you? Very fine today. But I have a friend here that would like to meet you. Mr. Watson. Mr. John D. Watson. I see, of course. Yes, he's right here. Of course, you neglected to mention that it's Dr. John D. Watson. Oh, hello, Mr. Holmes. I'm Dr. Watson. Of course you're Dr. Watson. John D. Watson. It looked like it was all set. I think that I'm sure that I was telling everybody that you were going to be in it. And this was the very beginning of Zoom, so it was going to be the very first group. Do you recall at all my excitement about this? I remember being in the kitchen, right around where the sink is, and it was at night, and I was having a little fantasy in my head about what type of house to buy you. OK. What type of house I would buy you with the-- in my mind-- the millions of dollars that were going to be coming in from doing this show. I was sort of imagining, you know, different styles of houses. And you were going to be so proud of me because I was going to move you into this house, like Elvis did with his parents. So this wasn't just a case of me wanting to be famous. I wanted the money, too. I thought I was going to be like Jodie Foster or Johnny Whitaker, from A Family Affair. My dad had been laid off from his engineering job and our family was coming out of some pretty hard times in the early '70s. Or at least it seemed that way to me at age 10. I thought I could save them. I was banking on it. But then it fell apart. And this is where it gets hazy. I know I invented some stories to protect myself. But now I can't exactly remember which ones. And my parents couldn't help. So I decided to embark on a search for the truth about my past. Even though it had been 25 years, I figured, what the hell. I'd contact the members of that first cast of Zoom. I continued to be recognized up till my third year in college. I was registering at NYU, and I was stopped at the front door by someone who recognized me. That's John. I called him up in New York, where he's a playwright now and approaching middle age, like all of us. This is him 25 years ago. She cannot read, read, read. She cannot write, write, write. But she can smoke, smoke, smoke her father's pipe. She asked her mother, mother, mother for fifty-- I thought John could shed some light on my history because he was part of the reason, at least as I remember it, that Chris, the producer, cut me from the cast. And then Chris Sarson told me, I'm afraid we've decided internally that we need to add another girl to the cast. Oh. And there's too many-- we had five boys and two girls. Nina and Nancy. And what Chris told me was that you and John are both sort of little song and dance men. And so we've just sort of arbitrarily decided that John would work out better than you. I can't believe they said that! I cannot believe they said that. Oh my god. And then said to me, but, but, but we're going to roll the cast over in a few months and bring in new kids. And we would like you to be involved then. But my recollection is that I turned down the opportunity to be on the second cast out of youthful hubris. Really? I felt so humiliated. So-- so I-- You can like title this piece, like Misery. Well, I think I felt like, you know, I had my shot. I blew it. I'm no good. Why bother? Yeah, all at age 10. Your life is over at age 10. John was sympathetic and I appreciated that. But he didn't remember any of this incident. And no reason he should, I suppose. Why don't you go ahead and open up the package I gave you? He and I were in different studios for this interview and I'd sent him a photo that he opened while we were talking on the phone to see if he even remembered me. Oh. Oh my goodness. Wow. Oh, look how little we are. Holy smokes. Now this really brings back how young we were. Oh. Now this is you with the blond hair? Oh, man. Does it ring any bell whatsoever? In your suit. Mmmm. I'll take that as a no. Yeah, it really-- you know, I feel, I'm embarrassed. You look like you're a really cute kid. You should have been there. I'm Joe. I'm Nina. I'm Kenny. My name's Tracy. I'm Tommy. I'm Nancy. I'm John. I still have paycheck stubs from back then. I saved them. Next I went to visit Joe, another kid from the first cast. And all the publicity. God, we were in-- we must have been in every single newspaper in the United States. We were in Life magazine, Time magazine. Just what I wanted to hear. It was a great experience. An amazing experience. It's on my CV. Absolutely. I put it on my CV now when I apply for jobs as a psychiatrist. Now Joe is a child psychiatrist. Isn't that perfect? I remember Joe as a nice kid. Very magnetic, thoughtful. I just remember you were blond and you were fun. And it seemed a good fit. I was convinced that you were on the show. I think we all were. But you know, I guess then we never got together after that, did we? No, we didn't. Not until now, all these years later. Talking to Joe, it was like I couldn't help myself, him being a psychiatrist and all. I began to confess. All the kids in my school, I remember them making announcements over the PA system that I was on Zoom. And I was treated, for a brief period of time, from being rather a pariah, to being a celebrity. And then back again, lower, because the kids felt like I had, you know, lied or something. And the year after my whole Zoom deal was really rough. And since then, I'm sure I went through a period where I told some fibs about my experience. If only because it was so humiliating, in my mind, what really happened. You've obviously grown quite a bit. It's to your credit. You must have a good therapist. You know, I think that you actually, of everybody involved in Zoom, probably had the most unique experience. And I can see it as a really devastating experience. Listen. He's treating me. I mean, there you are. You're given the prize and then they say, I'm sorry, you're disqualified. This is tough for anybody, but especially at that age. I mean, your whole self esteem is mixed into this. There you are. Are you good? Aren't you good? Are you talented? Aren't you talented? What is this? You know, I'm not the right sex? If I was a girl I would be able to do this? So I think, you know, I don't envy your position. This is a tough position to be in. It's a tough experience to have had. Joe told me that maybe I've been recreating this past in my relationships, where I might be loved by someone but I'm always thinking that they could change and decide, no, I don't want to love you. And I told them about how I had one set of memories in which I was the one who told Zoom that I didn't want to be a part of it. My guess is if you created this memory where you blew off Zoom instead of the other way around you might have been just a tad on the angry side, don't you think? Just a little annoyed by this whole event. But it's an incredible experience that you had. That needs to be cherished. It is unique. I didn't have that. Thank god. Listen, I know time is up. I had two things I was hoping to do before I walked out the door. One of which-- you probably aren't asked this very often. I'm wondering if you could autograph your picture here. I'm going to ask Tommy to do the same. Listen to me. I'm getting his autograph. Why? Because he's famous. He's Joe, the Zoom kid. Well, I mostly remember speaking to you on the phone, like often during that period, I guess. And you were kind of a wise-cracking, kind of show-bizzy, kind of person that I seem to get along with pretty well. As I do gravitate toward show-biz phonies even now. That's Tommy, another Zoomer from the first cast. He was actually my best friend of that group. We talked all the time on the phone while we were auditioning for the show. Then dip your note in a bucket of lard. In a bucket of lard, yeah. Then Nancy came in. Joe doesn't know what he's talking about. You put it in an envelope, without a doubt. Then everybody came in. Then take your typewriter, pencil, or pen. If you make a mistake, you gotta do it again. I got a real kick out of reminiscing like this. It made me feel like I was still part of things somehow. Tommy really tried to make me feel better. He called me the Pete Best of Zoom, which didn't really help that much, but I knew his heart was in the right place. But what I wanted to know from him was, was it great being a Zoom kid? What did I miss? Was it great being famous? Well, I'm sure that the fame must have went to my head because you've got so many people walking around kissing your ass and telling you how great you are. And just the fact that you're on TV, people look up to you. Just the fact that you're on TV is always like one of the biggest things you can do in America. It doesn't matter how-- what kind of other achievements you can get. Tommy and some of the others from that first Zoom cast went on to try to make it big. They did a commercial TV show and a record, but nothing really panned out. Our parents kind of kept the ball rolling and we got like a lounge band and tried to play live, and then things just kind of started fizzling. When things start fizzling down, they fizzle down pretty quick. Tommy's a video cameraman now. He loves the work, but he still wants to be a rock star. In fact, he gave me a compilation tape of all the bands he's been in over the years, hoping I might use it on this show. The long term effects of this on you, you know. Looking back now, you're 30-- 9? Is that right? OK. It's been 25 years. How has being a Zoom kid affected you long-term? It created my dream to work in this business. A dream that I pursue to this day. So it was a very heavy influence. It's hard to live up to it sometimes. You're really hard pressed to come up with something that's a better, well-known achievement than that. I don't care how many degrees you have, how good you are, or how smart you are. If you're on Zoom, that's what people know you from. So I'll just accept that fact and move on. Kind of depressing. I confess it made me feel a little better though. When I got home from talking to Tommy, I listened to his tape. Once you've done it, it debunks the mystique. Because in real life terms, what it meant was you really couldn't walk down the street without being recognized in some way or scrutinized. This is John again. There were certain events that were sort of traumatizing, like being mobbed. When a year ago, you could go to the mall and just buy your shoes or whatever, I'm with friends and suddenly, hey, there's John. And then three more, three people come and of course, will you sign? Then someone decides, oh, it's a good idea to get an autograph. And suddenly you can't move because they're-- it's what seems like a multitude. Who knows? Probably it was 20 people. They're demanding your time. They're grabbing your arm. I found it incredibly unpleasant. Because they're looking-- they were looking at me and not seeing me. They were seeing some sort of image. And it was sort of a glazy look of excitement and unreality. This kind of helped, hearing this. I began to wonder if maybe I missed something that wasn't so great after all. Whether I wasted a lot of time wishing I was on the show, even pretending sometimes that I was. You know what? I want to ask you a question. I want to ask you if it was true, were you ever really going to be on Zoom? Yes. I called up Karen. She had nothing to do with Zoom, she just watched it. But she was one of my closest friends during that time. I've come to distrust some of my own memories and wonder whether, you know, how much of it was wishful thinking. How much of it was fantasy or dreams or aspirations. And/or what I told people as sort of a cover story. I guess I should get back to my lie, in the spirit of full disclosure. Here's exactly what my lie was. I let people believe that I, Dan Gediman, was Danny. The Danny. The real Danny on Zoom. Was there a kid on the show named Danny? Yes. And I remember trying to make him be you. Because I wanted you to be on that show so much. I though, well, maybe that's Danny. Maybe he just looks very different on television, and sounds different. He was actually in the second cast. I didn't really intend to impersonate him or anything, but some of the time I would just kind of go with it and say, yeah, I was Danny. Which, technically speaking, was true. And they would get all excited and think that they were with a celebrity. So I did get some mileage out of that. Oh, I was totally impressed. This is my friend, Angela. Yeah, I couldn't believe I knew somebody who had actually been on Zoom. It would be like knowing, you know, the guy who did Oscar the Grouch or something. But then I was very sorry to hear that you were kicked off. I think you would have made a fine Zoomer. Actually, I think-- oh, I know what my response was. My response was, you weren't Danny, were you? That's what it was. Now, if that had been the case I don't know what I would have done. If I'd really been Danny? If you'd really been Danny, I'd-- you know, it'd probably be almost like-- not quite-- well, it wouldn't exactly be like meeting Donny Osmond. But it would have been up there, I would say. Yeah. So you were disappointed when you found out-- I wasn't disappointed. But you know, it was a nice little thought there for a moment, that maybe you might have actually been him. You know, I think everyone I talked to really wanted to make me feel better. It's OK that you weren't the real Danny. You're a perfectly good Danny. By the way, do you know the real Danny? See, that's the problem, isn't it? Fame makes you more real. And it's funny, we protect children from other adult experiences that have this kind of power, but not from this one. We don't let them drive cars or smoke or get married, but we let some of them be famous, and the other ones yearn for it. And here's something else. WGBH is starting the whole thing up again. They're reviving Zoom right now. They have a new cast, a new director. It's already hitting the airwaves in some markets. Back when our parents were young, they had the first interactive show for kids. That was then and this is now! A brand new Zoom. It's hip, it's hot, and it's for our generation. So I went back to Boston and dropped by. I wanted to see the new kids, imagine their futures, guess at their fame. What happened when you were finally told, all right, you're in? Well, I was at my friend's house and my mom called me. I answered the phone and she said, Haley, you're in Zoom, and I was screaming so loud. My friends started screaming. They didn't know what they were screaming about. Then when I came home, everybody was jumping up and down in the driveway. So that was fun. Have you thought at all about when it happens-- when I was your age and I was going through this, I gave a lot of thought to, oh my god, I'm going to be famous. You know? Have you thought at all about what it would be like to be famous? Yes. That'd be awesome. And if I did become famous, I'd try out for tons more stuff. But I don't really care about being famous. I just like-- I've been in plays. And it's no different from being in like any TV show. I just like it because it's fun, and I like to do this kind of stuff. But that'd be awesome if I was famous. I'm Haley! Awesome. Yeah. Like Danny. The real Zoom Danny, who I finally tracked down in Marlborough, Massachusetts, where he's working now as a musician. I called him up. [SINGING] Come on and zoom. Come on and zoom, zoom. Come on and zoom. Come on and zoom, zoom. How's that? That sounds great. Thanks. Great song. I have spent almost 25 years, since my own involvement briefly with Zoom, being mistaken for you. No. My name is Danny. You've never seen me, but I have-- when I was the age-- we're about the same age. And I had long, blond hair down to my shoulders. Thick Boston accent, it's gone now. And we actually resembled each other a little bit. So as my teen years progressed, I would oh, meet somebody, often a member of the opposite sex, and I would start to tell them the story of how I almost got on Zoom, and they would look at me, and they would kind of size me up. And they'd say, you're Danny. I remember you. You're Danny. That's funny. And I have to be honest with you, I did not always correct them. That's great. That's funny. OK. I confessed. I'll skip over this part, but basically Danny was nice about it. Maybe a little embarrassed for me. Maybe a little flattered. Like Tommy, he sent me a tape of the band he's in, just in case I wanted to use it in this show. Here it is, by the way. I told Danny about my friend Angela and how she was in love with him, second only to Donny Osmond. And he was flattered by that. So I asked him a favor, to say hi to her. To give her kind of a radio autograph. If we could take 15 seconds, we would make this woman's day. She's now in her early 30s. And just send a message out there to Angela. Hi Angela, this is Danny from Zoom, and I heard you were my biggest fan. It's great to get an opportunity to thank you for watching Zoom and being a fan of mine. That means a lot to me. And I do get around. If you're ever up in the Boston area, look me up and it'd be great to get together and say hi in person. Take care and best of luck to you. See how his voice sounds? He knows he's the real Danny, that he can improvise a long paragraph like that to a complete stranger, a stranger who he assumes would want to look him up if they ever came to town. And in fact, he's probably right. He did it. He was a Zoomer. It's part of him. Like Joe the psychiatrist says. It satisfied a very important part of my life, you know, that sense of having had that fame, having had that sense of being somebody special. And I don't need to do that anymore. It's nice. You've just got to go on. Do you remember me at all? Oh, sure. I don't remember your audition, and I don't remember-- although I certainly hope when I open the envelope I'll get a chance to see your face. Ground zero of my search. Chris Sarson, the producer who rejected me. He's sitting in a studio in Boulder, Colorado, and I'm in a studio in Kentucky. Why don't you go ahead and open up the envelope I sent you and see if this does any good to jog your memory. This was awkward. It's like Christmas. Christmas revisited. I kind of put him on the spot. Good heavens. I remember you much better now. As I suspected, he didn't really remember who I was, but he was nice about it. It's a picture of presumably you, but it doesn't have-- oh, wait a minute, there's a note. This is me-- Obviously this moment was a lot bigger in my life than in his. Well, let me tell you what I recall of what happened and how I came to not be picked for the cast, et cetera. And tell me if this sounds plausible. OK. I'm blushing already. I wish we'd picked you! Well, you know, what can you do? This is what I recall. So I told him what I remembered. And he thought my memory was probably right, but he wasn't sure. And by this time, I've realized it doesn't matter much anyway. And that's incredibly liberating. Correct me if I'm wrong, nobody really went on to a major showbiz career. Well, I think it's lovely where the kids did end up. Chris told me about the other cast members. Most of them went on to lead a variety of perfectly ordinary lives. None are big stars. One sings with a symphony. There are teachers, doctors, musicians. One was homeless for a while, and some reported having trouble in the aftermath of their brief fame on Zoom. They were profoundly embarrassed that they'd been on that kid's show, you know, and one guy said that it wasn't until about three or four years ago that he was able to get out and finally admit without shame that he was on the Zoom cast. So it may not have been all rosy if you'd got on the show, Dan. OK, I understand that now. I really do. Chances are, it wouldn't have changed my life. But still, I'd take it. That special time, that attention. When all is said and done, I'd take my chances. I'd rather be a Zoom kid than just a kid. Wouldn't you? But it's OK. I'm still in the game. I write songs now. As a matter of fact, that's me singing one of my original tunes in the background. And I'd like you to know that my tape is available by the way. The name is Dan Gediman, not Danny. Dan Gediman's story was produced by Jay Allison as part of Jay's Life Stories series, which is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. Coming up, a childhood of lies that may have saved a life. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we try to document every day life in these United States. Today's show, Truth and Lies at Age Ten. We've arrived at the second of our two stories, about children who lie to themselves, who lie to others, and who try to stop lying once they get to be adults. Act Two, Truth or Consequences. Mary J. Pruka was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was two years old. CF is a degenerative disease that primarily affects the lungs. As your condition worsens your lungs fill with fluid and you have to do hours of respiratory therapy every day to clear out that fluid. Over time it gets so bad that you cannot clear that fluid. Essentially, you drown. Few children with CF live past the age of 18. When Mary Kay was little, understandably, nobody told her that she would die so young. When she went to the doctor, she saw how nervous her mother was. She knew it was something serious. But I don't remember myself ever knowing how serious it was or knowing fully what it meant. And I don't think I asked the questions, maybe, that I needed to ask to find out. And I can only assume that maybe I didn't want to know the answers or I just-- I guess that. That I just didn't want to know the answers. I was, I would guess, in the area of about seven years old. Truth and lies at age seven. That's when I first learned that CF was a deadly disease. And I had gone off to a CF summer camp for the first time. And I was real nervous about going, but as soon as I got there I felt very comfortable. I was put into a cabin with maybe 12 other girls, and we had a leader whose name was Beth. And I immediately clicked with her, I was her shadow the entire week. And during the camp we would have an early breakfast, and then afterwards we would go and do respiratory therapy. And at that time, I was not doing respiratory at home on a routine basis. But I noticed that some of the other children at camp needed this. They had to do this every day. And I just kind of sat back and watched. I really didn't feel like I was a participant in that, or that I had the same disease that all these other children had. And so I wasn't forced that first year to really think about why I was there. I was very excited to go back. And my first question, when I got there, was where's Beth? She was the one who, the first year, who I palled around with and followed. Here I go. I just remember that she wasn't there. And that they told me that she had died of CF. And I thought, oh my god. You know? I have CF and nobody ever told me I was going to die. And I think a real panic set in. My first thought was, I've got to get out of here. I've got to leave right now and go home. And I remember I just cried. I cried. I didn't tell anybody, I didn't say to anybody, I'm scared, I didn't know that people could die of CF. So it was my aunt and uncle who came and picked me up along with their kids. And they're all saying, you're a baby. Why are you crying to come home? You know, I really think I believed that if we talked about the possibility that I would die, it could happen. Just saying the words would be enough to make it happen. So even if I got nervous about it, or I had discussions with myself about it, if I didn't verbalize it I would be safe. Or even to say it and let my mom hear it would be even worse. Because I saw that she was afraid of it and she didn't talk about it. So this must be the best way to handle it, is to just not talk about it. I know my parents were devastated by it. I know my mom's initial reaction was that if we just stay positive and maybe not think about it, the bad won't happen. We'll just focus on today and we'll raise her like the other two children. And that was her way of handling it and not thinking about or dealing with the possibility that I might not live long. But my dad and I have never talked about it. I've tried on a number of occasions to have conversations with him about it. And in my 20s, my CF began to progress, and I began to get worse. And I didn't see my dad very often, so I had a feeling that he didn't know this was happening. And at that point, I began to have frequent hospital stays. And I would call him and say, Dad, I'm in the hospital, for example. And he'd say, oh, OK. And I'd say, well, I'm here for IV therapy. And he'd say, OK, so what else is new? As if there's something else new when you're in the hospital. And I can remember him-- or even changing the subject to, what have your sister and brother been up to? Truth and lies at age 15. Through the teenage years I think I lived in a fog, like I think a lot of teenagers do. You don't-- you just don't think about the serious life issues that you have to think about. And I think all teenagers think they're invincible. Even when you have a disease, you think you're invincible. Even though you have hard facts in front of you. So I just didn't think about it. I really was able to get away without thinking about it. I really didn't think beyond now. The right now. Truth and lies at age 18. At college, for the first time, Mary started to face up to the facts of her situation. And, as it often happens, she was forced into doing this because she faced a crisis in her own life. And what started the crisis was the fact that, for the first time in her life, she was at a place where she had to think about the future. College is about the future. And everybody around Mary Kay had a plan, a purpose, while she had nothing like that. Meanwhile she was getting sicker, having coughing fits more often, and she was starting to change in other ways. But the summer before I went away to Southern Illinois University, I met my husband. And on our first dinner date-- whenever I had a dinner date, or any time I was eating a meal with friends, I had to take my pills. And there was 10 large capsules, so it wasn't anything I could hide at the table. And oftentimes, most times, I would go into the bathroom and take them, so as not to make a scene. And on our first dinner date, I remember boldly taking them out and swallowing them down, knowing that he was going to ask me what I was doing. And I think in some ways I was challenging him. Go ahead. Go ahead and ask me what this means. And I knew this was going to be, either he was going to accept it and it would be OK. Or it was going to be like past times where no questions were asked, and I got the feeling they didn't want to know anyway, and so we didn't talk about it. And his first reaction was, what is that? And what does that mean? And what is cystic fibrosis? And then that week, he must have asked me 50 questions. And I remember thinking, my god, he's really interested. And he was probably the first person that asked the questions and I answered them. But I think I'd reached a point where I said, I'm not going to pretend this doesn't exist anymore. It's a part of me. This is who I am. And I need to start talking about it. When I went away to SIU I felt very homesick. And I think I really begin to think, at that point, that I had met somebody who I wanted to spend all of my time with. That I was now wasting precious time that I had, being away at school, that I should be spending with him. And I was beginning to have the sense that I don't know how long I have. And I need to now-- now that I have something that I want to do-- I need to do this and I need to leave school. But something else happened during this time. This is something that may be very minor for some people, but this was a really big deal for me, is that I got braces during this time. And for me that was a big, big step in planning for the future. Because I remember thinking-- it was a big expense-- and for me, it was the first time that I really took on an expense for myself. And I remember thinking to myself, now, am I going to die in a couple years anyway? And this is the biggest purchase I had ever made. And I thought, do I really want to get braces and invest all of this into my-- you know, into my teeth and into my looks? And how long am I really going to live anyway? And just getting-- in just making that decision and deciding to go ahead and get braces, for me, it meant that I had enough confidence in the future, even if it only meant the next five to seven years. I had to sort of weigh, well, if I live only five years, will it be worth the investment? And I thought, yeah, it's worth the investment. My health was starting to decline. It was starting to now become something I had to think about every day. And amazingly, at that time, John decided that he was going to be the person to do my respiratory therapy every day. And in order to do respiratory therapy, the object is to loosen the secretions in my lungs. And as the disease progresses, my lungs begin to fill up with fluid every day. And if I didn't get the fluid out I couldn't breathe. And so what he would do is he would just get behind me and start to pound on my back at the different lobes of my lungs. And that would loosen the secretions. And then by using his hands on my back, in a sort of vibration, I could then cough out the secretions. And there's nothing pretty about it. It's very disgusting. And this is just something that you can't imagine couples sharing. Or you would think if you met somebody, you would be embarrassed to involve them in, in respiratory therapy. But when we finished doing the respiratory therapy, and I could breathe better, he felt better. And it is-- it is very intimate. We would sometimes joke about it. We were forced to spend this time together. If we had had an argument five minutes earlier, it had to be done and over with, because I needed to breathe. And so we called it our therapy. Besides being respiratory therapy, our couple therapy. And it was intimate and that it would bring us together. And we were forced to sit and do this. We got engaged when we were both 23 years old. We had been dating now for four years. And this was a big, big step for me. Getting engaged. And we had a great wedding. I was terrified the whole day. I was just very nervous. Because this meant so much. It meant that I believed I was going to have a future. And it meant that for everybody in the room, and everybody in the church, that they believed I believed I had a future. And I wondered, how many people behind me are doubting? Are thinking I'm kidding myself? I was always afraid people thought I was kidding myself. And I even wondered, am I kidding myself? Or who am I fooling, to think that I'm going to get married today and have a whole future ahead? I had one really bad episode at the reception. And that was, I was having increased trouble breathing around this time. And I had just begun having episodes of hemoptysis. And that is when bleeding starts in the lungs and you start to just cough up blood and choke on blood. And during the reception I was dancing and there was a bunch of people dancing. And we were actually playing a game of musical chairs and the men were all the chairs. They were getting down on one knee so the women could sit on their knee. And this was kind of happening like a musical chairs game. And just as the game was over, I had the real familiar cough. And I started to feel my chest filling with blood. And it's just a horrifying feeling of panic. And I knew what was going to happen. I had a white gown on and I just ran to the bathroom. And started coughing up blood. And so that kind of just changed the whole mood then of the day for me. Because that was-- this was the one day that I was not going to think about CF, and there it was, right in my face. Truth and lies at age 24. Mary Kay's health deteriorated. Her lungs were failing. She tried to get answers about her condition from her doctor who only told her not to worry. So ready to face the truth, she got another doctor, one who told her that she was in the final stages of the disease. It was a rather jolting dose of reality. Mary Kay told her mother that she hated her new doctor, would never see the new doctor again. This feeling didn't last. Mary Kay started to investigate more aggressive treatments for CF with her doctor. Finally, at the age of 30, Mary Kay was in her kitchen reaching for a glass and suddenly she began choking and coughed up a bowl of blood. When doctors tried to operate, she had a stroke on the operating table. They signed her up for a lung transplant, which they only do if they think you don't have much longer to live. Mary Kay waited 13 months for a donor. I remember Christmas time in December that I really began to think that this really, really might be my last Christmas. And I really had an awful Christmas. I spent the day-- I spent the day imagining next Christmas and my family not having me there. And I couldn't help imagining this picture without me. And what would it be like? And what would my family be like? And how would they handle my death. I had finally had a conversation with my mom. And I told her that I was afraid to die. And she said, I know. And she hugged me. And that was a big moment for us. Because we had never-- she knew I was afraid, and this was our fear all along. And we had never really verbalized it. And we were just standing in my bedroom and she was helping me get dressed or something like that. And I just said, you know, this disease just might get me. I really thought I might beat it, but I don't know anymore. And she just said, we just have to get those lungs. We just have to keep praying for those lungs. And so that's what we did. And I just-- we just hoped all the time. Every time I watched the news, I would-- it sounds really terrible-- but I would hear of an accident and I would think, you know, that's really a shame. But I wonder if they'll donate the organs. And you feel terrible thinking that way. And I remember my mom telling me that she had thoughts like that. And she felt terribly guilty after thinking that. But I spent a lot of time preoccupied with death during that time. Truth and lies at age 31. After 13 months, Mary Kay got her transplant. She said that she had never experienced before this what it was like to be healthy. She did not even know how to imagine what it was going to be like. Suddenly she could breathe. The purpose of her life was no longer simply staying alive. Now she's 33 years old. Since her transplant, she's had two children, twin girls. And though one of the central struggles of her life has been to learn to face the truth about her own disease, she says there is a time and place for lying to yourself. About the age of 10, I don't think I was very honest with myself about the illness that I had. I honestly don't think I would have it differently at that point. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had been told early on that I was probably going to die at the age of, you know, in my teen years, for example. Which is, I believe, what my mother was being told at that time. I think that news in itself can be crippling. And because I wasn't feeling the effects of the disease yet, I don't believe I needed to know it then. But I have to look back and wonder if the fact that I did so well has something to do with the ignorance that I had at that time. Mary J. Pruka, she spoke with reporter Adam Davidson. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] editor, Paul Tough. Contributing editors, Jack Hitt, [? Margie Rocklin, ?] and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from [? Sylvia Leemis, ?] [UNINTELLIGIBLE] [? Davenport ?], and [? Laura ?] [? Doggett ?], who interviewed Claire, the non-Chilean woman at the beginning of our broadcast. Dan Gediman has asked us to mention that his CD can be purchased at 1-800-BUY-MYCD. And we would like to take a moment to point out that Mary Kay Pruka's life was saved, and she had two beautiful baby girls who are actually here in our studio today, only because somebody signed the organ donor release on the back of their driver's license. We don't usually say this kind of the thing on the show, but I would urge you to consider taking out your license right this second and signing up right now. If you want to buy a cassette of our program, you can call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. 312-832-3380. 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] Or you know you can listen to nearly all of our shows for free on the internet, www.thislife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who walks into our studio after each and every show with this request. You're not asked this very often, I'm wondering if you could autograph your picture here. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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It's a typical camp, all the normal activities-- canoeing, archery, sports. There are two girls who everybody calls the homesick girls, who will cheerfully identify themselves that way to anybody they meet. She wants to go home. I do. I swear to God, I want to go home. I want to go home too. Because it's a pretty upscale camp, there's also horseback riding. And on the rifle range, suburban girls from Chicago's North Shore lay on their bellies in sniper position while a real former Israeli soldier barks orders about how to shoot. I know it's really hard for you ladies to keep it quiet, but try, OK? Aim and fire. [GUNSHOTS] The boys' cabins are all named after Indian tribes. The girls' cabins are all named after women's colleges. So perky little suburban kids are constantly informing you, I'm an Apache, I'm Mohawk, I'm in Vassar, I'm in Bryn Mawr. And it seems pretty simple, but everybody here will tell you, no one back home understands it. None of their friends, nobody. There is just a gap between camp people and non-camp people. All the time during school, I'm like, I want to go to camp. I want to do this. Camp is all I talk about during the year. My friends get so mad at me, they're like we don't want to hear about camp anymore. Because everything that goes on at home, you can always think of something that relates something that happened at camp. And so then you tell that, and they'll be like, camp? We've heard about camp way too much. It's little stories you tell, and you think they're so funny and everybody in your cabin understands them. And then you go home and you're laughing, and they give you a look like what are you talking about? Like, that's stupid. Well, today on our program, we try to bridge the gap between camp people and non-camp people. We try to understand what is the cult-like, mystical connection some people feel with their summer camps. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Notes On Camp. Six different notes, some recorded at a summer camp, and some amazing stories that actually came from you, people who listen to this program and called us up to talk camp. Stay with us. Most of today's program takes place in Michigan, not far from Paw Paw. Two affiliated camps, Greenwoods and Lake of the Woods, one is a boys camp, one's a girls camp. But they sit on the same land, they share everything. Basically they function as one camp. Producer Julie Snyder and I spent a fair amount of time there. Julie usually hung out with the girls, I usually stayed with the boys. Here then, our findings. Note number one. Mr. Popular. Let's try the chorus again, because something in that last part is weird. Counselors David Himmel and Dean Hines practice a song for Saturday night's camp show. Ready? OK. [SINGING] And even Hitler had a girlfriend who he could always call. She'd always be there for him, in spite of all his faults. He was the worst guy ever, vile and despised. Even Hitler had a girlfriend, so why can't I? [SPEAKING] It goes too high there. That's the problem, it's going too high. [SINGING] Even Hitler had a girlfriend, so why can't--? David Himmel has been coming to this camp since he was 11. Now he's a counselor and a sailing instructor, a college sophomore. A boy with clear, blue eyes who actually has no trouble getting a girlfriend. Like a lot of campers and counselors we met at this camp, he says that all the best moments of his life have either been at camp or with camp people. Camp, it's number one with everything I do, I guess. Camp-- it's kind of ridiculous, but it's everything. It changes people's lives. People base their life around camp. I would not be who I am if it wasn't for camp. Who would you be? I don't know. I think I enjoy things better now because of camp. When you live so close to people like this-- and it's sort of like college-- but everybody at camp is just real close knit. It's like a bond that just happens. And that's why a day at camp is two weeks in real life. It's like a time warp here. And people at summer camp treat David with a deference that few of us get in real life. He and I are walking around camp one day when a group of 13 year old girls comes up to us. He is the best counselor. This is my fan club. He's the best counselor in the world and we love him so much. What makes him the best counselor in the world? He takes us sailing. He takes us sailing. He's cool, we made him all this food, made him a song. And we have a song for him. Let me hear his song. You guys don't know it. I'll sing it. [SINGING] All across the big lake, Davey's the one that keeps us awake. We got the rudder, we got the sail. Davey [CLAP] he's our male. We got a D- A- V- E- Y. We got a D- A- V- E- Y. We got a D- A- V- E- Y. Davey, he's our guy. D-A-V-E-Y, Davey, Davey. D-A-V-E-Y, Davey's number one. Davey's number one, Davey's number one. D-A-V-E-Y, Davey's number one. Whoo. Time for lunch. Everyone get out of your cabins. Please head over to get some delicious food. That means stop playing ping pong right now. Let's go, go to lunch. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. La comida. I sit next to Dave at lunch one day. In the mess hall, everybody at camp eats together, and it is constant singing. The girls have their own traditional songs, the boys have theirs. Most of the cabins have songs of their own. After the oldest girls' cabin sings their cheer-- which, by tradition, is chanted so quickly that none of the boys and none of the younger girls can figure out what the words are-- the oldest boys cabin, the Mohawks, stands to respond. Dave turns to me. I made that up. What are the words? Well, it's a radio version of the original Mohawk-- it's called the Mohawk Song. It goes Mohawk once, Mohawk twice, holy jumping, golly gee, cheese whiz, we're the best that ever lived. And it's a clean version. There's a dirty version with swear words in it. And we started singing it at lunch. We kept on getting in trouble, so I said we got to make a clean one. Radio edit. And it just popped into my head. And it's kind of cool hearing that. I started all these things. Like what else? When somebody has a birthday, we sing Happy Birthday to them-- and this is kind of dumb, but I get a kick out of it-- we go happy birthday to you, and last year I went, whoo. And now everybody does it. And it just kind of cool, you make stuff up and--. It survives. David's a force. David is the one who people turn to. David is the man, at least when it comes to some things. The night of the last camp dance, David wanders the grounds, keeping his eye out for the 13 year old boys in his cabin. He spots two of them sitting with two girls, and he says to me. You got four 13 year olds just chilling in a circle. Sitting on the ground. Sitting on the ground Indian style. It's like a powwow. And Dan is with Amanda and he's going to try and kiss her tonight. Has he ever kissed a girl? That's what I asked. I said, have you ever kissed a girl? He said, not French. I said, do you got the gall to do it? Can you do it? Do you need some pumping up? He's like, no, I got it. Which one's Amanda? Amanda is the one with the hair braid. The beads in her hair? Yeah. Now Dan is just sitting there kind of quiet. He's not really saying very much. He's a quiet kid. He doesn't really say anything unless he has something to say. Hey buddy. He's a cool kid. How do you think he's doing? In the cabin or in general? No, how do you think he's doing over there right now at this moment? I think he's doing good. She's really into him. In that hair thing, she's got three beads that says A heart D, Amanda loves Dan. And I talked to her, ask how's Dan? Oh, he's fine. You like him? Yeah. So I think he's doing good. One of the things he most likes about camp, David tells me, is the constant, ongoing drama. It is a soap opera. And David is one of the people who's always making up skits and songs based on the hundred inside jokes that are at the heart of any camp humor. Later that night, after the dance, all of David's 13 year olds are back in the Cheyenne cabin, getting ready for bed. And David gets a report from each one. Keith? What? What are you smiling about? Nothing. And Dan? Nothing happened? We just talked the whole night. We were just sitting there. I don't know. [INTERPOSING VOICES] We were just talking the whole night about really nothing. And then, just after we-- I didn't get anywhere, I just hugged her at the end. I didn't really get anywhere. If you'd tried, do you think you could have? Yeah, I would have. It's your fault then. No it's her fault. Why is it her fault? Because she didn't-- I could have made a move, I guess. But she didn't-- it's her fault, because she--. She's not going to make the move. I think she likes you. You got to go for it. She's got that thing in her hair, one of the kids says. They all resolve that Dan will get another chance. David's got his back. David will see that things go OK for him. Note number two, Fear. Sure, kids today, so sophisticated. They have email and PlayStation. It is encouraging, then, to realize that if you get them living in the woods a few weeks, they can be entertained by some of the most stupidly primitive forms of entertainment available since the dawn of civilization. I'm talking about scary stories. Every camp has got them. This is so true you do not even need me to tell this to you. 12 year olds know this. You know how every camp has a little ghost story? Ours is about this-- We have the story of Turtleman. I'll tell it. OK, Sarah will tell it. The Turtleman story? All right, I'll tell it. You help me out if I do it wrong. A long, long time ago, there was this counselor who was really mean to all of his campers and everything. I can't remember how many years ago it was, but supposedly there was this counselor, and he was dishonorably discharged from the military. And he was real, real mean to all the campers. He always took their food and stuff, and like, stole their clothes and stuff like that. He would beat them and everything. And his campers were so afraid of him. And he said if you tell anybody about me. He said if you tell anyone about me, then I'll kill you. And he would read their letters so they couldn't write home and tell about it. And one year, these campers had a foot locker filled with fireworks. And he found them and he took them from them. And so on the Fourth of July, the guys were like, he's so mean, we should try and kill him ourselves. We're not really this vicious here. So they put fireworks under his bed. And once he had fallen asleep, they all went up there and they like lit--. No, he was smoking. He was smoking a cigarette. And then I guess they could smoke in the cabins. I mean, it was many, many years ago. I guess there wasn't a law. And he took and he put the fireworks underneath his bed, and he fell asleep. And a cigarette fell out of his hand and into the footlocker. The fireworks got lit and he exploded. He ran into the lake on fire. And supposedly, he's still alive. Every Fourth of July, he comes back and he takes revenge on a camper and pulls him into the lake. Every Fourth of July, he comes out of the lake and takes someone in for his next victim. But what really happens on the Fourth of July is either a counselor or one of the Mohawks, without asking anyone, goes into the lake and comes out and scares the heck out of everyone. Some of them really believe it, so it's cool. The older kids are funny in how they handle the ghost stories with the little kids. When producer Julie Snyder was interviewing a group of girls about Turtleman during arts and crafts one day, there was this moment. 12 year olds Rebecca Stern and Sarah Turkisher were talking about how they used to believe in Turtleman a few years ago when they were little, when suddenly some of the younger girls sitting around, Jenny Mayer and Nicole Horn, piped up, asking, well is it true? And then the older girls, unsure of what to say, in the course of 17 seconds take every possible position on the issue. Here's the tape. And then you tell all the little kids, but you're kind of cautious--. It's not true, it it? No. You said it was true. It is true. You made it up, though. It's a legend. There's always a legend of camp. So is it true or isn't it true? You'll never know. Time does not tell. You'll find out. The 10 year olds seem to sit on the cusp of belief and disbelief when it comes to stories like this. For them, talking about these stories is just part of the process of trying to puzzle out, how does the world exactly work. When you're 10, remember, people are constantly telling you scary stories, of murders, of kids with guns. And the thing is, a lot of those stories are true. So you're still figuring out where is the line between fiction and nonfiction. One Saturday night, Aaron Etchler had all of his fellow 10 year olds in the Sioux cabin completely worked up by telling them the story of Candyman. Candyman, if you know this story, appears and kills you if you say his name 10 times. Aaron said that a friend of his had died this way. He said his friend died from Candyman. He was crying last night because of Candyman. I was this close to killing myself because it was so scary. And that freaked me out hysterically. We had to leave the bathroom light on last night, because I keeped on saying, turn on the bathroom light on man, I'm so scared. We kept our light on the whole night because we were so scared. What could be more fun than getting scared like that? Nearly all of them had trouble sleeping. So much trouble that they were not allowed to tell any scary stories Sunday night at lights out. So instead, they tried something else, an experiment. I joined them after dark, after evening activity, right before lights out in their cabin. Who's ready? Let's do it. OK guys, ready to be chantful. [INTERPOSING VOICES] I'm Alex. and we're going to do a little seance over Bloody Mary. We're going to go into the bathroom. I think our whole cabin's going to because this is going to be a great time. What you're going to probably see is a bloody face when you say Bloody Mary forty times. You'll see the bloody face of Bloody Mary. In the mirror? Yes. Face in the blood, very ugly. It's going to be scary. I squeeze into the tiny bathroom with 12 10 year old boys. Some of the boys hold their arms as if they're cradling a baby. If you act like you have a baby in your hands and you say Bloody Mary 50 times, then you will have actually a dead baby in your hands. And why a baby? It's Bloody Mary's baby they say. She threw it up in the air and she didn't catch it and it fell. That's the story? [INTERPOSING VOICES] It's called Blue Baby. It's called Blue Baby. Baby Blue, not Blue Baby. It's time to do this Bloody Mary bloody thing. Turn off the lights. Let's get scared. Ready? One, two. [CHANTING] Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary. They're 10. In a couple of years, there'll be cynics in the bunch, and they'll all be competing to prove they're too cool to believe in stuff like Bloody Mary. But for now, we all watch the mirror. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary. Stop. Crap, it doesn't-- how many times did you do it? 40 times. They're so ready to believe that when the face doesn't appear in the mirror, their first explanation is that maybe you need to chant 50 times, not 40. And then--. I felt a baby in my hands. I felt a baby in my hands. It worked. I felt a baby in my hands. So did I. You're supposed to go like this. So did it work? Yeah, it worked in a different way than we expected it to, but you felt Baby Blue in your hands. It took a while after that for them to settle into their beds. When I left half an hour later, it did not seem like anybody was going to be falling asleep very quickly. Notes on Camp three, You. A few weeks ago, we invited your stories about camp, and you responded. So many of you with so many great camp stories, here is a selection. When I was five, my parents got divorced. And my father remarried the day after. In fact, he eloped to South Dakota, because in Minnesota, you had to wait six months between your divorce and remarriage. And then when I was eight, my mom died. And we were adopted by a nice, young couple, my sister, brother, and I. And I remember one year, we went to a long weekend type of religious camp that was sponsored through our church. But it had counselors there from a lot of different churches. And there was this one guy there that looked just like my dad. And I must have been, I don't know, 9 1/2, 10. I was convinced that that was my father, and that he had realized the error of his ways. I had imagined that there must be some prohibition on him contacting the kids after he put them up for adoption, and I just thought this was his way of checking on us. And I would say things, like leading statements like, do you remember when I was little and you fixed my dolly Peaches? Of course he just looked at me like I was nuts. He must have thought, what an odd little girl. But I was sure, and I told my sister, Tracy, isn't that Dad? And she said, no, of course not. But I was sure. Somehow it made me feel better, as strange as that seems. For that long weekend, that was my dad. My mother emigrated to the United States from Germany in the '50s. And her understanding of American culture and traditions wasn't always quite clear. And one of her confusions was about summer camp. She knew that kids should go to summer camp, but she didn't realize that it usually involved 24 hour adult supervision. So one week she drove us up to a campground on the coast of Malibu and set us up in this tent, and left us some groceries, and then she drove home to go back to work. So I was left in charge of my brothers, and I was 12, and my brothers were 10 and 7. And we were at summer camp. We played in the ocean. We played in the little stream that ran by our camp site. We picked things and tried to figure out whether they were edible. And the only problem that we had, really, was that we had to keep it a secret that our parents weren't there. And this involved lots of stealth and subterfuge. We would notice that campers were looking over in our direction at some point and kind of wondering where our parents were. So in the morning, when we got ready to go to the beach, I would unzip the tent and yell into the tent, bye Mom, bye Dad. We're going to the beach, see you later. And hope that we'd be overheard doing this, and my brothers kind of picked up on this. One of them, when he would see a man in the car driving out of the campground, if he was alone, he would yell after him, bye Dad, don't forget the Popsicles, as if the guy in the car were going to get us some groceries. We were pretty obsessed with groceries. And a week later my mom came back. We had called her and told her how much we hated summer camp. And she thought that we were extremely spoiled, because we didn't appreciate this great outdoor experience that was obviously a big part of American life. The first year I went, I was 10 years old. And that was a kind of a fluke, because my parents were very committed left-wingers, and they wouldn't let me join the Girl Scouts because my mother called them a bunch of little brown shirts. And they wouldn't let me go to a fashionable summer camp, because they didn't believe in fashion. So my father asked a friend where his kids went, and his kids went to this very left wing, Zionist camp. And so they got me in. But we had one day at lunch time, a rock came through the window of the dining hall, and it landed in my soup, and there was a note wrapped around the rock. And it said, we don't want no Jew camps in Wisconsin. And so of course, being a highly political group of people, they got together and they had discussions and they went on and on. And they posted guards. We had to paint our faces black so we wouldn't show up at night and so on. And so a bunch of us were sitting in the dining hall, and somebody said, look, out on the lawn. And there was this large cross burning out on the lawn of the campgrounds. And these people came in, and they were all wearing white sheets, and they had these white things over their heads like pillowcases, and they made us all go outside. And there was another guy in a white sheet and a white pillowcase riding up and down on a horse. And they started to yell at us that they wanted the lousy Jews out of Wisconsin, and that they didn't want no Jew camps in Wisconsin. And they said, don't bother trying to call the authorities, because in this neck of the woods, we are the authorities. And everybody was just petrified. And we all stood around shaking in our boots. And all of a sudden, one of the counselors said, I'm an American citizen. You can't treat me like this. So two of the guys in sheets grabbed him by the arms and marched him away. And another counselor said, I'm an American citizen. You can't treat us like this. And pretty soon, all the counselors were being marched away, and we were all left there. And I got really frightened. So I went, I'm an American citizen too. And somebody came over in a white sheet and took me down towards the beach. And as he was marching me down to the beach he said to me, Adina, couldn't you have kept your big mouth shut? And it was all a political lesson that we were supposed to be learning. Anyway, I was seven, and it was church camp. And several men dressed in black holding machine guns entered the chapel at different areas. They immediately tied the hands of the four pastors on stage and held a gun on the main pastor. I think as soon as the man said, if you're a Christian stand up, the devoted stood and the rest just ran off. There were kids running all over the woods. And as we walked to our cabin, we saw counselors with flashlights and bullhorns proclaiming it was only a play. We heard kids yelling and cursing and crying. It was pretty bad. Thanks to everybody who called. Thanks to everybody who wrote. Note number four, Ritual. Down by the lake, some of the Bryn Mawr girls explained it all to me. Every year it's the same, same songs, same ceremonies. There's Circle and Olympic Days, there's Color Days, there's Mohawk privileges and cabin nights. And there's the dance where the girls choose a boy who they'll marry for one day. And there's the powwow. Last year, first session they took powwow away from us because it was politically incorrect or something. And we were all really upset because powwow is one of our biggest camp traditions, because we have a little song or whatever in the beginning. And you do different hand motions and everything to it, and it's really fun. And then you like challenge other teams. It's fun. But then second--. Before you continue, can I just say that it's really interesting that you can't even tell the story without suddenly bursting into song. Our camp sings a lot. Besides the singing, powwow includes a talent competition. One girl, her talent, she crosses her eyes. Jolie can like snap her belly button. And I can sing all the vowels in Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. And you just do weird talents, and you challenge other teams. And at the end, if your team's the best, you get a peace feather. The reason it got taken away last year was because a lot of the counselors felt that it was politically incorrect, because the speeches that the Indians make are derogatory towards Native American culture, if you look at it that way. I ask for examples. A few of the girls hold their palms up in the air and say, how. They launch into these fake, Pidgin English sentences where they drop lots of verbs and add um to the ends of the words. We go to Lakeum of the Woodsum Campum. I liveum in Vassar Eastum. I teachum camper naps how to walkum on waterum. It's like inside jokes they like put into-- like with adding stuff that like Indians or whatever. It's so funny that it's not like even-- no one even really thinks about it like that. In fact, fake Indianness has been a part of camping in America since organized camping began a century ago. One of the co-founders of the Boy Scouts of America ran a camp in 1901 in which he organized boys into a make believe tribe called the Sinoways. The Red Man is the apostle of outdoor life, he wrote back then. His example and precept are what young America needs today, above any other ethical teaching. Indianness and a real connection to nature, an appreciation for all that was being lost with industrialization and urbanization. Just one generation after Custer's Last Stand, fake Indianness was an integral part of the early Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts organizations in this country. By 1910, camps with names like Camp Minawawa, Camp Miramichi, Camp Poconoket were springing up everywhere for middle class and upper class children. It is still a big part of camping all across America. And after a year without powwow, Camp Lake of the Woods brought the powwow back. Most of this simply has to do with tradition. The special songs and ceremonies are a part of so many American camps and it's not just because they're fun. A camp director in Wisconsin told us as we were putting together today's program that financially, you cannot run a camp without lots of repeat customers. These traditions bring kids back year after year. You have the kids singing constantly about their loyalty to their cabinmates and their camp. You let them know about all the extra rights and privileges and honors they're going to get if they return as older campers. It is part of making the business run. And in addition, it's part of what makes camp thrilling. It is using all of the stagecraft that all the world's religions have always used. The ceremonies, the chanting, the repeated words, the official honors and offices, but for an entirely secular purpose-- to thrill children, to make them feel part of something big and special. I think it's a really important part of camp. I personally like the traditions, because it's like, you know what's going to happen, and you can trust things like that-- You expect it. I come back for the traditions. I expect everything to be here the way it was last year, because that's the reason I come back. If everything changed, I don't think I'd like it any more. Well, coming up, war. What is it good for? Answers. Also, the second mention of the Israeli Army in one radio show. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Notes On Camp, summer camp. A lot of the pleasure of being in camp is the pleasure of being part of this team, this group that you just feel loyal to, which also happens to be one of the pleasures of being in the military since ancient times. Well, Adam Davidson is half Israeli, grew up in America. And when he was 15, he went to a camp run by the Israeli Army in Israel, on their own training facilities. The campers ran the same drills. They shot M-16s. It was all designed to convince these American Jews to move to Israel and join the Israeli Army someday. It's so exciting, because you really feel-- I mean, you know that at that age, when you're 15 and you're in Israeli Army summer camp, there's no one in the history of the world who is cooler than an elite army unit soldier. I loved the fact that we would go the bathroom, and the toilets wouldn't have a seat, because that's a place where terrorists could put a bomb. And it felt so macho crouching on top of the seat, and showering in this freezing cold water. Because what? A Sayeret Matkal would need hot water? Why? Now for me, for the first few weeks, what was tough about this was that I was really a nobody there. And I'd always be bringing up the rear, I'd always be kind of slow. And I wasn't showing myself to be macho, even though there were so many opportunities in a given day to prove yourself macho. I mean, we were always, for no apparent reason, running like crazy from one tree to another tree, or up some mountain. Every few minutes there was something you could be the best at. And I was never the best. But all of this changed. My geek status was completely transformed. One night, the different units would put on plays. And we were supposed to do take offs of fairy tales. And this was some kind of a competition, there was voting over who did the best job. So my group, [? Plugat ?] [? Barach, ?] our fairy tale was Steve White and the Seven Dwarfs. And I would be Steve White, this fabulous gay man who lives with these seven dwarfs. And the prince who comes to rescue me would be Rambo. This was one of those moments where I just knew that I was in the zone, I was in my element. I mean, I was from Greenwich Village. I'd been an actor all through my childhood. My dad was an actor. But more than that, there's a way that Americans can be very free that Israelis can't be, precisely because they have to be macho. And no matter what they're doing, even if they're mocking themselves, they have to maintain that studliness. And I had no obligations in that area. I dressed myself just-- I tried not to be too outrageous, but I had to be kind of outrageous for them to get it. So a little bit of rouge, a little bit of eyeliner, my hair kind of slicked back with mousse, and sort of ridiculously short shorts. And so I'm lying there, and I hear a knock on the door. And I just stand up, and I remember the entire crowd is howling, just howling. And I just do the most awful, mincing, gay voice, just who is it? And my friend, who was a skinhead from Toronto, whose parents happened to be Israeli says, it's Rambo. And I said, oh Rambo, you sexy beast. And everyone is freaking out, just laughing like mad, like maniacs. And of course, throughout it all, I'm making jokes about the camp members themselves, like saying, oh, I think Commander Oloney is just the thing. And everything I say, the entire crowd is just with me, is just laughing hysterically. And what happens is Snow White to Steve White. I eat the apple, I pass out, and I need to be resuscitated. So Rambo comes to kiss me, and what we'd worked out is he put his hand in front of his mouth, and I put my hand in front of my mouth, and we just touched hands, and we're kissing our mouths. But from a distance, it looks like we're making out. And at this point, the camp is standing up, they're howling. I mean, I have transgressed every boundary that the Israeli man sets for himself. And they are loving the other side. And from that point on, I was no longer the unknown American bringing up the rear of the obstacle course. I was like a movie star. The Israeli guys, particularly the machoest, toughest Israeli guys constantly wanted to do this make out thing where we put our hands over our mouths and make out. We'd be relaxing after some really long hike in the Negev Desert or something, and Nehtyu or Shaoul or whatever would come up to me and say, it's very funny the way you do this make out thing. Show me do it. Let's do it. And the first few times I would do it, I guess part of me was like flattered that the macho, future Sayeret Matkal guys were into me in any way. But after a while, it was just so weird. I'd just be like, look Shaoul, I'm just not going to do that. I don't do that anymore. I'm just not going to do that. And they'd be like, why not? Do it. It's very funny, that's all. It's not for anything, but just the funny. Now I've been to plenty of camps. And in every camp, you're somehow a part of a team. I remember in Boy Scout camp, when I was at horse riding camp, it was the people who rode horses in the morning versus the people who rode horses in the afternoon. And I just loved my guys. And I would look in the lunchroom at the other bunk and I just didn't understand how you could even live in that bunk. But Israeli Army summer camp is the purest distillation I've ever seen of this joy in being a part of the group. Every week I would do things that I wouldn't have thought I could possibly do. And that was so incredible, and I knew that was because of the group. I knew that was giving me the force. And there was never a moment where I had to ask myself, can I do it? It was just, we're doing this. Plugat Barach is going to do this. Adam Davidson is now a member of our Planet Money team. Although he intended to join the Israeli Army when he was 15, it never worked out. Note on Camp number six, Color Days. It is impossible to overstate what a big deal Color Days is at the camp in Michigan Julie Snyder and I visited. It is like any Color Wars at any camp, except that it's three days. And once you're assigned a team-- a blue team or a white team for girls, black or red for boys-- you will stay on that team all your years at camp. There are legacies. Your brothers and sisters will be on the same team as you are. Being named a captain of the Color Days teams is considered such a big deal that many older campers can name all the captains of all the Color Day teams going back years. Two girls and two boys are named as captain each year for each team. Only campers from the oldest bunks can be captain. Bryn Mawr is for girls, Mohawks and Blackhawks for boys. Counselors who were once named as captains, if you talk to them about it, they get all choked up when they tell you about the moment they were chosen. Even Dayna Hardin, the 29 nine year old owner of the camp, went into this long explanation of the ceremony with me at one point, her voice cracking, ending with--. I'm almost in tears right now. I really am, because it was the biggest honor in my life. Julie Snyder watched the girls Color Days this year. Just to give you a sense of the intensity of Color Days, a month before it all begins, an 11 year old Blue team member tells me Color Days isn't all that competitive. I mean, she'd talk to a girl on the White team and everything. And all I could think was, if you have to say something like that, you know there's going to be trouble. The speculation about who will get the honor of being captain of the Color Days team, the biggest honor at camp, is so intense that weeks before Color Days begins, Lindsay Sayowitz and some friends in Bryn Mawr East decide to consult Lindsay's Ouija Board. Is anyone here? Hello? Who's this? B-L-A-I-R. Blair, our old friend. We talk to her a lot. Do you know who the Color Days captains are for girls? Could you name one of them? OK, A- L- I- S- S- A. Alissa. Alissa Strom. She'll get it, I bet. Everyone thinks Alissa's a shoe-in. And the Ouija Board also picked Jamie Stream, another favorite, and Lindsay Sayowitz, who coincidentally had her hands on the Ouija pointer at the time. Two weeks later, in the middle of the night, all the girls' counselors snake through the cabin area with lit kerosene torches and wake up the girls for the opening ceremonies of Color Days 1998. Girls, it's time to wake up. Everybody up out of bed. Get a pair of pants on, shoes on. Wake up [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Little girls stumble out onto the sidewalks, rubbing their eyes, wearing mismatched shoes and looking confused. Across the way, the Bryn Mawr girls have never even gone to sleep, anticipating this moment when they find out which one of them will be named Color Days captain. They stand with their faces pressed up to the screen door of their cabin, holding hands and silently crying. Counselors with torches lead 120 girls. They march down to the lakefront and surround an enormous bonfire 10 feet high. It looks like some cross between a debutante ball and a Klan rally. We are here tonight to usher in our three days of competition known as Color Days. I call forth the first spirit. Do you hear me, oh spirit? Come forth and tell us who you are, and why you're here. Like a summer stock Grecian play, one of the counselors dressed in a white toga comes out of the forest and stands behind the fire. I'm the spirit of the white. I represent the clouds of a summer's day, white caps in the water, and the dove of peace and purity. What is the message you bring, oh white spirit? It is a difficult thought to convey, but rich in meaning in every way. One can't find peace in a world of dream, each person is a fraction, a part of the team. We have no choice, everyone must belong. If no one is weak, can a team be strong? I call forth the next spirit. Do you you hear me, oh spirit? The spirit for the blue team, another counselor in a toga, appears before the fire and talks about blue and blueness. Candles are lit, and the girls vow to abide by the camp's seven virtues during Color Days. Those virtues-- friendship, determination, sportsmanship, tolerance, enthusiasm, patience, and unity. In order that you may have time to consider carefully the meaning of these next few days, we ask that you now take a vow of silence. Please repeat after me. I will be silent. I will be silent. Finally, the camp director Dayna picks up four whistles, two on a white string and two on blue. This is the moment everyone's been waiting for and guessing about, the moment Dayna remembers so well from 16 years ago when she was a Bryn Mawr. She walks behind all the girls to the last row where the Bryn Mawrs sit and silently places the necklaces over the heads of the girls selected to be the captains of Color Days, 1998. The chosen girls stand up, sob, and cling to each other. The other girls stay seated, sob, and cling to each other. It turns out the Ouija Board was only right about one of the captains, Lindsay Sagenreich. Alissa and Jamie look shocked and heartbroken. There's so much crying, some of the girls can barely walk straight as they stumble back to their cabins after the ceremony. Because of the vow of silence, there are lots of sniffles, gasps, and blowing noses. Color Days hasn't even started yet. For those who don't know yet, I'm Jamie. I'm Lindsay. I'm Beth. We have an awesome team. I'm so excited. It's the next morning, and the White team is gathered for their first team meeting. The veteran campers are dressed entirely in white, white shoes, shirts, socks, bandannas. Their faces are painted white. Their hair is painted white. Lindsay and Jamie, the White team captains, are in charge of organizing all the girls, raising their spirits and motivating the team. But it's difficult to hold your first pep rally within the confines of a vow of silence. Under the vow, only team captains are allowed to talk. OK, are you guys excited? Just nod your head. After the flag raising on the first morning, the vow of silence is lifted, and then you realize why it was instituted in the first place. What follows are three days of solid wall of sound screaming. The girls cheer at the individual and team competitions. They cheer while standing around and waiting for their events to begin. They cheer on the way to the mess hall, they cheer outside the mess hall, and they cheer on the way back from the mess hall. They have constant team meetings where they talk about the importance of cheering. You guys, cheering tonight is the most important night to cheer. Cheer so loud. It is not normal if you don't lose your voices. White team listen. This is really important. This is really important you guys. Trying your best is the most important thing right now. You run your butt over here as fast as you can, because it is so important that you guys help with any of our meetings. But some of the girls, the older girls, are having a hard time cheering. It is really hard to get in on it, because I'm telling people to be louder, because I know they're not being loud enough, but yet, I can't do it myself. Lexie's on the White team. She's a Bryn Mawr, was eligible to be a Color Days captain, and spent the last night crying. Because if being chosen for Color Days captain means you're a leader, an intelligent and caring person who looks out for other people, what does it mean if you're not chosen? I didn't expect it, but I really, really wanted captain. And I mean, it is a disappointment, because it's something that you're eligible for, and if you don't get it, then you think about-- or at least I think about what I did to not do it, and what I did wrong, and how I'm not as decent as a person as other people. And it's just-- I mean, it's a letdown, but it's not everything. And that's what a lot of people lose grip of. That's what I always lose grip of, is that it's not everything, as much as it means. But it means a lot. Over the next two days, it's basically what you'd expect an all camp competition would be like. The younger girls and older girls split off. They do track and field events, swimming and boating events, scavenger hunts, and an all camp song fest. Both teams seem pretty evenly matched, and for the most part, the girls win and lose with grace. Most of girls I talk with all say Color Days is their favorite part of camp. They like the cheering. They like the games. They like feeling a part of the team. But one night, after an intense capture the flag game, where Blue team pulls it off by one point, one of the White team girls doesn't take the loss too well. White team, can I talk to you for a second? You guys, the Blue team is playing very dirty, and none of us should play like that at all. They knew I was already over, yet they still felt that they needed to trip me. But just don't complain about it, we're just going to kill them tonight. I say we get them back right now by screaming so loud that they will have to plug their ears, because that is how upset I am right now. The climax of Color Days is on the last night at camp, the obstacle course relay, where every member of each team takes part. Usually whoever wins the relay wins the Color Days. The Blue team gathers at their meeting spot on the go-kart track to organize all of the team members for the race. Certain things are clear. Alissa Strom does the longest run, Carley Siegel always does the math problem, Rebecca Stern rules the pie eating contest. But there are some open spots, which require careful consideration. OK, first person--. Shh, you guys, quiet OK? This is really important you guys. This is really important. First person is at the flagpole, and they have to eat one peanut butter and jelly sandwich as fast as they can and sing [UNINTELLIGIBLE] like so fast. You guys, you are up against Lexie Gore. She is the fastest eater I've ever seen. Yeah. She can shove it in her mouth. It's crazy. Who's got a big mouth who can eat really fast? I can eat really fast. Jamie, do you want to try that? Can you eat really fast? You can sing while you have food in your mouth. You can be like--. Jamie, don't eat dinner. But it's pizza night. After dinner, the captains and the two peanut butter and jelly sandwich eaters gather at the flag pole to begin the race that will last over an hour. On you mark, get set, go. Jamie, amazing. Absolutely amazing. Do you have any idea how much it takes to keep up with Lexie? The relay race goes all over camp. One camper has to wait for the runner with the baton, then jump in the shower, wash her hair, get out, and passes the baton to the next runner, who goes to the waterfront, where a little girl will do 25 jumping jacks with a life jacket on, who then passes the baton to another girl, who goes all the way back to the other side of camp to a cabin where a camper unmakes and makes a bed. All along the way, the girls are yelling for their teams, jumping up and down, and trying to control their nerves. I am so scared right now. I'm like here, but I'm not. I'm like somewhere else. Go Blue. Yeah. As an outsider, watching three days of all of this, I have to say what was shocking was how gung ho everyone was. Camp is this unusually safe bubble, where kids can let themselves go, crying and screaming and singing. They all buy into this. None of them stands back. Nobody thinks they're too cool for it. Back at school, the rules are completely different. Everywhere the rules are completely different. Down at the waterfront, the White and Blue teams stand side by side with dueling cheering, waiting for the final leg of the relay race. When the last baton is passed, the two captains from each team have to build a fire under a rope that's suspended between two sticks about three feet off the ground. The first team whose rope catches fire and burns all the way through wins the race. Some Bryn Mawr girls have been saving wood for the burn the rope since the second day of camp. Tonight the Blue team has about a full two minutes on the Whites as the runner hands off the baton. The Blue team captains, Carley and Dana, drop to their knees and begin with the kindling. They get only one match a minute as they add twigs and sassafras to the fire. Soon the white team starts on their fire. The captain's hands are shaking. Both teams are jumping up and down, cheering and hugging. The first pile of sticks to become like a real fire is the White team's, and the moment it catches, tears start streaming down Carley and Dana's cheeks on the Blue team. Both look close to hyperventilating as they lie down on the dirt, their cheeks on the ground, blowing on their fire, crying and frantically moving sticks around. But the White team's fire rises, their rope starts burning, and once it snaps, the race is pretty much over. Girls are jumping up and down, collapsing into each other's arms, sobbing and laughing. The younger girls, it's almost as if their little bodies can't take all this emotion. I watch one girl, about eight years old, who stands off to the side, begins to tremble, and her face gets redder and redder as tears pour down her cheeks. A teammate tries to comfort her. It's OK, she says, we won. It might seem strange standing in the middle of 100 crying girls that most of them will tell you this is the best day of camp. But it's the best day of camp precisely because it's 100 girls all crying together. If the point of camp is to feel this camaraderie, to feel like you belong to something, that feeling is at its most concentrated during Color Days. This is also the last day of camp. It's strange. This whole thing, there's so many things to deal with. It's just all jumbled in at once, and it's confusing. I don't know. I talk to Jamie Stream and Lexie Cowurtz. Jamie's been here for seven years and can't come back as a camper again. Lexie starts high school this year, and for her, this isn't just the last day of camp, her last day living in this safe little bubble. In a way, it's her last day of childhood. One camp summer has never meant so much to me now that we're getting older. I'm so frightened of going into high school that I don't want to leave here anyway, but I'm so secure here. It's such a haven for me that I can't imagine going home. Also I think it's hard, maybe not for you, but for me, since this is my last year, these are my last three days of ever being a camper. And it's so weird, it's like this is my last Tuesday at camp. This is my last dinner with my cabin. This is my last time ever being in a cabin with my friends. And it's like, that's what's so weird about it, because you're just thinking about the last this, last that. Like, I'm kind of scared to go home in a way, because my friends at home are so different from my friends here. And it's going to be scary. They're so dull. I don't mean that as in like-- I mean, I love my friends to death, but when you think of the things that we go through here, we're not really living at home. We go to school, and we go out, and it's not their fault, but the environment is so different that it's dull living at home. I'm perfectly content here just sitting here getting mail. I don't really care as long as I just-- it's so strange. And I'm going to miss walking-- I was just talking to Laura [UNINTELLIGIBLE] about this, I'm going to miss walking down the path. I'm going to miss the doors slamming. I'm going to miss the overflowing bathrooms. It's unreal that we have to leave. Just stupid little things is what you really miss. Our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Senior editor Paul Toff, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Markie Rocklin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Harmonica music throughout our hour today by Howard Levy. Thanks to the staff and campers of Lake on the Woods and Greenwood camps in Michigan. Our program today was recorded there in the summer of 1998. Thanks to historian Philip Deloria, whose book Playing Indian details the history of fake Native American culture in American summer camps. Special shoutout today to Emily Bernstein, whose stories about summer camp a few years ago in the New York Times were an inspiration as we put together today's program. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can get our free weekly podcast or listen to any of our old shows online for absolutely free. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who calls our contributor Adam Davidson at least once a day to demand--. It's very funny the way you do this make out thing. Show me do it. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. It's very funny, that's all. It's not for anything, but just the funny. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Every year, about a half dozen people spend from late spring through early autumn walking the streets of New York, making a map of every crack, every depression, every protrusion, every pothole on every sidewalk of all five boroughs of the city. So in this section, we have cracks, we have depression, and we have a broken curb. Ralph Gentles is looking at a crater the size of a manhole cover. He draws on a map he's carrying with a red felt pen. So that triangle would cover the fact that you have a depression there. So what you do is two triangles with a line in between them, another line, and then two x's with a line in between them? Yes, to indicate that the curb is also defective. Under New York law, if you trip on the sidewalk and hurt yourself, you cannot sue the city unless somebody had informed the city beforehand that there was a problem with the sidewalk. If no one told authorities to fix it, there was no negligence. And so years ago, a group of attorneys simply decided to hire a map company to go out each year and chart every foot of sidewalk in New York. They turn in the maps to the city, which makes it possible for injured New Yorkers to do what nature apparently intended for them to do, which is take their city to court. On this street, I would also look at the crosswalk. It's uneven, so we usually use some rectangles to suggest that. It's an unusual job. Ralph says that wherever he goes now, he notices the sidewalk. We stand at the corner of 44th and Lexington. The window of a health food store there has a big sign that says "Juices in Sickness." It tells you what kind of juice you should drink for a long list of diseases-- diarrhea, hypertension, impotence, hair loss. Ralph, meanwhile, is looking at a hole in the ground where some water has collected. And we have these cracks here. I'm just going to name some of the things that you're not putting on the map. There's a perfume and gift shop. There's a natural foods place. There's the passport photos place. In front of the perfume shop, there's a guy sitting on an crate trying to fix a gold watch. Not very well. None of this goes on the map. No, none of it goes on the map. And this gets to the very heart of what mapmaking is all about. Creating a map means ignoring everything in the world but one thing. That one thing could be the bus routes or the air traffic control patterns. It could be the homes of Hollywood stars, or it could be the cracks in the sidewalk. Maps have meaning because they filter out all the chaos in the world and focus obsessively on one item. And this is the age of maps, though you might not normally think of it that way. Denis Wood is a cartographer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Something like 99.99% of all maps that have ever been made have been made in this century. This century now? This century that we're in right now. What are those maps? And what proportion of them, do you think, are the maps that most of us civilians usually use, which are just road maps to get us one place to another? But you see, I think you've missed all the maps right off the bat as soon as you go to the road map because you've forgotten about the maps you see every night on television, the maps that litter the newspapers. The weather maps. The weather maps, the maps all over the magazines. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Mapping. Every map is the world seen through a different lens. And today on our program, we bring you five different stories, five different ways of looking at the world, each story about somebody who is mapping the world using a different human sense. Act One, Sight. Act Two, Hearing. Act Three, Smell. In that act, we pay a visit to Cyrano Sciences, makers of an electronic nose. Act Four, Mapping the World Through Touch. And Act Five, Mapping the World Through Taste. Stay with us. You will not be disappointed. Act One, Sight. Ordinary people using a map. According to cartographer Denis Wood, that is a very recent development in human evolution. Up until a few centuries ago, people went to war, built empires, sailed the seas, all without maps. We do have some ancient maps, a Babylonian map which seemed to be used by authorities for tax assessment, things like that. But early maps are relatively few, and usually exist to accomplish some specific purpose. That has changed, of course. Denis Wood brought into the studio a set of maps that he has been working on for years, maps of his own neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, a neighborhood called Boylan Heights. Denis Wood begins with a regular locater map showing how the streets of Boylan Heights fit within the streets of the surrounding city. And then there's a map of part of what would be seen if you were to look through the surface of the Earth into the neighborhood that we don't usually experience but that the sewer men and the gas men and so forth and so on expose whenever they-- so it's a map of manholes, gas lines, water lines, and sewer lines. I'm looking at a map now that's got all of the overhead lines mapped on it, and it is a crazy star field. It's the power lines, the telephone lines, and the cable lines. And there's a hierarchy, of course. They flow into the neighborhood from outside the neighborhood. And as they move into individual homes, they break down. They shatter, so that the homes are all like the ends of little, teeny capillaries. Which makes the neighborhood sound like a living organism. It is a living organism. It's absolutely what it is. Here's a map that shows the pools of light cast by each one of the street lamps at night. And it's black, and you have these pools of light. Keep going. What else have you got? I've got a wonderful map that's every traffic sign in the neighborhood. And the traffic signs are each one of them drawn on the map. And the thing that's fascinating about this image is that the traffic signs are, of course, by and large for people who don't live in the neighborhood. So their density reveals those streets where strangers are going to move through the environment. And when you draw it on the map, do you represent each stop sign with a the little red stop sign and each yield sign with a little yellow triangle? Absolutely. Each one of these things has been drawn here. I have a map of the pumpkins that were on the porches at Halloween. What's that one tell you? Well, that's an extremely interesting map. And I like to relate it to the map that shows the number of times each residence was mentioned in the Boylan Heights newsletter over the past 25 years. You've made a map of that? Yeah. You take all the newsletters, and you just note every address that appears in it, whether it appears as the name of an individual in the neighborhood or as a specific address, and you just do frequencies attached to each one of the residences. Wow. And the thing that struck me about that map when I first did it was that some locations-- that is to say, some dwellings-- are frequently mentioned no matter who lives in them. And I imagine that the people who are going to be movers and shakers in neighborhoods pick homes that are in important locations in the neighborhood or are architecturally significant or historically significant in the neighborhood. Or they've just got more money, and then they buy the big place. Well, believe me, money is what's behind both the pumpkin map and that map. Now, as you're telling me this story, I'm thinking, so where are the pumpkins? I'm trying to guess in my mind where the greatest proliferation of little orange pumpkins would be. Oh, that's not how the map looks. What I did was photograph the pumpkins at the face. And then I printed them black on black, so all you see are the eyes and the mouths of the pumpkins on the black background. John Carpenter would love this image. So the map of the pumpkins is just a map where there are just little eyes and pumpkin mouths floating by the houses which have them. But they're just floating on the black background, just as the traffic signs were floating. And the map of the traffic signs, there are just traffic signs. There's no streets or anything. On the map of the streets, there are just streets. On the map of the trees, there are just trees. And what you do as you go through these maps is you begin to build up-- even though it's never said-- you begin to build up the kind of structural knowledge that you take away as the residents of that neighborhood. So the idea that we have to have the pumpkins drawn against the street only makes sense if you don't have any other images. But as soon as you have other images, you say, oh my lord, look. Look where these pumpkins are. Why, they're exactly where-- and I'm going to answer your question-- they're exactly where people are mentioned all the time in the newsletter. And as you go away to the edges of the neighborhood, where the people aren't mentioned in the newsletter, by golly, they don't have pumpkins on their porches. And are the people who are mentioned in the newsletter, do they tend to be the people in the bigger homes? Yeah. They do? Oh, yeah. Is it true you've also done a map of the graffiti in the neighborhood? Oh yeah. The graffiti in the neighborhood, the things carved into the cement as it was setting in the neighborhood, patterns of leaf light on the neighborhood, that is to say the light coming through the leaves of the trees in the summertime. What does that tell you? They are what it is to live in the neighborhood. The neighborhood is experienced as a collection of patterns of light and sound and smell and taste and communication with others. Denis, if most maps, historically, have tended to be maps organized around some thing which had to be done or some purpose that people needed a map for, it seems to me that the maps that you're describing of your own neighborhood are about something very different. Yeah, they are. And they're very much involved with this sort of search that I have for a poetics of cartography. Well, it's interesting. It's taking the premise of the map, which is that it's a way to describe the world, and then pointing it at things that we usually don't think of as being mappable. Yeah, and I guess one of the contentions that I would make as a geographer-- also as a person-- is that there isn't anything that you can't map. There isn't anything that doesn't have some kind of spatial dimension or spatial character. And that spatial character is interesting. I live in this dream of maps. And I keep looking for the map that's going to really realize the potential of this thing. But Denis, I understand this impulse of wanting to capture the whole world in a map, but do you have moments where you think that it actually is not within the power of a map to do that? Yeah, I know it's not. [LAUGHS] I know it's not within the power of a map to do that. Because in fact, a map, it seems like what a map is, in a certain sense, is the opposite. A map gets its meaning by not giving you all the information about everything but by selecting, like, this map will be about this slice of the world, and this map will be about this. Sure, and that's why I've produced an atlas in which I have, on one map page, just the faces of pumpkins, and another map page, all of the drawings of the street signs, because every map is selective. But I guess what I'm pushing for here is selecting subjects for cartographic display that are other than those that are typically done. It's almost like you're trying to write a novel-- I am. --but with pure symbols. Maps. Right, with maps. Yeah. Why not? Denis Wood is the author of the book The Power of Maps. If you want to see his maps of Boylan Heights, they're not published anywhere, but he's allowed us to post a few of them on the This American Life website. That address-- grab a pen-- www.thislife.org. That's "thislife," one word, no space. Act Two, Hearing. Since every map is just a chart of one small slice of the world, most of the people in today's program tend to be people who decide to view the world through one small, specialized window. At some point, Toby Lester started to map the sounds in his world, the everyday sounds that surround us all the time, that most of us do not even bother to notice, much less analyze. Our contributing editor Jack Hitt visited him outside of Boston. And Jack put together this story. What's on right now? I don't mean the radio. I mean, is your air conditioning on? Is your car engine idling? Is your refrigerator running? Just take a moment and listen. Listen to the droning around you. Map the landscape of your background noise. See if you can hear what Toby Lester heard one day a few years ago. I'll wait. I arrived in a new job at a new office. And in those sorts of situations, you're always kind of hyper-aware of everything. And it was quite a cold week, and the heater was just humming along very loudly to the point of distraction. And I started paying attention to it. And it was a very musical hum, and I found myself humming in the key that the heater was playing, essentially. Once he heard his heater, then Toby was in the unenviable position of not being able to not hear his heater. You too will have this problem shortly. But Tobey, who's an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, is a musical guy who hums at work. So he began to play with it, literally harmonizing with the heater, creating interesting intervals and chords, a kind of barely audible musical score to his life in the office. And then I started to work myself back and realized that I had probably been singing in the key of my office as long as I had inhabited an office. Was it a good one for you? Your high notes weren't too high? No, it suited me pretty well, actually. I was able to appropriately reproduce whatever mood I happened to be in. But that's when I started wondering whether it actually wasn't working the other way around. Rather than my knowing this note was there and playing a minor third or a major third, whether, in fact, there was something else playing a note on top of the heater that would, in effect, create my mood for me. I found myself sitting in this little office listening to the heater and staring at my computer and suddenly realizing that yes, in fact, the computer was humming as well. Not nearly as strongly, but it was indeed humming. And that brought me to bring a little pitch pipe into the office and figure out what the two notes were. And at the same time, for some reason, I'd been thinking about why is that we seem almost universally to assume that a minor chord is sad and a major chord is happy. If a minor third just is somehow inherently sad, then if I were sitting in an office having a minor third played at me all day long, then it's indeed possible that I could be made sad by just sitting in my office, which, of course, everybody is. You're saying that the heating system in your office and the computer hum of your machine created a certain interval. Right. Right. So can you show us on the keyboard what was the basis of that interval? It was essentially-- [PLAYS KEYBOARD] So the first note, this one-- [PLAYS KEYBOARD] --that was like the heating system. And then your computer was doing this. [PLAYS KEYBOARD] Yep. So together, what you're saying is that the interval it created was this. [PLAYS KEYBOARD] Right. And that happens to be a major third, which happens to be what's traditionally interpreted as happy. So you're loving your new job, then. Well, except for the fact that I was spending a good deal of time on the phone. And the dial tone played a note above that, which was then constructing a three-note chord. [PLAYS KEYBOARD] That was the heater, that was the computer, and then that nasty little one was the telephone. So all together, they were-- [PLAYS KEYBOARD] Ooh. When played against the tonic-- or foundation note-- of his heater, the telephone created an interval known as an augmented fourth. Toby began to do some research and discovered that the Catholic Church had assigned different meanings to numerous musical intervals back in the Middle Ages. And the augmented fourth was the most reviled sound of its time-- feared as the "diabolus in musica," the devil in the music. Toby and I were sitting in his kitchen when I was talking to him. And suddenly I was afflicted with the same keenness of hearing that Toby had been. I heard something, and felt compelled to identify it. What is that, now that we're sitting here? That is the tonic of the kitchen, the refrigerator humming. Let's see if we can get that. Where's the motor? Oh yeah, here. Down here. [PLAYS KEYBOARD] That's the note. So what note is that? B-flat. So that's the tonic of your kitchen? Essentially. Not long ago, Toby had come across a critic named Deryck Cooke, who had written a book updating the church's musical classifications. Rather than finding the devil in the music, Cooke assigned quite modern interpretations to each sound. One interval, for example, seemed to inspire, quote, "a spirit of anguish." Another sound was "violent longing in a context of finality." Apparently, any combination of notes conjured its own specific mood and sensation. For example, let's just do one. This refrigerator's in B-flat. So when you come in in the morning and you put a bagel in your microwave over here, what note are we adding to the tonic here? Let's listen to the microwave. Even the beeping-- What was that beep, do you think? Let's press it again and see. A C. Right. So it's a B-flat to a C just to turn on the microwave. Well, and let's look at that. Let's examine that. A B-flat to a C is a major second. And Mr. Cooke refers to it as "pleasurably longing and has a context of finality." So play that on the keyboard here. Let's hear it. OK, yeah, finality. There's a sort of closure to that. And so then the bagel is ready. So let's run that microwave. [STARTS MICROWAVE] And that hum is an F-sharp, very identifiably. So the B-flat and F-sharp. [PLAYS KEYBOARD] Not a great way to start the day, really. And let's see, what would that be? "Active anguish in the context of flux," according to Mr. Cook. Active anguish in a context of flux. Did Sartre write this? [LAUGHS] Toby's research led him to Plato, who once wrote, "When the modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change." It sounds preposterous at first, but might there be a connection between the low, constant humming of our industrial culture and the dissonant mood of anxiety and irresolution that seems to characterize our century? We're the first generation of people to live in an environment in which there are lots of devices buzzing, whirring, humming at us. I'm entirely a product of it. I have no awareness of a life led without some sort of humming appliance lurking somewhere behind me. Of course, there must've been noises in the 16th century that were musical. If nothing else, just nature. But what appliances do that I don't think other natural world things have done is provide a steady drone. It's the droning that is really novel. My guess is that people these days find themselves a lot more bored, in general, than they used to be, partly because their appliances are taking care of things for them. But the payoff is that there's this drone behind everything. And the drone is sort of a symptom of modern life. We're very acutely aware of our own boredom, and we've been eased into our boredom by all these machines. So let me restate my first question. Listening to your own background noise, do you hear what Toby Lester hears? Try it again. Now that I can't stop hearing it, I wonder if every exercise in mapping is really such a good thing. When I sat at my keyboard composing these lines, the computer hum and fan were droning a minor third at me, an interval associated with sorrow. Before Columbus's day, the old maps simply showed an arrow pointing to the mysterious West, and then the words, "there dragons be." Maybe not every terra incognita needs discovering. But, of course, this is America. We don't just explore, we profit. Any day now, I expect a house tuner to be ringing my doorbell, some failed telemarketer who'll promise to harmonize the whir of my toaster with the flush of the toilet, and thereby guarantee me an inner peace worthy of the millennium. And you could obviously select from-- like you might select from paint chips-- from a variety of different house moods, happy, sad, active anguish in a context of flux. Jack Hitt lives in New Haven. Act Three, Smell. Well, traditionally, there are maps of things you can see. And sometimes, there are even maps of things that you can hear, for example, those government maps of where the jet noise is in the neighborhoods around airports. But finding somebody who has a need to understand the world-- to chart the world's objects-- through smell, this was not easy. And then we found Cyrano Sciences, a Pasadena company that's trying to make an electronic nose. Ms. Nancy Updike headed out to their offices. She prepared her report in the form of those "frequently asked questions" pages on the internet. Quick warning to listeners before we begin. We have no idea if these are, in fact, the questions that people most want to know about the nose. We just like the sound of it. Here then, her report. Hello, and welcome to Frequently Asked Questions About the Electronic Nose. Does the electronic nose look like a nose? Actually, no. It looks like a tiny table. It's a green, three-by-five plastic circuit board like you'd see inside a computer. And it's sitting on steel legs a couple inches high. It does not go on your face, needless to say. Sitting on top of the circuit board, there's something that looks like a black stamp. It's a microprocessor, the computer that runs the thing. At the other end of the circuit board, there's a white box about an inch high with the name Durante printed on it in black letters. I'm not joking. It says Durante. And then there's a clear plastic tube, thinner than a pencil, that the nose uses to sniff. But that's just the guts of the thing. Richard Payne is the project's chief technical officer, and he showed me a mock up of what the outside of the final product, which is going to be a handheld electronic nose, might look like when they finally give it an outside. So one would be able to push the black buttons to give it instructions as to start or stop. And these are black buttons that are sitting on a yellow disc, almost like-- not a dinner plate but the next size down. It's a dessert plate. A dessert plate. Thank you. What can the electronic nose smell, and what can't it smell? If the electronic nose could draw, oh, I don't know, a map, say, of its world, here's what wouldn't be in the picture-- blueberries, movie popcorn, candle wax, pretty much every smell you can think of. The electronic nose is still a baby. It has to learn each smell for the first time, just like we had to do as we grew up. It has to build up a smell archive in its computer brain that it can compare new smells to. Here's what its map would include. Here are the smells it can identify so far. And be forewarned, It is a small, sad world, frankly, for the electronic nose. In preparation for its life as an industrial workhorse, the electronic nose has been sniffing mostly nasty solvent vapors and decaying bacteria. But when scientists want to show it off, they let it identify two perfumes-- the lovely Chanel Coco and the, in my opinion, overly sweet Bal A Versailles. We've opened up the bottle of perfume and inserted the sampling tube. The first sound you heard was clean air being drawn in to purge the sample chamber. And now it's on the draw mode when it's identifying. And it has successfully identified Chanel Coco because it was trained to identify Chanel's Coco. What will the electronic nose be used for? By you and me? Not much. It's going to cost $2,000 to $5,000 at first. But Richard really, really wants you to have one. So they're going to spend the next five years coming up with a model just for you, the consumer, for under $10. Meanwhile, the electronic nose will have other assignments. Detecting landmines. Factories could put electronic noses throughout their plants to detect dangerous gases that might be leaking during the manufacturing process. Doctors could use a handheld electronic nose to diagnose pneumonia and other conditions that have distinctive smells. Smell, actually, used to be a much bigger part of medical diagnosis decades ago. Richard tells me about one nation-- not the United States-- A more neurotic nation, shall we say. --that wants to use the nose in an elaborate scheme to detect counterfeit money. This unnamed nation-- Oh, it was actually the German printing office. --wanted to inject a smell into their money, a smell that would be detected by "die nase elektronisch." How does the electronic nose work? Before we get to that, let me explain how actual noses work. The inside of your nose is filled with millions of little sensors, like sponges. A smell, meanwhile, is made up of a whole bunch of different chemicals, in the form of gases, that combine to create one specific odor. As you breathe in-- let's all breathe in-- the gases enter your nose, and each chemical is absorbed by a different sensor that's primed to respond to that type of chemical. The sensors-- the little sponges-- then send signals to the brain. And the brain combines all the data from all the different sensors and identifies their combination as a particular smell. Right. I'll repeat the question. How does the electronic nose work? So the electronic nose works almost the same way. Remember how I said it looks like a little table? Underneath the table, it has a pump, like a tiny set of lungs to draw smells in through the plastic tube. The air goes up the tube into the white box named Durante, and the box holds all the sensors. Then some of the sensors swell depending on whatever chemicals are in the air being drawn in. Electrodes measure the amount of swelling, and the microcomputer acts as a brain to coordinate all the information from all the sensors and to compare the new pattern to smells its learned before. How does the electronic nose compare to a dog's nose? Dogs are used at airports to detect explosives, and they're also used in detecting landmines. Maybe you've seen them in the movies. Their nose, at this point, is pretty unbeatable for mapping smells. It has 10 times as many sensors as the human nose. And human noses have 300,000 times as many sensors as the current version of the electronic nose. But the electronic nose does have one significant advantage over dogs. Dogs, they tend to have a very short attention span. They usually are good for 15 or 20 minutes, and then it's time for another dog. An they're expensive to train. And they're very good-- I didn't know that. You always see the dogs being so focused. No, they stay focused for time frames on the order of 15 minutes, maybe a good one, a half an hour. And is the electronic nose going to be as good as a dog's nose? It will be a long time before it's as good as a dog's nose, but it will be someday. Does the electronic nose have a soul? A few hours into my visit at Cyrano, I found myself, inevitably, thinking about that dilemma at the heart of so many science fiction movies. At what point does a machine achieve humanness? A machine whose sense of smell consists of counting up all the chemicals in a particular odor and naming them, is that really smelling? Real smelling seems different. It seems human. Real smells have associations. They evoke memories and feelings. We don't just count molecules floating through the air. What we do and what we call smelling seems fundamentally different from what the electronic nose does when it smells. Richard, like any good scientist of course, has no interest whatsoever in this idea. I won't play for you any of the five minutes of tape of our going back and forth about it, except to say that he ended with-- I'm happy I'm a person and not a computer. Yeah, me too. You know, at moments like this, you really need an omniscient narrator with a deep voice to come in and wrap it all up. And I have one. Yes, there are similarities and differences between the human nose and the electronic nose. The key difference is that powerful human computer we call the brain, which lets us sift through thousands-- even millions-- of different odors as we map our world. Well, coming up, learning to map a city using your mouth your guide. Our little radio experiment in the five senses continues. Taste and Touch are left. In a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers, documentary producers, and performers to tackle that theme. Today's program, Mapping. We're bringing you five stories, five ways of mapping the world, one through each of the human senses, sight, hearing, smell, and now touch and taste. We've arrived at Act Four, Human Touch. This is a story about somebody mapping her own body using the sense of touch. Deb Monroe is a magazine writer and contributor to public radio shows like Marketplace and The Savvy Traveler. If mapping means that you're charting only one aspect of the world, there is a good side to being obsessed with one thing. And, of course, there is a darker side. This whole thing began seven years ago. I remember the day. At a park with my daughters-- babies back then-- I came across a magazine article about breast cancer. It listed the warning signs. It suddenly didn't matter that I was in a crowded public place. I had to check. So I stuck my hand under my blouse and checked for lumps. Nothing. Then I stretched out my T-shirt and peeked inside. What was that? I'd never noticed it before, a sort of puckering on the pale skin of my breasts. Grabbing the kids and carting them to a phone, I called my doctor. Come in today, he said. At the office, the nurses watched the babies while the doctor examined me. He looked like he was trying hard not to roll his eyes. Stretch marks, he said. Those are stretch marks. That experience would have stopped most people from panicking and running to the doctor. Not in my case. It catapulted me straight into the world of hypochondriacs. When life gets stressful, I do five or six breast checks a day. When things get really intense, that number goes up to 30 or 40. I've pushed and prodded my flesh so hard that I've actually bruised myself. I've done self-exams at the dinner table, in the middle of a performance at the Hollywood Bowl, and I hope they're not listening right now, but in the studios of PRI's Marketplace. I can't control myself. But it's not just the breast exams. My husband Jim can tell you when it all began. Probably about seven years ago. Probably when we were living in Dallas and Michaela was not very old. She was really pretty young. A few months old, maybe. That's when you had your first tumor. I can't remember where it was. Was it a brain tumor? You went through so many. I think you thought you had a brain tumor. And then we moved to Chicago, and then you had stomach cancer. I believe you had another brain tumor, a couple of cases of breast cancer. Quite a survivor. You have actual physical pain. That's the weird part. You're convinced that you have had a headache for three weeks. You are convinced that your stomach has been killing your for three months, and that's got to be a developing tumor somewhere between your knees and your shoulders. You've got this cancer that's eating you alive. You're convinced of that, and it's bizarre, truly. I'm sorry. It doesn't sound very sympathetic. The weird thing is that I'm so afraid I might actually find something that I don't really do my breast exams correctly. My hand darts in here, there, feels around and then, relieved that there are no obvious lumps, my hand pulls away as if it's just been burned. But knowing that I did a lousy job, I must do it again, and the cycle just repeats itself. The cycle spiraled out of control two years ago. It was a bad time in my life. The kids were worried about starting school, and my father was on the verge of a nervous breakdown as my mother continued her decline into Alzheimer's. So when a magazine offered to send me to write about a weekend getaway for stressed-out moms in the mountains two hours south of LA, I jumped at the chance. Well, instead of being a relaxing, pampering experience, I kept sneaking off to the bathroom to check for lumps. I went to the bathroom so many times, one lady asked if I had food poisoning. I wonder what she would've said if she could see me, hunkered down on the grimy toilet lid under the fluorescent light, stripping to the waist so I could check myself. Fast forward to Halloween. At a friend's party filled with children and music and wine, I was walking by a bookshelf when I spotted the Merck Manual. It's filled with descriptions of diseases and their symptoms. I tried, but I couldn't resist. The book was suddenly in my hand. My friend's husband, John, sauntered up, interested. He was sure he had a brain tumor. The repeated CAT scans must've missed it, he said. We spent the next two hours pouring over the book, following the trail of little gray boxes of symptoms to their frightening conclusions. Hodgkin's disease, stomach cancer, Ebola. John's wife marched over, grabbed the book away, and pointed meaningfully at the children bobbing for apples. My husband ordered me to stop reading medical information in books and magazines. He forgot about the information that comes with prescription drugs. In teeny, tiny print on the skinny piece of paper that comes with birth control pills is that bit warning women over the age of 35 about the possibility of blood clots in the leg, which can shoot up through your veins and kill you. At 3:00 AM, I woke up with a leg cramp. It had to be a clot. I paged the doctor. Well, since I ruined all the goodwill in that relationship, I had to move on. This time, I switched to a woman doctor. Turns out we had a lot of common-- both 37, third generation Mexican-American, even grew up in the same neighborhood. She asked about the stress in my life. Because a lot of times, women with pain in that area will have a psychological cause for it. I would say maybe 50% of the time. 50% of the time? I'm not alone? No, you're not alone. What's this about? Knowing you as I have, I think perhaps you're just nervous and anxious about the possibility of having a problem. And with everything going on your life, it's easy to focus on something else to put your anxiety into. And at one point, it was the pelvic pain. And that resolved once you knew that maybe this is what was causing it. Now it's the breast situation. And maybe once you resolve whatever is in your life that might be triggering that fear and anxiety, that will resolve itself as well. Ah, fear and anxiety. They are so '90s. It's all so self-absorbed. And it's this part of hypochondria-- the self-absorption-- that I hate the most. I feel enormously guilty having such thoughts when millions of people are suffering from real problems. Everything is going along fine, and then it's like, oh, I remember the syndrome. Suddenly, we're back into it again. I think you're doing fine, you seem to be doing fine, and suddenly, I catch you feeling for a lump or something. I find it a little depressing. Suddenly, it's like what I thought was sort of a normal pattern has now come to an end, and now we're going to go through this difficult time with you being distracted and sort of self-absorbed and worried. And yeah, I almost want to slap your hand like you're a two-year-old reaching for a cookie. The trouble is, I think, that it takes your mind away from other things that it seems to me should be more important, because they actually exist, for one thing. I mean, the tumors don't exist and I do, your other things do, that sometimes get shunted aside when you're busy obsessing about these maladies. Would you have ever suspected when we got married that I would end up doing this? No. It's a great question. No. Not at all. You were smart, kind of fun and liked to have a good time, seemed to be very much capable of enjoying life. You were good at what you did. Now you still are good at what you do, but your enjoyment of life has to be hampered by your constantly searching for lumps and believing you have them. That definitely doesn't seem like the kind of thing the person I married would have done. But this is the problem. When you start mapping your own body while consumed with fear, the map's inaccurate. The picture that you get of yourself is inaccurate. It's filled with landmarks that seem huge but really don't exist. It's a road map that always sends you driving down the wrong road. Deb Monroe in Los Angeles. Act Five, Mapping the World Through Taste. Jonathan Gold's life was changed after he decided to map his city-- one part of his city-- by relying mostly on his sense of taste. His story begins in the early 1980s. He went back to where it all happened to tell the tale. This is the historic site of Mr. Coleslaw Burger, which now is a neon sign shop specializing in Hangul characters for Korean signs. Mr. Coleslaw Burger is on Pico Boulevard. And at the time, I lived on Pico Boulevard about three or four miles down over a kosher butcher shop in a Jewish-Iranian section of town. And I took a bus down Pico Boulevard every day for my job, which was an incredibly boring legal proofreading job at a downtown legal newspaper. My goal in those days, I suppose, was to be Elliott Abrams, who was at that time the undersecretary of state under Reagan, who seemed to have the glamorous life of flying around from Latin capital to Latin capital, meddling in everybody's economies and exhorting them all to try University of Chicago-style economics. I had some vague idea that I wanted to be a government bureaucrat. I took every civil service test that it's possible to take. I took the country civil service test and the state civil service test. I took the post office test. I took the National Security Agency test. I took a CIA test. And finally, but probably not least, I took the foreign service test. And I got a fairly high score on it. So I assumed that I was going to, at some point, join the foreign service. At some point during this year, my friend, Ken, took me to this place on Pico Boulevard-- Mr. Coleslaw Burger. And Mr. Coleslaw Burger wasn't much, I guess, in terms of restaurants. It wasn't the most magnificent place I'd ever been to, and it wasn't the best-smeling place I had ever been to, and sort of a surly guy behind the counter who insulted his clients and liked to be known as Mr. Coleslaw Burger himself, although his name was probably Miller. And the thing that struck me about Mr. Coleslaw Burger was that here was a man who had found his mission in life. And his mission in life was to put coleslaw on hamburgers. I'm not sure if he was the very first person to put coleslaw on hamburgers, but the first person I'd ever seen. And somehow, thinking of Mr. Coleslaw Burger and thinking of the other restaurants I'd eaten at on Pico, I came up with this sort of half-baked coleslaw-inspired idea to eat at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard and to create sort of a map of the senses that would be able to get me from one end to the other. The next week, as I was coming home from work and I had really nothing else planned for the evening or, realistically, the week or the rest of my life, I decided to do that. And I came up with a set of rules. I had to go to each restaurant in order. If the restaurant was closed, I could go to the next restaurant on the list, but means the next time I was out, I had to go back to the one that I had missed the first time. If a restaurant was really bad, I could skip out after a bite or two. If a place wasn't really a restaurant but, say, a candy store that also happened to sell hot dogs, then I'd have to try the hot dog, but I wouldn't necessarily have to make it part of my meal. And as often happens with these kind of restaurants, they'd close down. So if I'd gone two miles and then a restaurant that I had gone to had closed down and opened up again, then I would have to go and eat at that restaurant before I would be able to go to the next one. Street vendors, push carts selling tacos or mangoes were optional. I usually tried to eat at them, but I didn't consider it a fault if I didn't. I became obsessed with the idea of Pico Boulevard. Almost every ethnic group that exists in Los Angeles, you can find on Pico. There's specific blocks that are Guatemalan and Nicaraguan blocks and Salvadoran blocks. There are parts of Pico where you can drive for probably a mile without seeing a sign that isn't in Korean. There's big sections that are Mexican, and not just Mexican but some are Oaxacan, and some are so solidly aligned with Jalisco, with Guadalajara that you see the little symbol-- the goat of the Guadalajaran soccer team, which is the Chivos-- in almost every window. And it's center for a huge concentration of Persian Jews that came over here around the time the Ayatollah took power. I don't think there's another street in Los Angeles that's quite like it. This is the El Parian, and the thumping you hear is a man butchering goats. El Parian is probably the best place in Los Angeles to find the dish called the birria, which is sometimes translated as "ugly stuff" and in Arizona is made with beef. But in Los Angeles and in Guadalajara-- where the dish comes from-- it means goat stew. When you come to El Parian, usually people won't ask you what you want. They know what you want. There's only one reason you come here, and that's for the birria. You start off with some chips and beans, and then they bring it out-- a big plate of goat roast. Still has the crispy parts and the savory parts and some stewy parts. And they'll our over it this broth called consomme, which is essentially a very strong broth made with amplified goat drippings and lots of chile. First sip of the-- oh, my. The first sip of the consomme-- the first taste that you get is the taste of salt. And then almost immediately, like a kick in the back of the throat, the chile comes in. It's a very specific feeling. And then sort of like the round, almost arc-shaped flavor of the goat, which is gamy but not too gamy, and the meat's sweetness comes through. It's a wonderful taste. It's really well balanced. Really, I like eating the goat fine. But the goat soup that you're able to scoop out from around the goat is the best part of the whole thing. Birria may seem like a strange thing and sort of an isolated specialty, but birria's actually hugely popular in Los Angeles, especially among immigrants from Zacatecas state and from Jalisco, whose capital is Guadalajara. And there may be as many as 100 places specializing in the dish. This is the last remaining location of the world famous Oki Dog, the more famous branch of which used to be on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. The original Oki was notorious because it was where everybody went after punk rock shows at the Starwood. So you'd go there at 1:00 in the morning, and there'd be a line of 300 people with mohawks and cherry-red hair and rings in their noses and Doc Martens on their feet, flying the flag, hanging out with the freaks. The famous punk rock singer, Darby Crash, who was the lead singer of The Germs, was reputed to have had his last meal at the Oki Dog just a few hours before he OD'd. That one got closed because it was the site of about half the crime in the city of West Hollywood. The Pico Oki, though, was the one that always had the better food. Los Angeles has always been famous for its fusion food, its multicultural concoctions of things. But the same sort of thing that was happening in much fancier restaurants like Chinois and Chaya Brasserie across town, here, Oki Dog was doing almost the people's version of it. My favorite item, the pastrami burrito-- which is a truly fearsome creation capable of feeding four people for four days-- is a greased bun made with fried pastrami, fried cabbage, fried peppers, a glob of chili, pickles and onions if you want them, and wrapped inside a burrito, which is to say food with influences of Chinese food, Jewish food, and the Los Angeles chili tradition, wrapped in a burrito which is Mexican style, cooked by Japanese guys for an almost exclusively African-American clientele. This is the Magic Carpet Restaurant, which is a black kosher Yemenite restaurant. Mmm. Smell that mint tea. That just smells great. Magic Carpet was sort of on the end of my year on Pico. I had eaten in perhaps 150 restaurants. But at some point during the year, I started relaxing the rules a little bit. I started passing by the mango carts. I started becoming less interested in the places that serve chili burgers that looked exactly like the place that served chili burgers a block away. And after a while, all pupusas started to look alike to me. During the course of this year, I'd gotten the results of the first Foreign Service exam. I did pretty well. And on the second Foreign Service exam, I did better than I did on the first part. I'd been through my FBI search and had been fingerprinted and had been checked out by government physicians. I was ready to go. I was waiting for a posting somewhere. And it occurred to me that what I was looking for in the foreign service, that the sort of adventures I was hoping to have, that the sort of people I was hoping to meet, I was already having right there in my own hometown. Jonathan Gold is now the restaurant critic for the LA Weekly and for Los Angeles Magazine. His food column "Counter Intelligence" was in the Los Angeles Times for eight years. His mission-- to help readers everywhere be less afraid of their neighbors using the medium of food. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder, senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett and [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Davenport. The deep voice behind the electronic nose frequently asked questions was Mr. Paul Friedman, Chicago voiceover man who also happens to be the official voice of the Chicago Cubs. If you want to buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected], where you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Don't forget the special maps you'll find on the site this week. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who does the site for us for free. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. Does management oversight require the electronic nose? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. Does Torey Malatia have the electronic nose? PRI, Public Radio International.
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Eustace grew up in the suburbs in North Carolina. He watched TV, ate candy, rode a bike, all pretty much like any suburban kid, until, at the age of 17, he moved out in the woods and never came back. I had moved out into the forest. I was 17 years old, and I just decided that I would try an alternative style of living. And really, with that, I didn't think it all through in a major, complex way. I just decided I would like to try living outside. And so I moved out and started camping in a tepee, hunting and gathering food and making my own tools and clothes. And let me just be sure people understand. When you're living outside, you were there year round. Yeah, totally moved out. In fact, I've lived outside for 20 years now. From the time Eustace moved outside, he was interested in the past and all the things that people knew about how to live with nature, back when they had no choice about living with nature. For years, he lived in the woods, slept in a tepee, hunted his own food with bow and arrow, made his own clothes out of deerskin, his own utensils and tools. And then he started to evolve from a life as a hunter-gatherer to basic agriculture. He learned to plant and harvest, cultivated a patch of land, started raising animals, taught himself how to work with horses and mules. In other words, he personally went to through the major evolutionary stages that took the human species about 10,000 years during the Late Cenozoic. And around the same time he moved out into the forest, he had another idea, to ride a horse across America. And I decided to do it when I was sitting around a campfire. And I heard about a couple that was living with their horses in the national forest. And it just sort of struck me. It was like a thunderbolt. It's like it came into my mind and I said-- it's like I didn't even know what was coming out of my mouth. I just said, I'm going to ride a horse across America someday. And then he asked me if I wanted to go. Eustace's younger brother, Judson. And my first reaction was, well, no, not really. Why? It just seemed like a big undertaking, and I was happy in my little life. But then, I looked and I asked myself, well, what reason do you not have to go? Why shouldn't you go? Why not? And one of my biggest inspirations for going was to spend time with him. Yeah? 17 years after he first decided to ride across America, Eustace finally set out on the trail with his brother. The ride was partly an experiment in time travel. What happens when you try to live how people lived over a century ago? It was partly a lark, an adventure. Men on horses battling the elements, testing themselves, launched toward a goal they had no idea if they could reach. But I should tell you that for Eustace, the main idea behind this trip was not nearly so grand as all that. For Eustace, a big part of it was simply about horses. Eustace had been working with horses for a while when he sat out on the trail, but he knew there was just something about living with horses, working with horses, that he was going to learn if he rode so long, so steadily for months. He took Judson, who had worked with horses on a ranch in Wyoming, he was a wrangler, took people on trips into the wilderness, plus an acquaintance of theirs, Susan Klimkowski, who worked for a couple years in a stable, had a horse of her own. There are indoor people and there are outdoor people. Susan grew up down the street from Eustace and Judson, three kids who spent a lot of time out of doors. I grew up in a neighborhood where us kids, we all hung out and liked to run up and down the creek chasing crawdads and fish and snakes and turtles, but we lived in town. When you look around, do you feel like most people are indoors people or most people are outdoors people that you meet? Most people are indoors people, but I think they want to be outdoor. But they don't know how to get outside and enjoy it. They set out on Christmas Day 1995 from a beach in South Carolina. They carried a cassette tape recorder with them to keep a kind of audio journal of their trip. And it's those tapes that make up a lot of our show today. So to make this history for the recorder, tell us who you are and what you're about. I'm David Elliott. I'm the priest here at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. And I'll go out and bless the trip in a few minutes. I envy you. I think it'll be wonderful. Responsibilities tie me down. They tie everybody down. Let us pray. Dear God, our heavenly father, we give you thanks this day for the beauty of your creation. We give you thanks also for the human spirit. Guide these people on their trip all the way to California. Guide them safely, dear God. All this we ask in Christ's name. Amen. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio international, it's This. American. Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Adventures in the Simple Life. Act One, Long Riders. What you learn and what you find when you head out in the dead of winter, near the end of the 20th century, in a completely industrialized country, on a 2,500 mile horse trip. Act Two, Zen Shmen. What happens when your best friend renounces everything the two of you share, everything about your lives, to go live a simpler life in the mountains in a monastery? Stay with us. Act One, Long Riders. So when they set out, it was Eustace, Judson and Susan, four horses, one was a spare, camping gear, and a truck. And it's kind of a crazy scheme the way that they worked the whole thing. Every day, they would wake up, and then one of the would drive the truck 20 or 30 miles ahead to wherever it was they were going to camp the next night. And then that person would have to hitchhike back the same 20 or 30 miles, which could take hours. And then, after that, they would set out on their horses and they would ride all day. A couple months into the trip, they had this guy named Walker Young who joined the team to drive the truck ahead and find places to camp and handle stuff like that. The other crazy 20th century adaptation to their 19th century horse ride is it they did not ride through open country. They trotted along on the shoulders of highways, on the sides of roads. It seemed like the most efficient route. You recorded yourselves as you rode across the country on a cassette machine, about 30 hours of tape, starting with that first day. Can I ask you what it was like setting out? Oh, it was easy setting out. It was sort of like, OK, the day has come. We're going. I knew that we didn't know what we were doing. That was OK. I was real satisfied with that. I personally knew that there was a big chance that we wouldn't make it. My partners were a little bit younger and had done less traveling, a little bit more idealistic. And so they were Gung ho. Yeah, we're going to do this thing. We're going to make it. That sound in the background is the defroster. This is Eustace Conway on the 25th of December. Sitting beside me-- oh, you hear that little yelp? Let me hear that yelp again. That was a big yelp. That's Judson Conway. He's a crazy. And then between us is the lovely lady. What's your name? Susan. Susan what? Klimkowski. She's a simple lady. In that first day, I have to say you all sound so young and happy. We were. Yeah. Trotting along, trotting along, trotting along. Beautiful pink clouds above our head, baby blue background, the pines are dark getting black in the bottom. It's hard to trot when you're halfway twisted around looking at the beauty of it. Man, what a day. Mmm. I feel fully alive, fully awake. It's sacred, this minute of living, of passion, with dream. I hear that Pileated Woodpecker in the background. I hear a car coming up behind me. Just a little bit further, we'll be off the bridge. We knew almost nothing about this. We didn't know what we were doing. Even finding a route, like how were we going to go across. Did you have a big atlas or something? We had a few state road maps. A few state road maps is all we had to go by. And everybody kept saying, well, what's your route? How are you going to go? And I was like, I don't really know. We're heading west every day. It's 7:00 in the morning. This'll be our third day. It's about light enough to see out here, and the horses look well. Been going over for the last hour what we're going to do today. I think we'll drive the truck forward to highway 32. Well, it's 9 o'clock, and we're riding along. We stayed at Walter Hodges', and Clara Belle, their monkey, entertained us a little bit. They've had their monkey for years. And he told us about how one time, she had gotten electrocuted by climbing up on some wires. And she was getting shocked, and it had been raining a little bit. So he backed his track up and got a broom-- a dry broom-- and knocked Clara Belle off. And she was stunned on the ground. And then later in the evening, he said, what do you think about the monkey? And they had referred to it as their daughter. I said, well, I don't know. I think it's kind of strange somebody keeps their daughter tied up in the backyard and gives her electrical shock treatments and then beats her with a broom. I guess you had to be there. We're getting our first rain right now, the first rain of the whole trip. It's drizzling. Not much of a rain, but enough to lower our spirits enough to worry. Hey. Hey, no. Not my spirit, bro. You're over here whining. No, you were the one whining. "I wish it would stop raining until we got to camp." And describe how you were all outfitted. What did you all look like? We were basically wearing a lot of the Western-style clothes, which wasn't for style but all these old cowboy clothes, they actually work. They do the things that you need. Silk scarves, cowboy hats. The chaps and the spurs and the whole bit. --had guns and knives and long hair and looked rough as hell and all kinds of stories, interesting reactions coming out of that. Well, here's a good description. Here's a story. We're trotting through this little town and going down Main Street, and I see someone through a plate glass window look at us. And they're sort of awed. The mouth drops open, it's like, my gosh, what's going on here? So I see the man just grab something from his desk and run out the front door. So I look back every once in a while, and this guy is sort of half-running behind us. Finally, we get to the edge of town. It's misting, a bit rainy. And he says, "Hey, I didn't want to interrupt you. I thought you might be making a movie or something." It's like, "No, we're not making a movie." And he says, "But you guys look so real. I mean, you really look real." And I was like, "Well, I think that probably is because we really are real." And he said this over and another. It was like he was stuttering this chant, like, "You guys look real. I mean, you really look real." And now-- I'm glad the tape recorder's working-- now Judson's going to fire off a round to celebrate making it across a whole state in the Southeast Georgia. We just entered Alabama. Do it, brother! Whew! Oh, my god. Let me ask you to talk about some of the people you met along the way. Uh huh. Where would I begin? That's the most amazing part of the entire journey. People would really appreciate and take us in in ways that I never imagined would be possible. You know, these odd-looking rogues with long hair, knives and guns, and yet, the most conservative, Southern, clean-cut gentleman, farmers, would bring us right into their homes with their children, their wives, and just treat us like we were part of the family. The entire America was great. They were most gracious and accepted us. And we'd go into one town and they'd say, oh, watch out for this next town that you're going through because they're kind of questionable people. And we'd get to that town and they'd be just as nice as the last one. Everybody was great. Long story. I don't know how much you want to tape. But let's just say one morning, I met these two guys. I was actually standing on the side of the road with a fan of money trying to get a ride. And they pull up to buy some beer, Sunday morning, actually. On their way to church. Yeah. So this sporty little car pulls up with shiny mag wheels and comes to a stop right there at the quick stop across the road. And one of them goes in there to get something. I haven't met them at this time. So I'm out there, and I kind of smile, hold my money up. And so apparently, J.L. was in the driver seat at this time. And he leans out of the car door and says, "Hey, you got any money?" And so I'm embarrassed. I look around, I went, "Yes." "I say, you got any money?" And I think I better go negotiate with this man before I alarm the whole neighborhood. So I told him I'd give him $5 just to get me to the other side of the town. Actually, I'd gotten a ride halfway already. So I was trying just to get on the other side of town. So we're sitting there negotiating back and forth and back and forth. And Tyrone comes walking out. these two guys are buddies, J.L. and Tyrone. Tyrone comes walking out with this beer. And he just looks at me, he says, "You want a ride?" And I said, "Yeah." He says, "Get in the truck." So apparently, it was Tyrone's truck. So they crank it up and they start going along. And Tyrone pulls out a beer from his six pack. And he grabs that and he opens it. You can see the mist coming out. And he just looks at it, and he smells it, and he's just about to take a swig. He's reverently getting ready to drink his beer. And he's just about to turn it back and drink, and he looks to me. All of a sudden, he remembers his manners. He's like, "You like beer?" I say, "Uh huh." "You want a beer?" Being polite, I say, "Well, sure, OK." So he gives me a beer. Then he cracks another one for himself. He says, "I like beer. I love beer. I'll drink beer every day." So then he takes this big morning drink. It's like, whoa, this guy is into his beer. So I'm sitting there talking to J.L., hanging through the truck window. And he's telling me about his life. So he'll tell me something, and then I'll tell him something. I'm telling him about the Long Riders journey. And I'm telling him about the horses. Yeah, we got horses waiting over there. He's listening. At this time, I had no idea. But he thought I was full of [BLEEP]. He thought I was tripping on acid and had no idea that anything I was saying made any sense. So we're having this conversation. And I think he's believing everything, so I'm telling him about my life, my story. You're telling him your life, so you're telling him, "I live in the woods. I've lived there since I was a teenager. I trap my own animals." And he's just thinking, yeah right. You got it. You got the picture. So we get to the gas station. I fill them up with gas. Then we drive on. And so we come around the bend. He starts wondering if I even know where I want to go, like, if I'm just crazy. Making the whole thing up. Right. So we round the bend, and there is my partners with the horses. And J.L. is like, "[BLEEP], man, they got horses! They got horses!" He is just absolutely amazed. He throws the car into park and jumps out, leaves the door wide open, and just runs over to the horses and reaches out to touch them, as if, can they be real? All of a sudden, everything shifts. Instead of being a freak, all of a sudden, he's got respect for me, and the reality comes in. And he wants to help out. Instead of trying to take my money-- here's how I met this guy. "You got any money?" He's trying hard as he can to take me for any kind of dollar bill. And all of a sudden, heart comes in. Feeling. Something totally shifts. And he cares about us. And so he comes out and meets us on the road several times, brings a friend. They drive the truck ahead a couple of days. And just such a shift from our introduction. When they'd ride into town, they'd try to find somebody with a fenced-in field or yard, and they would ask them if they could camp there. And over and over, people not only said yes, they invited them in for hot meals and hot showers, helped them out any way they could. There was this one family in Louisiana, the Marbles, who, after putting up Eustace and Judson and Susan for days, really, helping them find a new horse, decided to deliver them a hot turkey meal with stuffing and cranberry dressing and all the fixings out on the road. We were riding down the road several hundred miles from where they live. And all of a sudden, they drive by hooting and hollering out the window. My gosh, is that the Marbles? And they pulled over ahead of us and by the time we got to them, they had a big old Thanksgiving dinner is what I called it, even though it was January or February. And they had driven hundreds of miles? Yeah, and they had no idea exactly where we were. They was just in a hope that they could find us. All the cooking, all the driving, all the planning to have that Sunday afternoon to come try to find us. And they did. Judson, why do you think people were responding the way they were to the three of you traveling? Because we were doing something that everybody dreams about but nobody takes the risk to do-- or the time, the energy, the money, the challenge to do. I guess I have my own way of thinking about it, is I wanted to tell people you can do whatever you want. Celebrate life. Don't just work at a grind forever. Just stop. Just say, "I want to do this. That's what I did. I said I want to ride a horse across the country. I had a thousand people tell me I couldn't. I didn't listen to one of them. I said, I'm going to do this. And I got on a horse and started out. I didn't know how to do this journey. I didn't know much about riding horses. It sounds like the three of you are just out there just like putting your hearts out there. You know what I mean? Just doing this thing. And so that just calls this thing forward from other people where they want to do it too. It does. People would even just ride up and roll down their window and stick out a $10 bill. Several times, we would turn people down. People were like, "Let me help you. You can stay at our house." And we're like, "Well, we've already got plans. Somebody already pulled over and invited us to stay their house." And several times, we split up, and one of us would spend the night one place and somebody else would spend the night somewhere else. Part of this reaction had to do with the horses, Eustace and Judson say. They had both hitchhiked across America, and they say that people are not nearly so friendly. But with the horses, they would ride into town, looking like cowboys, charming and dusty, like figures not just out of a the movie but out of some dream that we all have of America. When these epic figures trot up the interstate into your town, how could you not stare? Who would not want to be near something so larger than life. People didn't just give them money. People wanted to talk to them, tell them their stories, which Eustace recorded on tape. Allison, tell our diary what's going on. What do you do for a living? Where are we? And anything you want to say? We're at a rock shop out in the middle of nowhere. In fact, we're three miles from the middle of nowhere. Mile marker 33 is the middle. We just kind of poke along out here. And this used to be owned by Sam and Vera Jones. Sam was otherwise known as Rattlesnake Jones. He believed in protecting rattlesnakes. He had a rattlesnake pit out here with over 200 rattlesnakes in it at all times. Him and Vera also had two pet bobcats. And a lot of neat history out here. Sam killed himself on the front doorstep over there of the trailer because he was dying of cancer and all sorts of health problems. He was living on a hospital bed on an oxygen tank. And he told his wife that he was going shoot himself that morning. And she said as long as he didn't do it inside the house. She didn't want to clean up the mess. And she knew he was serious. And she was out in the rock shop and heard the gunshot and waited about an hour before she called the ambulance because he didn't want to be resuscitated. He wanted to be dead. My goodness. Yeah, it's real interesting out here. My dad was a bird hunter. And we had three or four milk cows. My sister and brothers, they'd milk the cows. I'd feed the horse. My dad would feed the mules. He would pass through the rooms, say, get up, boys. Get up, boys. And look, he wasn't going to say "get up boys" but one time. And the next time, he'd say, I thought you boys were supposed to be up. The next time, he had that broom handle. And ain't no such a thing as child abuse. The first time is when he wanted it to be done. And you better get out the bed, because let I'm going to tell you something. My daddy didn't play. 270 pounds of pure man. I heard that. 6:00 in the morning here. Just got up. Stars are bright. I'm going to go check on the horses here and give them their feed as early as possible so that they'll have time to digest it before we head out. Hello there, boys. Hello, boys. Yeah. It's hard to imagine, now that I really think about it, how a camera crew or even a news team of writers could capture what I think is best about this trip-- the movement, the familiarity with the known, the process of the day, the challenge, the freshness, the warmth of the simplicity, the support of the people like the ones in that car that waved as they just went by, the pattern of day-by-day moving as a herd across North America. There's no way that they could capture what I really want to share. Beautiful, quiet night. No light except the stars. The Big Dipper shining bright and pointing out to the North Star. We made it 30 miles, so I feel really good. Glad to be with my good partners, good horses. Good. Coming up, The Dark Side of the Horse, in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American. Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different stories on that theme. Today's program, Adventures in the Simple Life. We're in the middle of Act One, the story of three people traveling across country with some horses and a tape recorder-- prerequisite for getting on our show. I cannot state strongly enough how much of the 30 hours of tape they recorded is simply the three of them talking about the horses. Hours of detail about the horses' shoes and the color of their urine, and how the horses are doing. And I have to say, for city people sitting in an office in Chicago, listening to all this, it was hard to understand what it was all about. But, of course, what it was all about was the difficulty of being on the road, which is where our story resumes. And then we started meeting the miles and meeting the challenges and being up at 2:00 in the morning fixing equipment and getting up before daylight. Some nights, we'd sleep four hours, and we didn't go to bed refreshed. We went to bed worn out. We'd get up four hours later and start feeding and brushing horses. So it's pouring rain, and we're stopped by a little, metal building on the side of the road. And we pulled over and one of Mac's shoes, I noticed his back, left shoe was falling off. What in the hell are we going to do? Oh, jeez. 8:30 in the morning on March-- what is today, everybody? 15th. 15th? And I feel puny. My stomach is just feeling like a burnt pancake that got stepped on by an elephant and then eaten by a roadrunner and then [BLEEP] on top of a green stinkbug that's eating its way through it. And that's how my stomach feels. I might just vomit in this microphone. Turning right on a dirt road. And Judson's reaching for his six shooter. What's that boy doing? Oh my gosh, we're crossing into Arkansas. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my goodness! We made it to Arkansas! [YELPS] Are we really here, or is it just a dream? I think we're about to touch Texas. And there's a big old rock there that says "Texas." Oh my gosh, it's real. We're really doing it. Yes! [YELPS] Albert, settle down, boy. It's just a .357. Let me ask you to explain as you're going into Arizona. Oh, my. Very interesting situation. Almost embarrassing. But the fact is, we had just bought a horse. And this one hadn't been handled in a very long time and had a reputation, in the few times it had been handled, of being more or less wild. And so I'm riding along, and we get to the Arizona line. Every time we get to a line, one of us-- usually Judson, my brother-- shoots off a gun, just as a celebration, reckoning that we made it to another state line. So we go through the gate, and I shut the gate, and we're there. It's like, OK, let's celebrate. And intuitively, I knew not to get up on this horse. But my brother, for some reason, I don't know why, he said, get up on your horse. And for some reason, I followed his instructions and got up on the horse. There it is, boy. It's the state line. We're getting ready for a big bang. My gosh, we're getting into Arizona. Woo! We are walking in the soul of another state, and proud of it. I got bucked off of this damn black horse. He's not used to a gunshot. Guess I'm trying to stay awake now. Seems like maybe my head is addled. Maybe I have a concussion or something. And I cracked my head. Blood everywhere. The power of it goes from my head to my shoulder, twisted my neck, hit my back, tearing my back open, ripping my shirt. And I'm just sitting there slumped, hurting. And it was not what I wanted to happen. How much of a break did you take before you started writing again? Did you take the-- I didn't take a minute off. I climbed back up, blood was still running down. The blood knitted my hair back together. That's what held my scalp together. I just let the dried blood hold it back together. Did you think about seeing a doctor? There weren't any doctors anywhere nearby. Oh, my. My brother and Susan are kind of like normal people. But my lifestyle has been forever very extraordinarily different than common, normal America. Just about a month ago, I rode a horse into a tree. I was chasing another horse. And it got dark, and I did not want to give up on catching this horse. It was the first time I'd ever let this horse go. So I ran right into a tree and knocked my head back. When I came forward, all of a sudden I heard all this splashing. Blood was flying all around my saddle splashing down. And I wondered, my gosh, what have I done? And I stuck my tongue through my lip. It was right through the front of my face. I was like, ooh, that does not feel right. So I went to a mirror. See, I don't have electricity, so I lit some candles and looked in the mirror, and I had three huge holes in my face that were gaping open, profusely bleeding. So I could've gone to a doctor. I live way out in the country. But I just got out a needle and thread and sewed my face back together. It was about 14 stitches. Pulled it back together and I was good to go. Had to heal up and the swelling had to go down and all that, but it's healed up real good. But see, that's the story of my life. Me, what I'm trying to teach people and what I believe in is that you can do things yourself. You can take care of yourself. You can be responsible, and should be responsible, for yourself. I was born in normal suburbia. In fact, I guess that's one of the important things about me being able to do some of these things of living like people did a long time ago, is I went from normal suburbia. I know the American people. I can speak your language. But I live in a very different way that's come through decades of experience and voluntarily living by a whole other set of values and reality. Even when you embark on an adventure in the simple life, it doesn't get all that simple. Life resists simplicity. On this horse trip across America, the logistics of getting from place to place were as complicated as you might imagine, with that truck to move around and 20th century traffic always threatening to run them over. And then having to provision horses and get new horses and find a place to stay every night. It took money and telephones and all the skill with people that anybody would be able to muster. And then there's the mundane fact that like any people on a long trip together, Eustace and Judson and Susan got on each other's nerves sometimes. When it happened, one of them would ride ahead a ways for a while, get a break from the others. And when they finally made it to California, to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, what's striking is how bittersweet it was. That was a pretty intense day. We started riding. And that part of California is very hilly. And you'd ride up a hill and you think, we're going to look out and see the ocean. And we didn't. We rode and rode and rode before we saw the ocean. And you're just hoping and waiting for this end. It's kind of climactic, waiting for it to come up, and it never would. You'd just see more houses and more streets. It was like, "ugh." Almost at the beach. I can smell it and feel it and see it in the traffic and the worry in the people faces. And it's exciting because we're almost there. Hey, cowboys! We are cowboys. Hey, cowboys! That's what they call us here. And finally, we saw it. And it was like, wow. It was a weird feeling. It was like, now what do we do? I thought it was going to be more crazy energy. It was more self-reflective energy. It was more just sitting on your horse and staring at the ocean and going, wow. It was more just, we did it. And in the hot days of Arizona, somehow, I was just going, man, if I get to that ocean, I'm going to get off and just go running, dive in the water and swim out as far as I can. And all that crazy excitement didn't happen. It was more just a silent stare. We just stood there. Just stood there looking at it, unbelieving that we had gotten there. And looking around and, is this really sand under our feet? Are those really waves there? It was like if you could just scream "wow" and let it echo for a couple of hours. Wow, wow, wow. What do you carry back into your everyday life from a journey like this? Eustace is back living in the woods, having learned what he said he wanted to learn about horses on the trip. Judson's a fly fishing guide in North Carolina, starting his own business doing that. And Susan's the one who set to make the biggest transition, back to modern life, indoor life. She moved to Oklahoma to be closer to her grandfather, who's been ill. What's your job now? What are you doing? I'm an order selector at a local warehouse here. It's Associated Wholesale Grocers. And so what's that's like to go to a job like that after having been on the road for months? It's pretty crazy. We work hard every day. It's a pretty labor-intensive job. And it's interesting to look at the perspectives of my fellow employees and how this is their life, and this is what they do. And I kind of see past it, and I see what I've done and that there's so much more out there. Do you find you talk about it a lot now, months later? A little bit. Not a whole lot. I'm living in Oklahoma and don't know a whole lot of people. And if I tell them that I rode my horse across country, I don't think they'd believe me. But I reflect back on it quite a bit. Have you told people at work? A few. And so what do they say? They don't believe me. Act Two, Zen Shmen. Here's something that was written back when people rode horses because they mostly had no choice, the middle of the 19th century, a quarter century before the invention of the light bulb. Most people lived on the farm or in small towns. And yet, America was already so big and changing so fast and so unprecedented and alarming, that already, people worried that modernity and everything all that came with it was making it hard to think properly, to feel properly, to really live. Here's the reading. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life. I wanted to live deep, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms. And if it proved to be mean, wanted to get to the whole and genuine meanness of it and publish its meanness to the world. Or, if it were sublime, to know it by experience and be able to give a true account of it." This is Henry Thoreau from his book Walden, published in 1854. It is a clean line of heritage from this to the voluntary simplicity movement and so many other movements today, which seek to shed all the stuff that clutters our lives, fills our heads. Here's Thoreau again. "The nation is cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense. It lives too fast. Men think that it's essential that the nation have commerce and export ice and talk through a telegraph and ride 30 miles an hour. But whether we should live like baboons or like men is a little uncertain." Here's my favorite passage from Thoreau. It's especially appropriate for this week-- for any week, really, in which people are obsessed with the news. What I love about it is this simultaneously provocative and completely reasonable and, at the same time from my perspective, almost totally nuts. He writes, "I am sure that I have never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, we never need read of another. One is enough. If you're acquainted with the principle, what do you care for myriad instances and applications? "To a philosopher, all 'news,' as it's called, is gossip. And they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet, not if you were greedy after this gossip. News which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or 12 years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. "As for Spain, for instance. If you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions-- they may have changed names a little since I saw the papers-- it will be true to the letter and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers. And as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649." Well, we move on. One of the difficulties with simplifying your life is that people are complicated. So simplifying your life often means cutting yourself off from people, which can be complicated in and of itself. Ethan Watters has this story. A couple of years ago, my best friend, Larry left his life in San Francisco to study Zen at a monastery in the mountains near Los Angeles. What made his decision so unsettling was that Larry used to be me. We lived in the same flat. We had the same friends. We were both writers. We wrote for the same magazines. For me, this life was a blessing. Larry said it was a torturous cycle of unfulfillable desire rotting him from the inside. Larry has now been ordained as a monk. He's even taken a new zen name, Takado. It's been two years, but I still don't fully understand how he could have rejected our life in San Francisco. Larry picks me up at the airport while on an errand run for the Zen Center. Here's what we have to do. We have to go Home Depot and buy a lot of things that I'm not so sure about. So we'll have to figure a lot of things out in Home Depot. And then we have to find this dry cleaners place that I think is on Central or Monte Vista. For what? To bring a bowing mat that somebody spilled wax on. And then we have to go to-- In his new life, Larry wakes up at 2:50 in the morning to make tea for the rest of the monks and students. From 3:00 AM, it's bowing, chanting, meditation, and meetings with the Japanese zen master until the afternoon. Then he's in charge of constructing a toilet building for the monastery. Then more chanting in the evening. The daily schedule ends at 9:00 at night. I have to admit that I take a bit of perverse pleasure in the fact that even though Larry has rejected the secular life, he still has to navigate Home Depot, trying to figure out which grade of sand he needs to buy. 30 mesh sand. I don't know that I'd use this. What would you use? The reason is that this stuff doesn't absorb water well. Oh yeah? Driving around the suburbs filling the pickup with supplies is like old times. We gossip about mutual friends, talk about this and that. But that evening in the monastery when we get together on one of his breaks, things get a little more tense. We have the same conversation we've had a dozen times. I still want him to explain what's wrong with his old life, the life we shared. Here's what he says. Never been content. Restless. Never been there, never really being present, never being able to give myself fully to what it was. Holding back, ambivalence. Did you see that about other people in San Francisco? Who, you? Yeah, like me. So what's the answer to my-- I mean, do you think I'm-- of course, I'm suffering, I guess. But it also seems balanced out by this remarkably joyful existence. I guess I don't see it as a torture. That's why you're still in San Francisco and I'm here, because I saw it as a torture. And it would be silly for me to try to convince you that it's torture. In a sense, I don't really want to do that. What all these masters of various traditions say is, of course, you're blind and you're living in a dream. You don't know, you don't realize how much suffering you're in. But they don't go out dragging people out of their houses and saying, well, actually you're suffering. Whatever. Through some circumstances, I found this path. I heard this message and addressed suffering that was real to me. And I moved in that direction. And I've got to go. My visit is a burden for him. He's fitting it in during short breaks between chores and meditation. I'm cutting into his five hours of sleep. I follow as he goes to hit this big ceremonial piece of wood which signals the end of the day for the monastery. After he's finished whacking the wood, Larry and I climb up the hill behind the monastery. Hey, this is nice. Wow. We've got a view and nobody sees it. What's that? Right down there? Yeah. That's the sea of, you know, the LA sprawl. It's pretty huge. We sit down and talk. I want to know what you missed about San Francisco when you first came here and what you miss now about it or whether that's changed or whether those things have dissipated. What did you miss about San Francisco when you first came? I didn't miss anything. I mean, I missed my friends. That's all. When you say "my friends, that's all," it seems like you're being sort of-- I guess, maybe, I took that as slightly dismissive of that. That's all. To leave your friends is a thing that I couldn't, right now, do. Well, to make a possibly interesting situation truthful and boring, I did it in phases. I came here for three months. When I first came back here, I thought, God, I hate this place so much. I remember that I hated-- I hate this life. It's hard. It's cold. I'm tired. I don't like to get up. It's mind numbing sitting in this box. My knees hurt. I'm bored out of my skull. I'm going to leave pretty soon. That's what I thought. But I said, well, it's kind of embarrassing to go running back, so I'll hang. For the wrong reason that works the right way, I stayed. And then in time, things unfolded, and they were so powerful. And they brought me crying to my knees enough times, and I felt like the years that I had been traveling around the world and seeing all these things had felt like I was traveling around the world in an iron lung. And here I was given the opportunity to get out of the iron lung and live in this simple place in the mountains. I still miss you, I have to say. I wish that my friends could experience what I've experienced. And the world is a thousand times more interesting to me now than it was. Have you discovered in all this why you are so tortured-- I mean, why you are more tortured than, say, me? Although you claim to know that I'm tortured as well. But you have to believe me. When I see you, many times I see you as a portrait of torture. Your posture and your eyes looking away. And I can ask a few strategic, simple questions if I were to be sadistic about it and want to see this state of writhing. I can see you writhe in the way your eyes dart and the distraction of you. Like what questions? What are we talking about? How's things going with your girlfriend? That could be a question I could have asked any time in the last five years and seen you do the dance of writhing. You're writhing now. I ask you this question and you're writhing now. You're not writhing because of the question entirely. You're writhing because it points to a deep sore spot in your soul. The problem with this discussion is that we disagree on all the premises. Larry doesn't see any value in his old life, the life I'm still leading. He thinks I'm barely experiencing the world. I have the same doubts about his life. He says he's never felt more alive, but I see his move to the simple life of the monastery as a withdrawl from the world. It would be easier to be more accepting of his choice if he could be more accepting of my world view. The fact is, Larry tried to simplify and clarify his life by coming here. But his life refused to be simplified. Shortly after he arrived at Mt. Baldy, he met a charming zen student named Katherine. Love affairs are discouraged at Mt. Baldy, so for over a year, Larry and Katherine had a mattress in the woods, and they would sneak away when they could. When Larry decided that he couldn't fulfill his monk duties, study zen, and have a relationship with Katherine, she left the monastery. Larry's now decided that in a few months, after the toilet building is finished, he'll follow her. I feel vindicated that he's leaving. I'm not proud of that. Is it a possibility that you'd come back to San Francisco? I don't know. Does it feel like a step back now? Maybe it does. I don't know. Maybe it feels like a part of my life-- it's going to sound pompous to say I moved beyond it, but it's just suffused with things that I don't really want to pursue. So Larry and Katherine are going looking for another Zen community, a place that accepts couples. Before I leave, I ask Larry to play some of his songs. Again, it's an experience where we disagree on every premise. I miss the times our friends would gather to hear him sing. I think it's a crime that he stopped writing his songs. Larry sees it differently. He calls them a catalog of his torture. But I make him sing a few for me. I want to get them on tape. Messages from the old Larry, a person I miss more than he does. [SINGING] Leave me alone. Leave me blue. Leave me, because I can't bear to leave you. Say goodnight. Hang up the phone. Believe me, when you leave me, you will leave me alone. Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder, senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett and [? Sini ?] Davenport. In other program notes, with this program, Paul Tough leaves his job as our senior editor to move back to Canada where he's going to run a big magazine called Saturday Night. Partly, the idea of the magazine, the name of it, comes from the very Canadian idea that on Saturday night, you stay home and you read a magazine. We'll miss Paul. Paul should still show up here on our program from time to time. If you want to buy a cassette of this or any of our radio programs, you can call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] Or you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet, www.thislife.org. That's thislife, one word, no space. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who does our website. Eustace Conway, the guy who led the trip across the country on a horse, has his own website. You know, this is just how far the internet has gone. People who live without electricity have their own websites. That address, members.aol.com/tipreserve. Or you could just get there from our site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who describes management oversight this way-- Tortuous cycle of unfulfillable desire rotting him from the inside. I'm Ira Glass, back next week more stories of This American Life. Many times, I see you as a portrait of torture. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Consider please, this White House scandal from the year 1881. No treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors against the state, but the president still did not survive in office for four years. Of course, he had a much bigger problem than any faced by our current president, specifically a bullet in the back. President James A. Garfield was shot by an assassin in July of 1881. But here's the strange thing. Here's where the scandal begins. As he lingered, sick in bed from his infected wound, rumors began, possibly leaks from within the White House. So it's fairly clear from a modern perspective that the man was suffering from infection from the wound. Nancy Tomes is a historian at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. What's fascinating is that the wound itself was not sufficient to explain what was wrong with him. There was such a long history of popular belief that the White House was a very unhealthy place because of its bad plumbing. The rumor began to circulate that what really was wrong with Garfield was the state of the White House toilets, that they weren't properly hooked up to the sewer system and that he was being poisoned by sewer gas. Sewer gas. In the 19th century, as indoor plumbing was becoming more and more widespread, it just sort of freaked people out that there was something inside their own houses, this pipe, that connected them to a huge public sewer. It just seemed filthy. And they believed that gases rose from the decaying matter in the sewers, came back up the pipes, and made you sick. And because our nation is of course crazy when it comes to the presidency, because the White House is, among other things, a national movie screen onto which we project a whole array of fears and misplaced idealism, we projected our national fear of sewer gas onto the presidency. The fear was so profound that in June of 1882, the Senate actually voted $300,000 to build a second White House, a second one, a sanitary one, free of filth, right next door to the original White House. And the idea was for his family to just move right in there. A lot of this was the work of Chester Arthur, who succeeded Garfield, and who wouldn't live in the White House. He was so convinced that it was unhealthy that he lived in a soldier's home to avoid exposing himself and his family to this danger, the sewer gas. One of the things that's really amazing reading about this is the way that you write about the press coverage, the equivalent to current tabloids. Yes. A paper company called the New York Herald, at one point they interview what they call a well-known plumber, and you just think-- a well-known plumber? An unnamed source who asserts about Garfield, quote, "The real trouble is sewer gas which is 10 times as bad and even more poisonous than foul air." And this same unnamed source claims there is not a perfect working sewer trap in the executive mansion. Indeed. And the whole concept of a sewer trap, that was to prevent that sewer air from backing up into your home. So an untrapped toilet was the portal of death. Naturally, this being the United States government, an independent investigator had to be brought in, in this case a sanitary engineer named George Waring, who had made a reputation for himself years before as an expert in these sort of plumbing issues, and could be trusted to issue a nonpartisan, objective report. He found that while there were problems in the White House plumbing system, they were nowhere near as bad as popular rumor had it. He concluded that President Garfield probably did not die of sewer gas, probably the bullet was enough. The issue was of sufficient public importance that when his final report was issued, long excerpts were published verbatim, even in the New York Times. And one interesting footnote to all this, one of the changes that Waring recommended at the White House in his report, was that they install these new kinds of toilets, toilets of his own design, in this style that was still very new, namely, they were white and they were made of porcelain. And after this, toilets like this became a huge fad, eventually replacing wooden and metal toilets nearly everywhere in this country. Somehow this association between white and porcelain, it was sold by plumbing contractors, people like Waring who devised these kinds of toilets as safer, because the porcelain would be impervious. Nothing could kind of get in there and fester. And also you could see that it was clean. Now I bring all this up today, not to talk about the nature of the presidency, but to talk about hysteria and germs. All of this, everything in this story, occurred before the germ theory of disease had been proven. People did not know that germs were the way that disease is spread. That's why they were scared of things like sewer gas. And it would be nice to think that with more information, factual information that we have today about how disease actually spreads, we would all become more rational, take rational precautions to protect ourselves. But the fact is, that is simply not happening. At this very moment, we are experiencing a boom in antibacterial soaps and skin products, antibacterial children's toys and kitchen implements, pizza cutters, and underwear, all marketed to healthy, middle-class people who, if they use the products as intended, will be no healthier as a result of using the products-- most of them. We want to be rational creatures, but we are flawed. We are not rational. And one area we see that all the time is when it comes to germs. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, germs and our struggle to stay calm in a universe filled with microscopic creatures that can kill us or make us sick. Act One of our program today, Biblical Thinking in a Digital World. Reporter Hannah Rosen did an investigation of the new antibacterial products. In her investigation, in her report, she mocked them as ineffective. She mocked the people who used them, until one day she went through her own transformation from rationality to irrationality. Act Two, 20th Century Germ. Germs were first understood at the turn of this century. And it turns out that the aesthetics of everyday life in this century, the way that we dress, the way that we groom ourselves, the way that we make our homes, are all the way they are partly in response to this new fangled idea of germs. We explain how. Act Three, Ladies and Germs. We bring you one woman's story. Act Four, You Gonna Eat That? Reporter, author, and farmer Frank Browning on how irrational fear means that you probably are not going to see decent apple cider in your local grocery store this fall. Act Five, The Conqueror Germ. Sean Collins and the germs within us, the germs that can kill us, and the germs that do kill us. Stay right here. Act One, Biblical Thinking. Well our nation goes through waves of germ consciousness. Social reformers at the turn of the century tried to clean up the city slums, prevent the spread of tuberculosis and other diseases. Booker T. Washington proselytized among former slaves about middle-class cleanliness and the gospel of the toothbrush. When reporter Hannah Rosen noticed the latest wave of American germ consciousness kick in, she wrote about it for The New Republic magazine. I was either in a store buying-- I'm now at the age where some of my friends are having kids or about to have kids-- and I was in the toy store. And I was trying to buy something for someone. And I just noticed that everything was antibacterial. And I thought, hmm, that sounds strange, because kids eat dirt. So what good would it do to have sort of a little antibacterial chair. But there it was. I mean the fire trucks and the things that the kids chew on and the play pens, and everything was suddenly antibacterial. And I just sort of looked into it. And realized there was just an entire universe, a booming universe of antibacterial products which just-- you could buy anything. You could buy an antibacterial television. In fact, a friend of mine in England had told me that there's an entire antibacterial supermarket. I just started to ask people. And then I realized that it was everywhere. Let me just ask you to read-- there's a little section in your article where you're explaining the extent of this. And you explain that now antibacterial soaps are 50% of the $2.1 billion soap market. And then you have this little passage where you try to convey how far this has gone. Sure. "It is already possible to spend most of your day in germ-free comfort. You can get a good night's sleep on an antibacterial pillow, snuggled under an antibacterial blanket, brush your teeth with antibacterial toothpaste, take a shower with antibacterial soap, dry off with an antibacterial towel, pull on your antibacterial socks and underwear, eat breakfast on your antibacterial tray, say goodbye to Spot in his antibacterial dog bed, give little Susie her antibacterial toy, grab a cookie from the antibacterial jar, spray the bus seat and your office phone with antibacterial cleaner, then come home and chop up some celery with your antibacterial knife for dinner." And the substance of your article really, you spend a lot of time in the article I mean mocking these products and the people who use them. And you argue essentially that for most adults, these things really do nothing. Yeah. It's probably that they just oversell themselves. I mean I imagine they don't have zero use. But most scientists say that the major disease risks from ordinary contact with ordinary everyday services and substances, like a table or a scissor or the kinds of things these things are used to protect, are basically zero. If you're a healthy adult, you don't have much risk from just touching things on your desk. And so these products don't do that much good. Another thing you pointed out in your article is that when we get a cold or a flu, what we're getting is a virus-- Right. --which is very different from bacteria, which is what these things are actually targeted at. Right. And that's point two, is that in general a lot of diseases are caused by viruses, not germs. And so these don't help against viruses at all. What about for people with kids? Is there are some legitimate use for some of this stuff? I suppose. But I think even in most cases what will happen is that the kid will get kind of sick. And kids get kind of sick. I mean I don't have kids, but I have friends who have kids. And kids just are constantly getting sick. I mean like I said, kids eat dirt. They chew on each other. There's only so much you can do with a bit of Purell. Let me ask you to talk about Purell? Explain what this product is and explain kind of what you say about it in the article? Purell seems to be incredibly popular these days. I now see Purell everywhere. It's in airports and just everywhere. So basically, it's an antibacterial hand soap, which is sort of a combination of the alcohol they use in the hospital plus some sort of aloe vera lotion, so it feels good. And the company that started it was a company that actually made hospital products. And they suddenly realized that there was sort of a domestic use for this stuff. And it comes in a pump bottle. And you sort of pump it on your hands and rub it on. And it feels like a lotion, but it's actually meant to kill the bacteria on your hand. So you now have sort of dead bacteria on your hand. It's not sort of preventative. I mean if you touch something else later, you'll just sort of get that thing again. But my problem with Purell was that when they describe the product, they describe it as this sort of sunny, healthy thing. When you talk to the company, they'll talk to you about good family living, and take your kids on a camping trip, or a mother with her diapers. And they'll just describe it as sort of just another part of a Norman Rockwell American life. But then if you look at the actual ads they run, they're clearly meant to appeal to the hassled yuppie in all of us. I mean they show this sort of Petri dish with these office products and some just disgusting looking germs all over your phone and everything. So they're actually meant for people who don't even have time to wash their hands after they go to the bathroom, or who just have four seconds to eat their lunch at their desk and so they have to use Purell, because it takes too much time to go to sink and wash your hands. So their idea that they're not marketing to fear just isn't true. I mean you look at their ads and they're just terrifying. Nobody wants to know that there's this gross stuff on their phone, even if there is. It doesn't do you any good to know that. And it might not actually do you any harm, really. There's no proof that it does you any harm if you're a healthy adult. Right. That's my other thing. I mean all these sort of subway pole ads. I mean once you know that these germs are on your phone or on your desk, you'll never forget that. Every time you look at a subway pole, you'll just imagine it's sort of alive and crawling with maggots and worms. And you'll just have a hard time touching it. So I wish I had never known about this stuff. Because now it's just sort of there in my head. But there's no reason why you ever have to know that your stapler on your desk might have germs on it. It just sort of sounds yucky, even though it's meaningless. Let me ask you to describe what happened. After your article was published, you found that you yourself went through a change. Yeah. Yeah. That was really terrible. It's like after I spent a month, or however long it was, just talking to people at various companies who did research about this, and I suddenly sort of went home and started to worry about what I was using on my cutting board. And should I disinfect my cutting board somehow? Or should we not have rare meat when I was at a restaurant. And just because I knew about this stuff, it's just the image is so gross you feel like you have some knowledge into an underworld. And you just can't somehow banish it from your head. And I think I'm not the only one this happens to. I mean I mean the germs have gotten a lot of popularity recently. I mean there was a front page story in the New York Times magazine. There was a front page Time magazine story. And it seems to go in waves where every once in awhile, there's sort of a germ phobic panic. One of the things that you write about in these articles is you say, there's a paradox that as society gets cleaner, it searches for germs in even more remote places. Yeah. That was very interesting. I mean that seems to be a sort of theme of American history. It's moments when we're prosperous, when we're thinking about home life and domesticity. And so we start to turn to the home and its cleanliness. And you start to worry a lot about cleanliness. I mean you'd have these 1950s, lots of home ads, in which you'd have sort of sparkling, clean, shiny products in the home. But one thing I pointed out is that, even in that, there's distinctions because the '50s ads they would be infused with this kind of sense of American progress. Here we are moving forward. This blender will save you X amount of time. This floor cleaner, well, boy, you don't have to bend down anymore. This is the new America. But now with this new household microbiology, it seems to have the exact opposite kind of grim tone to it. We thought we cleaned everything. Well no, we're going backwards now. All these things you thought were clean, were dirty. I think it's almost what happens to police officers who I've known, who start to think that there's danger everywhere, because they spend a lot of time around danger. So they think that world is the world. So after you spent a fair amount of time with scientists who are saying how germs are everywhere and pointing them out, when you would go around, you would literally sort of see and imagine germs everywhere in your environment? Yeah. Like I would go to the gym in the morning and I suddenly thought, oh god, should I sit on this bench? What's going to-- is there going to be bacteria growing between my toes if I take a shower in the gym? And just everywhere, I would be sitting and reading on my couch at home, and just watch for dust balls and think, is there dust balls? Or I cook dinner-- it's like every nice domestic activity was just suddenly ruined. It's just kind of infiltrated by this just horrible underworld that was suddenly kind of crawling up from my floorboards. Yeah. You wrote in a second article that you published after the first one, you wrote that you found that you were seized by a kind of dementia. And you wrote that an hour doesn't go by when your hand doesn't stray over to the bottle to squirt Purell on your perfectly clean hands. And I hate that. I mean what ultimate revenge for Purell that that should happen to me. I mean they'd send me all these products. I mean there was plenty of germ phobic people at my office at the time. So I gave most of them away. But then I couldn't give all of them away. So I just had this little bottle of Purell sitting on my desk. And I would notice that if my hands felt sort of a tiny bit clammy or I was like picking up too much newspaper that day, I would just suddenly go over to the Purell and start squeezing it, and then thought, oh, did I have enough? But then knowing that it doesn't actually prevent anything, that maybe I should do it again. Because maybe in the three minutes since I did it last time, there's some bacteria that crawled on my hand. When you described it, it's almost like it's calling cue from across the room. Come to me. Maybe that's a good idea. They should have talking Purell. Then it would be too powerful. No one would be able to resist. Exactly. You know what is so disturbing about all of this is when you talk about the way that information works in this kind of situation, when it comes to germs, that is when you hear about the germs, then you become over-aware of them, and then you act irrationally. Uh-huh. It's almost like a pre-enlightenment view of what information does to a person. That is, that it won't lead to rational thinking. It won't dispel fear and paranoia, but in fact will lead to fear and paranoia. In a certain way it's very biblical. I mean its very Garden of Eden, that you will get this information. You will eat from the tree of knowledge. And then you will be expelled from paradise. Right. No, it's true. I mean one thing that writing this has done is transform my understanding of information. I mean I'm a journalist, so the more information the better. I'm not worried about the information at all. But then reading this has made me sort of see information in another way. So how's the battle for rational thinking going in your own life? I mean how's it shaping up? I think it's just sort of fading. I think I've lost a little bit, although not all of my germ consciousness. I mean now I think laziness has triumphed here. The battle still happens, but I'm just too lazy to actually just disinfect my cutting board or wash my hands. Thank god for education. It's the only thing more powerful than fear. Hannah Rosen is now a reporter for the Washington Post. Act Two, 20th Century Germ. Before people understood about germs, they knew some things about how disease spread, that you could get ill from contact with a very sick person or contact with human waste. But people were not exactly sure how you got ill. They thought that some diseases might just travel through the air, they thought that other diseases might be inherited. There was the whole sewer gas thing. Then came the germ theory, the notion that there are these tiny living microorganisms that can get on your hands or your clothes and then you can transmit these tiny little living creatures to somebody else by touching them or touching their food or by sneezing or by coughing. All of this was only discovered just before the turn of the 20th century. Historian Nancy Tomes has written a book called The Gospel of Germs about how the germ theory spread in America, across America. It turns out that one of the characteristics of the 20th century is that it's the first time in human history that people understood how disease was transmitted and an entire aesthetics emerges, an entire way of living, based on the fact that people now wanted to avoid spreading germs to each other. Yes, you can see dramatic changes in interior decorations, in home design, in the revolt against a Victorian aesthetic, the plush, the ornate, the dust catching, because dust was one of the vehicles that the new bacteriology pointed to for germs. So what is the aesthetic? What is the emerging aesthetic? It's stripped down. It's a preference for less, rather than more. It's the use of hard surfaces, light colored surfaces, paint as opposed to wallpaper. Wallpaper was thought to hold germs and to breed germs. And in the bathroom itself, you describe how in Victorian homes, in homes in the last century, the bathroom would basically look like any other room. There'd be rugs, there'd be drapes, there'd be wood everywhere. The bathroom looked like a little parlor. But when the health reformers get a hold of that, I mean they see all of those rugs and trappings as dangerous vehicles that trap the sewer gas, that silk particles get embedded in there. So you end up with a bathroom that looks much more like our modern conception of a bathroom with porcelain on the floor, porcelain sinks, porcelain toilet fixtures, something that could be easily cleaned with strong soap. I mean essentially you arrive at a bathroom which is like an operating room in a hospital. I mean I remember the first time I ever saw an operating room. The thought you have is well, it's exactly like a bathroom, except there's a table. Yes, and the stripping down didn't apply just to the home, it also applied to the body and to the clothing. So with women, one of the changes that you see is a shortening of skirts, because long skirts swept along the street, picked up the dust, the dirt, that carried the germs. And there's a big push, starting in the late 19th century, to get a men to shave. The idea of male authority in the 19th century was a long flowing beard and the mutton chops. And the anti-tuberculosis reformers say to American men, if you love your wife, if you love your child, shave that beard off. Don't give them these germ-laden kisses. And of course Gillette jumps on this, because they think, wait, I'm going to sell them razors. Right. Because none of these innovations ever happens without some sort of product tie-in. Exactly. Other innovations from the beginning of the age of germs, Kleenex and cellophane, Listerine, named after surgeon Joseph Lister. Also because of anti-tuberculosis activists, you get your own fresh bar of soap in a hotel room and you get clean sheets. And they fold the sheet back over the blanket, so you don't touch the germs on the blanket. Nancy Tomes' history of all this is called The Gospel of Germs. Act Three, Ladies and Germs. It didn't take very long after the existence and characteristics of germs were proven before public health educators began to talk about the man problem. Men were not being vigilant about preventing the spreading of germs. A study in the 1920s in Muncie, Indiana, noted that men still refused to stop spitting, despite the widespread tuberculosis education campaigns that told them not to spit. And most of the responsibility for preventing the spread of germs fell on women, when they cleaned their homes, when they prepared food. It is no surprise then that psychological studies today indicate that women are more likely than men to develop obsessions over cleaning and over germs. And it can go pretty far. Emily Colas is the author of this amazing and funny, and disturbingly honest account of her own obsession, called Just Checking. We asked her to read a brief excerpt here, as a case study on just how far things can go. The TV was on and I wasn't paying attention as I went to turn up the sound, so I was shocked to notice what was on the screen while my hand was still on the volume button. A guy who'd obviously been in a fight, was kneeling down, spitting blood into the snow. I froze in fear for a second, and then became obsessed with the idea that I had somehow contracted a disease from this television encounter. So much so that I was unable to keep it to myself. My husband had always been able to rationalize my fears as either an unusual personality quirk or some hormonal pregnancy problem. But at this moment, he was no longer able to differentiate me from any other crazy person. That night he paced around the house in disbelief, biting his nails and shaking his head from side to side, saying "You don't really believe that, do you? The show was taped months ago. There's no way any disease could live that long in the air. Besides, there's a screen between you and the blood." My husband and I generally kept a pile of about 20 garbage bags in one corner of our apartment. Which may seem out of character, for me to let them stay, but it was our trash and I knew nothing bad was in there. It was the communal trash that made me shake. So when it was time to take the bags out to the dumpster, my husband had to follow a whole hygienic procedure, to keep the neighbors' germs out of our place. First the water had to be turned on and left that way, because if you touched the garbage and then the spigot, the spigot would get contaminated. Next he'd take one bag in his right hand and open the door with his left. Then he'd shut the door behind him and lock it, so that no one could get into the house. I guess I could have monitored, but he wanted me upstairs so I couldn't critique him. He'd take the bag down, stand a few feet from the dumpster to be sure not to touch it, and throw the bag in. Then he'd unlock the door, open it, slip his shoes off, come inside, and wash his hands. He used a pump soap so that he could use his clean wrist to pump some in the palm of his hand and not contaminate the dispenser. The water would stay on, and he'd move on to the next bag. He went through this procedure 20 times, once for each bag, until they were gone. If contamination occurred at any point during the process, say some brown liquid was on the outside of one of the bags and it got on his shirt, and I saw it, I would not be happy. I would have to go over the scene again and again in my head until I could find a way to convince myself that I wasn't really in danger of getting a disease. I'd inspect myself for cuts that the brown liquid might have gone into, go over the list of things we'd thrown out in the past weeks that could have been brown, or try to remember if anyone had come into our house who might have thrown something away, like a bloody tissue, that could have gotten on me. If I couldn't shake the fear, I'd ask my husband to go through the discarded trash to find the contaminated bag and try to identify the liquid. He was usually pretty against this, so I had to beg. It was all I'd talk about for hours, and I guess in an effort to just shut me up, he'd relent. Of course, this trip was considered highly unsanitary and called for special protective measures. He had to put on clothes that he'd be willing to get rid of and carry paper towels so his hands wouldn't touch the bag directly. When he was finished with his inspection, he had to take off his clothes outside our front door, leave them to be thrown away, come in and do a double hand wash. Then I'd turn the shower on and he'd finish cleaning off. I'd sit on the edge of the bed and wait for him to finish, so he could deliver his report. On this day, he identified the liquid as hamburger juice. A particularly insidious liquid that is close to the color and texture of human blood. My husband said that he smelled and tasted it and was sure that it was indeed from a cow. Looking back, I'm a little surprised that it was four more years before we separated. Emily Colas. Her book is called Just Checking. Coming up, if a germ does kill you, what does the germ get out of it? Also impure food, impure thoughts. That's in a minute from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Welcome there, ladies and germs. So that's the great thing about today's theme is I get to say ladies and germs as many times as I want. A privilege you don't get very often in public radio. Each week on our program of course, which choose a theme, Ladies and Germs, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, germs and why they make us leave the world of rationality for irrationality. We have arrived at Act Four of our program, Act Four, You Gonna Eat That? One of the places that we fear germ contamination, is of course in our food, but of course this fear is not always justified. For example this fall, this very fall, chances are you will not be able to find fresh apple cider in your local grocery store. Now I'm talking about the stuff that comes straight from the farm, unpasteurized, dark brown. Usually it's this very careful blend of four or five different kinds of apples based on some farm family's old recipe. Unpasteurized cider like this only makes up 3% to 5% of the nation's cider, but it is becoming harder and harder to find. And the reason-- Frank Browning is a reporter who often covers public health stories. He answers the question. First, truth in labeling. I'm not just an objective journalist. I have a farmer's bias. My brother and I grow apples on a hilltop in eastern Kentucky. And we make cider. This year, as last year and the year before that, we've been hauling our cider down to the Kentucky State Fair in Louisville. Is that good? Yeah. Here I am at the ag-produce tent, talking cider slushies. Apple cider slushies. Come get a free taste. Can't go wrong free. It's nothing but pure apple juice. People love them once they taste it. When you drink one of our slushies, or for that matter when you draw a plain cup of fresh cider to your lips, we want to steal away all those awful memories you've accumulated of insipid canned apple juice. Tasting fresh cider should be like a eating a handful of autumn, honeyed and tart, nutty, spicy, playfully fragrant. It should play mischief with memory as it trickles across your tongue, washes over the palate, and makes you giggle silently at how exquisite of a treasure of the ordinary earth. But as I say, I'm biased. Then came E. coli O157:H7. You've read about it in the papers, or heard about it on the nightly TV terror news. The great cider contamination scare. Like most apple growers, we saw the same stories. And we wondered, had cider fallen victim to that front line of bacterial armageddon that threatens all our collective fate? So I called up Joe O'Leary, the food safety scientist at our state Farm Extension Service at the University of Kentucky, and told him we were worried and confused about cider's health risks. Well, you and a lot of other people. But the number of instances has really been extremely low. When you look at the number of small operators, and the number that have been a problem, it's only about three or four in this country in a 20-year period, and then there were one or two in Canada as well. And it may be a risk, but it's a fairly slight risk. But again, we've got to be concerned about these little children that could drink this. The problem is Odwalla. Isn't that a splendid name? Liquid beacon to the organo-yuppies of the health food movement, all natural, all organic juices, until somebody dumped a load or two of rotting fruit, presumably organic, into the mill and forgot to follow the company's own sanitizing procedures. And a little girl in Colorado drank that organic health food juice and died from E. coli poisoning. A million and a half bucks Odwalla paid to settle the matter. There had been four other E. coli cases on small farms, all of them were traced to using apples we call drops, that have fallen on the ground and haven't been washed. Then you put that together with bad hamburgers, dirty sprouts, lettuce, contaminated berries from Guatemala-- never mind how great the actual risk is in epidemiological terms-- and we Americans brewed up a full-fledged food panic. In all the media coverage, there's something probably nobody told you. Cider can be produced safely and without pasteurization. Now here's what family farms like ours do. We never use drops. We wash all our equipment down in high acid, dairy grade detergent, followed with a chlorine rinse. Then we run the apples themselves through a chlorine wash, just before grinding and pressing. All of that makes unpasteurized apple cider thoroughly safe. Unfortunately, in the hour of hysteria, that isn't enough. Here's how far it's gone. Ohio apple growers found themselves drowning in the full scale cider panic last year, organized by the State Agriculture Department. My friend Mitch Lynd, Ohio's biggest apple grower, told me the story. Well, the doggone-- as a result of this E. coli thing out of Colorado, this one incident, why the decision was made that maybe they ought to impose pasteurization on all these cider makers. Next thing we knew, we're called into this meeting and in effect we were told now, you fellas don't have to pasteurize. But we're going to advise the schools, saying now, don't let your children drink the cider from any of these farms or orchards if it hasn't been pasteurized. Ohio officials admitted the cider was safe. But said they were going to go ahead and scare people anyway. And their attitude was that if they're going to be wrong, they want to err on the side of safety. Well, it's like saying which is more safe, to drink two drops of beer before you drive down the road or one drop of beer before you drive down the road? One's twice as safe as the other, but neither one's very hazardous, you see. Time to call that state official, the one who read the riot act to all the growers. That would be Sam Waltz of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, a very nice man, who confirms that well, yes, there's never been a case of food poisoning from cider in his state. Yes. We've never had, that we're aware of, a case of food poisoning from any bacteria that was attributed to cider. And we had a situation here in Columbus that was kind of unique. There was about 10 cases of human E. coli O157:H7 food poisoning reported in Columbus. And what kind of food product was this? Well, early on one of the common foods that many of the 10 or so infected people had consumed was fresh cider. And there was a leak to the press-- don't know really where it came from-- that was covering this quite heavily at the time, a leak to the local press saying that cider was suspected. Of course, the investigation was not complete. And later on it was shown that cider was not the likely culprit, that more than likely it was some lettuce. But the fact that it leaked into the press that cider was a suspect food, fresh cider sales in the city of Columbus, which is a large market in our state, dropped by about 2/3 overnight. And just didn't recover for the rest of that season. And so then you contacted the media and urged them to press this issue? Yes. How did that go? It really went well. And the media was good to pick up on this. And it showed up in a lot of newsprint. And what did it say? Basically positive that E. coli may be a hazard in cider, very rare. But that the cider industry here in Ohio is being proactive to do whatever they can to learn and employ techniques that will produce safe cider. But that included pretty much urging people not to drink unpasteurized cider, didn't it? Ahh yes, and-- well, we took the position that if it's produced properly with proper sanitation, that unpasteurized cider is not a problem. Not a problem. Well, except that the main point of the press campaign was to convince parents that serving unpasteurized cider might kill their kids. None of it made any sense. And then I remembered something else Joe O'Leary, the food scientist from UK, said to me. Well, another consideration is that these commercial juice processors, the really big outfits, they see the small farm cider operations as a threat in this. They're bringing bad publicity on the industry. And so that's one of the reasons why they are in favor of all these changes, in my opinion. So you think the big operators basically want to squeeze the little guys out? Well, that's always the case, isn't it? Hmm, I said to myself. I've spent my life writing and reporting about the politics of money, the politics of health, even politics and agriculture. But somehow, my farmer self hadn't imagined that politics had crawled inside the rustic cider jug. What small growers have always supposed is that we're such a minuscule part of the juice biz that big processing companies and their Washington lobbyists never thought about us at all. The heavy hitters in the American apple kingdom are in Washington state, Michigan, and New York. And they have a club, the US Apple Association. I call it Big Apple. It includes national packers and processors, and of course fields a clutch of lobbyists in Washington. And where do you suppose Big Apple stood on the pro-pasteurization cider crackdown? They lobbied against the FDA's decision this year to permit small growers to sell untreated juice, even if it is produced under sanitary conditions and labeled as unpasteurized. Who else has been driving the pasteurization campaign? Another Washington lobbying group, the National Food Processors Association, which modestly represents many of the world's largest multinational food conglomerates. Tom Willard, the Processors' spokesman, was off at a conference when he called me back. He only wanted to talk safety. Well, food safety really affects everyone. If a consumer were to be made ill by a particular product, they could lose track of the fact whether it was pasteurized or not. That has a tendency to damage the reputation of all people in that sector. It's why we feel it's important that all juices be pasteurized. The food industry spends many, many millions of dollars a year to ensure that what they do to their products renders them as safe as possible. We think that if there is a safe and effective technology out there that can further ensure US food safety, it should be applied. Now I've spoken to a number of public health people, and they basically have said to me, you have a maximum of four E. coli cases ever in the history of the country, out of millions, probably billions, of gallons of cider that's been sold. And that this is another one of those cases of nutty American food panics. Well, I think that if you turn the situation around and say, here was a product that only caused three or four cases of illness anywhere. The question is not is that relatively few, but is there something effective that you know you can do that would render this completely free of that-- that that would not be an issue anymore. If there is an existing technology that is there that can be applied and is widely being applied, we don't really see why you wouldn't go ahead and require it. Meaning, in plain talk, the producers who invented and control global brand identity prefer to eliminate everybody who does not have the capital or the market share to compete. Forcing independent apple growers to spend $25,000 or $30,000 on pasteurization equipment would drive about 3/4 of today's cider makers out of business. But then as I have said, I'm biased. Now presumably, from Big Apple's point of view, it's better that way. Then consumers have nothing to judge Mott's and Tree Top and Red Chief against. When Americans panic over microbial contamination, it isn't market neutral. It boosts big business. The campaign of fear is working. I called up the one city market where we sell our apples and cider, Pipkin's produce in Cincinnati and talked to Ben Pipkin. So Ben, what's been happening to cider sales this year? Cider sales this year, well, we're just getting ready to start on cider this year. Last year, sales were probably about, on the unpasteurized cider, about half of what they were last year. Yeah. We made our first delivery of the season to Ben the day of my phone call. And he told us that customers were lining up at the loading dock to buy the new fresh cider. Then over the weekend, the local press ran its by now annual panic stories. Ben's customers started wrinkling their brows with concern. Well, why not? If I knew nothing about growing applies, if I hadn't seen our sanitation system, and if every time I picked up the paper to read about cider, I was told about a little girl who died Colorado, I'd panic about drinking cider too. Panics, whether about food, sex, or politics, require two essential conditions. First, the trigger must be something that hits us very close to home. Second, the object of the panic must be something we really don't understand. With fewer than 3% of the American population actively farming, few of us have any idea what it takes to lure plants out of the ground, or how it is that they find their way to the local supermarket's produce shelf. And so we make myths, in this case of unseen microorganisms threatening our families. And we live by those myths, afraid of what we don't know. And it turns out for all too many people, the world of unseen, unexplained phenomena includes apple cider. Frank Browning's latest book is called Apples. His family orchard is in Kentucky. Act Five. The Conqueror Germ. More often than not, we use the language of war when we talk about disease. Someone is said to battle cancer or to fight an infection. The truth is, the metaphor is an apt one. In the case of my friend Christopher, the germ won. It took some 15 years to happen, but it won. It didn't win each battle, but it won the war. Now this story of the germs within us, and what we fear most from germs, namely that they'll kill us. Sean Collins has this account of the battle that his friend Christopher Rose went through with a bug. Christopher grew up in a tiny farming community in central Illinois, but had more of a Noel Coward, kind of personality. A professional musician, he took a turn for the worse, after years, not too long ago. There is a fact of medicine late in the 20th century that seems absolutely absurd on its face. And it's this, just about the worst place you can be when you're really sick is in the hospital. 5% to 10% of all patients admitted to an American hospital, acquire an infection while they're there. The rate of these so-called nosocomial or hospital-acquired infections is much higher in patients admitted to intensive care units. In fact, a measurable percentage of patients in ICUs die, not of the condition that landed them in the intensive care unit, but from one of these bugs they picked up while they were in the hospital. These germs, more often than not a strain of Staphylococcus aureus, are resistant to most, if not all, antibiotics. And they live there in the hospital. And they got Christopher. If you lie in one position long enough, perhaps in as few as a few days, you're at risk for developing what are called pressure sores, which happen because your weight rests on just a few parts of your body, your butt, your tail bone, the backs of your elbows. What happens is the weight of your body pushes the blood out of the capillaries and your skin in those places. This happens especially if your blood pressure is low, which means the circulatory system doesn't bring as much oxygen to the tissue and it begins to die. The skin literally breaks down. The bugs that live in the hospital love this. These pressure sores are huge gateways to the circulatory system. You might as well put up signs, this way in, this way to the rest of the body. Germs allowed direct access to the bloodstream kind of go wild, eventually growing on things like heart valves and eating away at them. It can cause death literally in a matter of hours. So for patients in ICUs, especially immobile ones, skin care is really important. Of course, skin care was always important to Christopher. In college, when he didn't have rent money, he had a supply of Clinique products. And now the doctors really didn't want him to lose the defense his skin could provide. In the end and on his own, Christopher did develop a nasty bed sore. A sample got sent to the lab to be cultured. And it came back positive for an antibiotic resistant bacteria, a strain of staph. As soon as that happened, signs went up on the door in big letters, CONTACT PRECAUTION. It told us to wash our hands upon entering the room and leaving. And to be gloved and gowned if any direct contact with the patient was expected. This was to keep the bug in the room. And to keep it from making forays into other rooms on the unit. And they would routinely draw his blood to see if it made it past his skin, past that last, best defense, and into his bloodstream. Suddenly, all you can think about is every hospital show you've ever seen on television. Just how are you supposed to wash your hands in this situation? I found myself wondering if I should turn the water off with my elbows, or at least use the paper towel when touching the faucet. In the end, you take your cue from the nurses, and you see that soap and water seem to do the trick with a little friction under running water. Nothing too elaborate, really quite quick. But it's amazing how important that one act is in controlling hospital acquired infections. The International Society of Infectious Diseases came out with a little book this year on controlling infectious outbreaks in hospitals. A friend of mine worked on that book, which chronicles ways to control infection in the operating rooms and ICUs and the morgue, basically everywhere in the hospital. My friend said that during its production, the working title for the book was Wash Your Hands, Stupid. That was rejected in favor of the more sober, Handbook of Infection Control in the Hospital. Christopher had made it clear that he wanted to be treated aggressively, as long as there existed a real possibility that that treatment would lead somewhere-- his words. So he was aggressively treated. The condition that landed him in the hospital was something called a necrotizing vasculitis, which manifested itself as a sort of creeping paralysis, that began in his feet and worked its way up his legs, to his hips, to his chest, and then from his fingertips, to his hands, to his arms. Day by day, the loss of feeling would progress. Inch by inch, the movement of his extremities first became awkward, then impossible. The metaphor of battle became obvious as his body became a sort of war map. Reports of troop movements were filed by the members of the house staff on the rheumatology service, especially a dreamy, dark-eyed resident Christopher especially liked. Armed with mallets and pins, this otherwise good natured dreamboat would poke and prod and pinch and whack at my friend, all the while maintaining the guise of friendly conversation-- can you feel this, can you move your toes, how about grasping my hand. Good. Christopher wanted to comply with the instructions, but couldn't. The terrain of battle was becoming unfamiliar to him, the fog of war was obscuring the landscape. He was losing ground. They tried something called plasmapheresis, where his blood was removed and cleaned. He said it was to remove the bad humors. All this further weakened his defenses, and the germs took advantage of the cracks in the ramparts. Now about this war metaphor-- the US military has in place at this moment a plan to fight two wars at once, or to fight one big war in two major theaters of action at the same time. Asking the US military to fight three wars at once, would be asking too much. They've said as much. So it was with my friend. Besides the creeping paralysis and the bug on his butt, Christopher acquired a pneumonia, a relatively rare type of pneumonia caused by cytomegalovirus. Here's the odd thing about CMV, most of us live with it in our bodies all the time. Hour by hour, we successfully fight it off. Most of us are winning that little battle right now. But people like Christopher, people with immune systems damaged by HIV, they end up dying of a bug they've lived with all their lives. His pneumonia got progressively worse, his lungs so filled with fluid that they could barely exchange any gases. It was because his pulmonary function was so poor that the decision was made to withdraw treatment and to allow him to die. That was his wish, that if there was no real hope for meaningful recovery, that extraordinary treatment be discontinued. So on a spring evening at the end of March, some three months after he first went into the hospital, his parents, whom he loved so much, and about 20 of his friends, stood around his bed in the ICU, as a technician turned a knob on the ventilator and allowed him to breathe room air instead of a mixture artificially rich in oxygen. He stopped taking breaths on his own a few minutes later, even though the ventilator was pushing air in and out of his lungs. Minutes later his heart rate slowed. And then the monitor above his bed tolled an alarm and spat out a strip of paper. Two minutes later, another alarm and another strip of paper. A minute later, one last strip spilled out of the machine and curled to the ground, like a receipt. Someone wondered out loud if it was the hospital bill. I took it home. It says Christopher Rose, 26 March 1998, 19 hours, 53 minutes, asystole. And below that, there's a flat line drawn across the width of the graph paper. We all just sat there for a while. There is an unmistakable look a dead body has. Within just a couple of minutes, the color of the body changes, the skin turns ashen, a luminescent gray. You can see why people have always believed that something has left the body-- spirit, breath, ruha, pneuma, soul. It is no accident we say that someone has expired. Some people walked out of the room. Others stayed. I stayed for a while. And I found myself wondering how long will it survive? How long will the HIV, the virus that caused all this, how long will it stay alive under that dead man's skin? I had the distinct and odd feeling that death is a gradual thing, a process. The person is said to have died, but then death begins in earnest at the cellular level. Once the circulation of blood stops, the cells are deprived of oxygen and they begin to die. But how long would the HIV continue to live after it had killed its host? I did some research. And it turns out the best guess is that the human immunodeficiency virus can survive for many days post-mortem, in tissues preserved under laboratory conditions-- that according to the International Society of Infectious Diseases. The truth is we don't know precisely how long the virus survives in a cadaver. It might die in the blood rather quickly, but live in a pocket in the spleen for instance, for a little while longer. We know that it outlives the host for a little while, but not that long, perhaps less than a week. Which brings me to this question, is it worth it? That extra week in a dead man's blood, is it worth all the bother? Is it worth it hitching a ride for the better part of my friend's life, being the source of endless anxiety and pain, only to outlive him by a week at the most, maybe only for a day or so. It hardly seems worth it to me. Christopher lived his entire adult life with this hanging over his head, waiting for this to happen, and the bug won, and then death claimed them all. Sean Collins is the Senior Producer of NPR's All Things Considered. Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself, with Alix Spiegel and July Snyder. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Paul Tough, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett, Sylvia Lemus, and [? Sahini ?] Davenport. Music help today from Mr. John Connors. Special thanks today to penicillin. To buy a cassette copy of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, (312) 832-3380, (312) 832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] Well, you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website at www.thislife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who of course refers to the door of the This American Life studio as-- The portal of death. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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I've been thinking about the gangster, Arnold Rothstein, the guy who's often credited with fixing the 1919 World Series. I've been thinking about his last words after he was shot during a poker game in 1928. Someone asked who shot him. "Me mother did it," he said. His mother. Even in death he was not going to rat. You know, at that point, what is the killer going to do to him? Naming his mother was nothing more than reasserting who he was one last time, in the face of death, who he was, which was a guy who would not rat. And this is what we want from last words, let me tell you, this kind of summing up of who a person is. You know, sometimes you'll see those collections of famous last words that were printed in the paper or in the Sunday magazine, and they all have this quality-- they always do-- of pretending to sum up an entire life. Bing Crosby, "That was a great game of golf, fellers." WC Fields, "I've spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes." Oscar Wilde, "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." And you know, the fact is, Oscar Wilde didn't even say that on his death bed. It's a remark he made to a friend at a cafe a month before he died. That's how much we want to believe in these things. But, you know, we want our lives to mean something, and we want to believe that words can capture that meaning. And, seen in that way, last words, attempts at last words, a one final shot at figuring it all out, summing it all up, they have this way of asserting the fact of our existence at the exact moment of our annihilation. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Last Words. Several case studies for you. Act One, Actions Speak Louder, the story of people who were perfectly eloquent and the limits of what even the best chosen last words can say and do for people. Act Two, The Unknown Soldier, a story in which 40 voices become one voice here on your radio. Act Three, Rosebud, an act about which the less said the better. Act Four, How the Living Use The Dead, Writer Greil Marcus explains what rock fans use dead rock stars for. Act Five, Black Box. We go through transcripts from those black box flight recorders, the ones recovered from airplane crashes. Act Six, What Goes Through Your Head. We have a story from writer Tobias Wolff. Stay with us. Act One, Actions Speak Louder. This is the story of people attempting to surround death in a web of words to better understand it, a very eloquent people and their last words and of what last words can and cannot accomplish. Page Smith and Eloise Pickard Smith were married for over five decades, and they died one day apart. In Santa Cruz, where they lived, they were well-known. She was an artist. He was a writer and historian, one of the founding provosts at UC Santa Cruz. Our contributing editor Sarah Vowell tells what happened. This is a love story, a death story. It is also a competition between actions and the power of words to describe those actions, between theories of death and the practice of dying. Before we get to anyone's last words about Page and Eloise Smith's joint life and joint death, here are the facts. I asked their friend, John Dizikes, and their daughter, Anne Easley, to tell this story. Anne recalls the beginning of the end when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Early on, the diagnosis was not a good one for her. Like, within the first three weeks, we knew that it wasn't a battle that she was probably going to be able to win, but she went ahead and allowed a lot of treatment anyway. And I think that she did that mainly for my father. And then he had started symptoms, probably, beginning in the first part of her third month of her illness. And I talked to her doctor because Dad's doctor seemed to think that it was nothing important and was being very cavalier about it. And my mother's doctor told us not to be surprised if Father died shortly after Mother. And she had just met both my mother and father, but she could tell. And, I don't know, there must be something that happens when people who are that connected-- the doctor just knew right away. And she said that Father wouldn't live six months. I repeated that to my parents. I couldn't even believe it. It was kind of shocking. And my mother had had a major heart attack 10 years before they both died. And Dad told all of us, all the four children, that if she died, he would also die. He said-- and I've never forgotten it-- "I've looked into the void." And it stuck in my mind very much. And he never suggested he would commit suicide or anything other than he would just drop dead. He was just going to die. He refused, spiritually, to live without her. There was something in the way he said it that made me realize that this person who was so strong, powerful, he exuded a sense of power, this person must have found the prospect of life without Eloise impossible. And he told us individually, I mean, just made sure that all of us knew, that that was the way he felt about it and that that was what was going to happen. And none of us questioned it. I mean, we all thought it was crazy and that he shouldn't do that and that there was a lot to live for after Mother died. But it was what he wanted. We just figured he'd be able to do it somehow, and he did. When the doctor said that your father would die shortly after your mother and you told your parents this in disbelief, what was their reaction? What was your father's reaction? I think it was relief. I think Dad-- well, he knew he was going to do it. We didn't tell Mother, because we didn't want to upset her, until just a few days before she died. But I think it was also a relief for her. You're just going to have to accept this because I'm going to do it. That's OK. OK, good. That's OK. Anyway-- but, as a matter of fact, I think that Father would have died, probably, right with Mother, if he hadn't been on chemotherapy. They put him on chemotherapy because he insisted on outliving her. He didn't want to die before her. He wanted to die after her. And he was actually having one of his chemotherapy treatments when we went and told him that she had died. And he removed the intravenous lines from his arms and said, well, that was it. He wasn't going to have any more medical intervention and that he would just be dying shortly, and he did. He died 36 hours later. Those are the facts. As for the last words that try to make sense of that act, Page Smith wrote a column that does as well as one might hope. It was part of a series of columns he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle in his last years on old age and dying. In the essay, he talks about the deep pleasures of lifelong coupling and, ultimately, the deep pain for those whom death does part. He wrote, "The consolations of an old marriage are the good news. The bad news is that one partner in a marriage, however idyllic, will pre-decease the other. Many years ago," he continued, "my dear old friend Josephine Jacobson, the poet, saw on a New England tombstone the unbearably poignant words, 'It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.'" In another column, called "Famous Last Words," Page ponders the quandary of the final thought. He said that he admired the last words of John Quincy Adams, who collapsed on the floor of the House of Representatives and declared, "It is finished. I am content." Page points out that the problem is that, in order for your last words to be famous, you have to be famous, which rather complicates things. He continues, "It casts a shadow over the whole enterprise. Maybe the proper thing to do is to die in decent, resigned silence, keeping one's final thoughts to oneself." Well, of course, all of us were waiting for his final words. But it wasn't something where we asked him, "If you had your last words, what would you say?" And he slipped off into the coma before any of us would have done that. We live and we disappear. We come from somewhere and we go somewhere. And yet, words can remain. Writing can remain. Art remains. Art is long, life is short, as we know. And the last words, I think, are connected with that evidence that it's a kind of testimony against our obliteration and our disappearance. That may be true, but whose last words actually live up to that? Anne says that Eloise's final words spoken to her sister, Ellen, were, "I'm going to God." Page told his son to, "Give my best to everybody up at Cowell," meaning Cowell College at UC Santa Cruz, which he founded. Historians, as an occupational hazard, live among the dead more than the rest of us. They talk to the dead, read their words, heed their warnings, try to give breath and blood to bodies long since turned to dust. The first important work of Page Smith's career was a two-volume biography of John Adams published in 1962. John Dizikes, Smith's former student, fellow history professor, and friend, delivered a joint eulogy for Eloise and Page at their funeral. I asked him to read it for me. It begins with one of Page's favorite anecdotes about the second president, the fact that Adams died on July 4th, 1826. Precisely 50 years after the Declaration of Independence and coinciding with Thomas Jefferson's death on the same day in Virginia, for Page, this extraordinary occurrence, to which he returned again and again in conversation and in lectures, the joint departure of two presiding spirits, two lives, two deaths, free will and necessity, unfathomably intermingled, suggested something far beyond mere coincidence. History is divine drama. "It could not be said that Americans were struck dumb," he wrote, "rather the reverse. They were struck into an outpouring of wonder and astonishment, of amazement and awe." And in these last few days many of us, too, have felt something of wonder, of amazement, of awe. The biography of John Adams was also a biography of Abigail Adams. And one of its most compelling aspects was the way past and present were merged, the 18th century and the 20th century, life and love, husband and wife existing simultaneously in the consciousness of the writer and of the reader, exemplified by the book's unforgettable dedication to Eloise, "through whom I know what Abigail meant to John." Those are lovely words, an historians words, but sometimes there's only so much words can do. When the man John Dizikes talks about the uncanny deaths of his friends Page and Eloise, he ultimately rejects the poetry of last words for a kind of wondering. Anne does too. In the face of such a story, of such a marriage, who can resist comparing his own marriage to theirs? I think many of us have wondered and thought privately about ourselves in relation to that. What Page and Eloise were and did may or may not be at all relevant to what we all are in our own lives. I do think, myself, that there is a quality of intensity of love that some couples have, of a necessity of being together, that many other devoted people don't have. Oh, very, very few people will ever have what they had. And I have a wonderful marriage. I have a wonderful husband, but-- I don't know, maybe in 20 or 30 years, if we're still alive-- and we've been together 30 years already-- and if we have another 30 years, maybe we'll be as tight as my parents are. I believe that I understand how much Eloise meant to Page, just as he understood how much Abigail meant to John Adams and how much my wife means to me. There's a certain point at which you say-- not that life is not worth living, it is, but-- perhaps, that you've lived it fully, and there's no point in living a diminished life. Page Smith once commented, "Often, the power of the original fact is so great you're awed by it." As Charles Adams said when his grandfather, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the same day, the fourth of July, 1826, "There is nothing so eloquent as fact." Historians, which is to say writers of non-fiction, spend their careers as fans of facts, noticing those moments when actual events have about them an air of magic, of myth. I think Page Smith, who loved his wife more than his life, would have appreciated the eloquence of his body's final act, dying when he did. Page and Eloise were cremated together, their ashes mixed. They're buried at the bottom of a hill. The marker, made by Anne, reads, "It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch." Sarah Vowell's most recent book is Assassination Vacation. Act Two, Unknown Soldier. We have this story written by Luc Sante. The last thing I saw was a hallway ceiling, four feet wide, finished along its edges with a plaster molding that looked like a long row of small fish, each trying to swallow the one ahead of it. The last thing I saw was a crack of yellow sky between buildings, partly obscured by a line of washing. The last thing I saw was the parapet and, beyond it, the trees. The last thing I saw was his badge, but I couldn't tell you the number. The last thing I saw was a full shot glass slid along by somebody who clapped me on the back. The last thing I saw was the sedan that came barreling straight at me while I thought, "It's OK. I'm safely behind the window of the donut shop." The last thing I saw was a boot, right foot, with nails protruding from the instep. The last thing I saw was a turd. The last thing I saw was a cobble. The last thing I saw was night. I lost my balance crossing Broadway and was trampled by a team of brewery horses. I was winching myself up the side of a six-story corner house on a board platform with a load of nails for the cornice when the weak part of the rope hit the pulley sideways and got sheared. I lost my way in snow drifts half a block from my flat. I drank a bottle of carbolic acid, not really knowing whether I meant to or not. I got very cold, coughed, and forgot things. I went out to a yard to try to give birth in secret, but something happened. I met a policeman who mistook me for somebody else. I was drunk on my birthday, and I fell off the dock trying to grab a gold piece that looked like it was floating. I was hanged in the courtyard of the tombs before a cheering crowd and people clogging the rooftops of the buildings all around. But I still say that rascal had it coming to him. I stole a loaf of bread and started eating it as I ran down the street, but there was a wad of raw dough in the middle that got caught in my throat. I was supposed to get up early that morning, but I couldn't move. I heard a sort of whistling noise above my head as I was passing by the post office, and that's all I know. I was hustling a customer who looked like a real swell, but when we got upstairs he pulled out a razor. I owed a lot of money for rent and got put out and, that night, curled up in somebody else's doorway. And he came home in a bad mood. I was bitten by that black dog that used to hang around, and I forgot all about it for six months or so. I ate some oysters I dug up myself. I took a shot at the big guy, but the hammer got stuck. I felt very hot and shaky and strange. And everybody in the shop was looking at me. And I kept trying to tell them that I'd be all right in a minute, but I just couldn't get it out. I never woke up as the fumes snaked into my room. I stood yelling as he stabbed me again and again. I picked up a passenger who braced me in the middle of Broadway and made me turn off. I shot up the bag as soon as I got home, but I think it smelled funny when I cooked it. I was asleep in a park when these kids came by. I crawled out the window and felt sick looking down, so I just threw myself out and looked up as I fell. I thought I could get warm by burning some newspaper in a soup pot. I went to pieces very slowly and was happy when it finally stopped. I thought the train was going way too fast, but I kept on reading. I let this guy pick me up at a party, and sometime later we went off in his car. I felt real sick, but the nurse thought I was kidding. I jumped over to the other fire escape, but my foot slipped. I thought I had time to cross the street. I thought the floor would support my weight. I thought nobody could touch me. I thought nobody could touch me. I never knew what hit me. They put me in a bag. They nailed me up in a box. They walked me down Mulberry Street followed by altar boys and four priests under a canopy and everybody in the neighborhood singing the Libera Me Domine. They collected me in pieces all through the park. They had laid me in-state under the rotunda for three days. They engraved my name on the pediment. They drew the collar up to my chin to hide the hole in my neck. They laughed about me over the baked meats and rye whiskey. They didn't know who I was when they fished me out and still didn't know six months later. They held my body for ransom and collected, but, by that time, they had burned it. They never found me. They threw me in the cement mixer. They heaped all of us into a trench and stuck a monument on top. They cut me up at the medical school. They weighed down my ankles and tossed me in the drink. They gave speeches claiming I was some kind of tin saint. They hauled me away in the ash man's cart. They put me on a boat and took me to an island. They tried to keep my mother from throwing herself in after me. They bought me my first suit and dressed me up in it. They marched to City Hall holding candles and shouting my name. They forgot all about me and took down my picture. So give my eyes to the eye bank. Give my blood to the blood bank. Make my hair into switches. Put my teeth into rattles. Sell my heart to the junk man. Give my spleen to the mayor. Hook my lungs to an engine. Stretch my guts down the avenue. Stick my head on a pike. Plug my spine to the third rail. Throw my liver and lights to the winner. Grind my nails up with sage and camphor and sell it under the counter. Set my hands in the window as a reminder. Take my name from me and make it a verb. Think of me when you run out of money. Remember me when you fall on the sidewalk. Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet. The Unknown Soldier was written by Luc Sante. We had 46 different readers, too many to name here, ending with the author himself. Act Three, How the Living Use the Dead. Janice, Jimi, Elvis, some dead pop stars are so big you don't even need their last names. Then there's Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Mama Cass Elliot, Jim Croce, Ronnie Van Zant, Duane Allman. I could go on and on with dead pop stars, but I don't actually have to because, in 1979, writer Greil Marcus did it for me, for all of us, in the most definitive way possible. He had observed the ghoulish fascination that people have with rock deaths, how it's kind of gain for fans, sometimes, seeing which stars in their deaths come closest to who they seem to be on stage. Who comes close to meeting that 19th century romance slash James Dean ideal of living fast, dying young? And then he decided that the only way to deal with it was to make it into a joke. To settle the discussion forever, once and for all, he ranked 116 dead pop stars according to a complicated point system. Now, I had absolutely fabulous fun doing it. You know, very quickly, I was taking it really seriously. Well, how much is a suicide worth? And, depending on the manner of the suicide, do you get extra points or less points? And, oh, it was so much fun. It really was. A classic example of something starting off as a joke and, suddenly, becoming an obsession. Well, I got fascinated by this in the '70s, at the end of the '70s, when this whole notion of the survivor seemed to utterly dominate contemporary discourse. And I don't just mean in pop music. Bruno Bettelheim wrote this quite wonderful, long essay on the cult of the survivor, basing it on concentration camps, Nazi concentration camps, and the whole notion of what it meant to survive, and how, for some philosophers and artists, it had become the primary virtue, that nothing was more important than surviving, that it was a good in itself. And I noticed that, in music, there were all these records called Survivor, or I'm a Survivor, or I Must Survive, or I Will Survive. In USA, Rock Death in the 1970s: A Sweepstakes, which is collected in your book, Ranters and Crowd Pleasers, you list them. There's Grand Funk's Survival, the Rolling Stone's "Soul Survivor," Barry Mann's Survivor, Cindy [? Bowen's ?] "Survivor," Eric Burdon's Survivor, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," Adam Faith's I Survive, Randy Bachman's Survivor, Georgie Fame's "Survival," Lynyrd Skynyrd's Street Survivors, then The Wailers' Survival, and then the band Survivor. Yeah, and it's worth noting that all these songs called "Survivor" were different songs, or, at least, they had different words and melodies. I guess they really were all the same song. And, at the same time, Brian Wilson made a comeback with the Beach Boys, and everything written about him said he's a survivor. He was being praised for not being dead. And you reach a point when people are patting themselves on the back for not being dead, when they're celebrating their triumph over the dead, when they're affirming their superiority for not being dead. Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces and other books including the upcoming book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. Coming up, the voices of airplane pilots from black boxes and other last words. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and reporters and performers to tackle that theme. Today's program, Last Words, people's attempts to make sense of their own lives, sum up their own lives, assert the fact of their own lives in the face of death. We've arrived at Act Four of our program. Act Four, Rosebud. [WHISPERS] Rosebud. Act Five, Black Box. The most frequent contemplation we do, as a culture, of people's last words is when airplanes crash. There is the black box, which is frequently florescent orange, not black, which has data from the airplane's instruments and the taped voices from the cockpit voice recorder, or CVR. We wondered, do these voices tell us anything about how people compose themselves in the face of danger and death? Well, Malcolm McPherson has published a book of transcripts from 28 different crashes. It's less ghoulish reading than you might think, more like the movie Apollo 13 than The Bride of Chucky. It's full of technical talk and people trying to work things out. I think that, in general, what I've seen in these is the work of some extremely professional people, some highly-trained people who are doing what their training has instructed them to do to that last second, and some, in many cases, through the last second. And then, at one point, you just know, you can read and you can feel in reading these, that they know that it's the end game, that it's over. And that's usually when you get the kinds of emotions that you can read in these, the yelling and the shouting and the swearing which goes on. A lot of these people just end with, "Oh, [BLEEP]!" Thinking about the different categories that these fall into, there are the ones where the crew actually acts very heroically and does what they can to save the plane. There are a few where people just seem to die out of sheer stupidity. There's one, a China Airlines flight-- It was a China Northern Boeing MD 82 over Western China. It was in November of 1993, and the crew lost track of their altitude in a fog. And they were coming in for a landing, on a landing approach, and there are these ground proximity warning horns that go off in the cockpit. They're quite loud, and they are recorded in English. And, when they go off, they start screaming in the crews ears, "Pull up! Pull up," in a very flat, very loud way. And, these Chinese pilots and co-pilots, they were later overheard on the cockpit voice recorder after the plane had crashed, and the pilot was asking his co-pilot in Chinese, "What means pull up?" The pre-recorded messages that the equipment puts out are all through these, and sometimes it's a little eerie. One of the most eerie times is Korean Airline flight 007, which got hit by a missile, and at the end of the transcript, the plane goes down. And, after the last words by any person in the transcript, the public address system recordings are still saying, "Put out your cigarette. This is an emergency descent. Put out your cigarette. This is an emergency descent. Put out your cigarette. This is an emergency descent," over and over after all the people are dead. Yeah, it's like an Arthur Clarke nightmare, you know? I mean, the humans are dead and the computers are still sort of living. How far those warnings were going on, I don't know. But they must have been repeated over and over as that thing plummeted from 50,000 feet. It was way up there, and it had a long way to fall. Let's go through a few of these so people get a sense of what these are like. There's one of the flights, Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight 529, this was August 21, 1995, going to Mississippi. And can I ask you to just read a little bit from where the captain says we can get in on a visual? "We can get in and land on visual approach without instruments." The control tower, "Good luck guys." The captain, "Engine's exploded. It's just hanging out there." The co-pilot, "Yes, Sir. We're with you. Declaring an emergency." The captain to the co-pilot, "Sin- single-- single-engine checklist, please." Co-pilot, "Where the hell is it?" Captain to the co-pilot, "Help me. Help me hold it. Help me hold it. Help me hold it." There's a vibrating sound as the stick shaker starts warning of the stall. Co-pilot, "Amy, I love you." The cabin, sound of grunting. Sound of impact. End of tape. One of the things I thought was interesting reading these transcripts is how few of them have anything like the pilots or co-pilots saying any last words to their loved ones. There's this one where the co-pilot says right before the tape goes off, "Amy, I love you." But in the whole book of these you don't have any others where anybody gets any last words like that to anybody on the ground. They're certainly not listed on these transcripts, the CVR transcripts. The NTSB, National Transportation Safety Board, which gets these things out of the black boxes, sanitizes them to an extent where personal or deeply emotional words that have nothing to do with helping anyone to analyze the incident, the crash, whatever it might be, they're not released to the public. In some instances, some of it gets through. But, for the most case-- and I think NTSB is absolutely correct in this, that-- it really has no business for the public to be reading this. I think that it's an issue between that crew and whoever. And so it's possible that, in fact, many more crews are actually trying to get in last words to their loved ones, but they don't get printed. Yeah. As a reporter traveling around, do you travel with a little tape recorder? I do. And have you been on airplanes where you were frightened about it crashing and you've looked at your tape recorder and you just thought, what should I say here? No, when I've been afraid on an airplane, Ira, I've been too afraid to turn on a tape recorder. What about you? Have you? I have, yes. I don't know what that says about me, but I have. Tell me. What have you-- Well, most of the time I'm travelling, I'm traveling with tape equipment, I'm working on a story. And every time that I've been scared that the plane was going to crash, I have sort of mentally prepared, OK, what am I going to say into this tape recorder if this thing goes down? Who do I want to say anything to, and what's my obligation to actually observe what is happening around me? I mean, in a way, it's the kind of self-flattering melodrama-- do you know what I mean? Oh, sure. And, I mean, it's putting yourself at the center of a dramatic movie that you're imagining in your head. Yeah. The thing that interests me most about the intrinsic nature of these transcripts is that I am fascinated by the moment at which everything normal turns 180 degrees in an instant. And, all of a sudden, everybody is-- in the case of the CVR transcripts-- everybody is in a pre-tragic situation. They're in an emergency. It happened to me when I was a kid and I was driving along one night at about 10 o'clock with my parents. I was 12 years old. It was in 1955. And we were driving along. My father poked along. He was a-- you know, whatever. And, all of a sudden, blam! Somebody stove into the side of us. My parents were killed instantly. Oh, my god. And my whole life at that instant changed. It turned around. Things happened to me that were not expected, you know? And I think about that issue when I'm reading these transcripts. So I think that's what brought me to these things, why I'm interested in these things as much as I am. Well, thinking about your collection of cockpit voice recorder recordings as an examination of how people handle that moment when the world goes from its normal trajectory into this sort of extraordinary trajectory where nothing is normal, the ones who come off as the most heroic are the ones who manage to keep themselves calm and keep themselves as much like they were still living their normal life, for example, Al Haynes from the Sioux City flight. Let me ask you to read a little bit from page 183 of these transcripts. OK. The remarkable thing was the humor that kept going back and forth. I mean, there was a running joke in that cockpit. Explain the running joke. Yeah, it's amazing. There was this guy in San Francisco they kept trying to get in touch with, who was part of the United maintenance crew in San Francisco. And he simply would not believe what they were telling him because, according to all his manuals and all he knew, this couldn't happen. The systems all couldn't go down the way they had gone down. Specifically, explain just how badly off these people were. Oh, there had been an explosion in the tail of the airplane, which had severed the hydraulic control elements that turn the plane, and the only thing that they had to move the plane left and right and down and up were the two engines on the wings. And so they had no control except for these engines, and they had to control by the throttles. So they would, basically, let up on one throttle and push ahead on the other to turn the plane to the right and-- yeah. Exactly. At the bottom of page 173 there's this moment where Captain Haynes is talking to the flight attendant, and he's giving her the instructions, "OK, here's what we're going to do to evacuate. Here's the command I'm going to give you to brace for landing," and, you know, all that. He says, "And then, if you have to evacuate, you'll get the command signal to evacuate, but I really have my doubt you'll see us standing up, honey. Good luck, sweetheart." I know. And then she says, "Thanks, you too." Isn't that amazing? It's so sweet. It's just so concerned and caring, you know? "Good luck, sweetheart." "Thanks, you too." You know, just to get back to something you said earlier, you know, I can't decide if I think it's a good thing or if I find it a little disturbing that people's last words are edited off of these transcripts. I can kind of see it both ways. Well, I see it, pretty much, in line with the NTSB. And there's nothing we can do about it, as you know, but the fact is that why would you want to see, or hear, or read some of the words that would come off that would be just-- I'll give you an example of what these can be like. There was a Turkish airline, DC-10 in 1975, that crashed in Paris. It was taking off going to London. And, as this thing was going down, the pilot started to sing a lullaby in Turkish, a child's lullaby. And it was extremely affecting. And it was just horrifying and, at the same time, it was so sad that this guy at that point knew he was seconds away. And this was his reaction. Why? What was going through his mind, what he was thinking about? God only knows. Malcolm McPherson's book is called The Black Box: All-New Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-flight Accidents. His latest book about a Navy SEAL's helicopter crash landing in Afghanistan is called Robert's Ridge. Act Six, What Goes Through Your Head. We have this piece of fiction from writer Tobias Wolff. Anders couldn't get to the bank until just before it closed. So, of course, the line was endless, and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders, a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed. With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the tellers stuck a "Position closed" sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank where she leaned against the desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers. The women in front of Anders broke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred. "Oh, that's nice," one of them said. She turned to Anders and added, confident of his accord, "One of those little human touches that keep us coming back for more." Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, but he immediately turned it on the presumptuous crybaby in front of him. "Damned unfair," he said, "Tragic, really. If they're not chopping off the wrong leg or bombing your ancestral village, they're closing their positions." She stood her ground. "I didn't say it was tragic," she said, "I just think it's a pretty lousy way to treat your customers." "Unforgivable," Anders said. "Heaven will take note." She sucked in her cheeks but stared past him and said nothing. Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in the same direction. And then the tellers stopped what they were doing, and the customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank. Two men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were standing to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol pressed against the guard's neck. The guard's eyes were closed, and his lips were moving. The other man had a sawed-off shotgun. "Keep your big mouth shut!" the man with the pistol said, though no one had spoken a word. "One of you tellers hits the alarm, you're all dead meat." "Oh, bravo," Anders said. "dead meat." He turned to the woman in front of him. "Great script, eh?" The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes." She looked at him with drowning eyes. The man with the shotgun pushed the guard to his knees. He handed the shotgun to his partner and yanked the guard's wrists up behind his back and locked them together with a pair of handcuffs. He toppled him onto the floor with a kick between the shoulder blades. Then he took his shotgun back and went over to the security gate at the end of the counter. "Buzz him in," his partner said. The man with the shotgun opened the gate and sauntered along the line of tellers, handing each of them a Hefty bag. When he came to the empty position, he looked over at the man with the pistol, who said, "Whose slot is that?" Anders watched the teller. She put her hand to her throat and turned to the man she'd been talking to. He nodded. "Mine," she said. "Then get your ugly [BLEEP] in gear and fill that bag." "There you go," Anders said to the woman in front of him. "Justice is done." "Hey! Bright boy! Did I tell you to talk?" "No," Anders said. "Then shut your trap." "Did you hear that?" Anders said, "Bright boy. He called me 'bright boy' right out of The Killers." "Please be quiet," the woman said. "Hey, you deaf or what?" The man with the pistol walked over to Anders. He poked the weapon into Anders' gut. "Do you think I'm playing games?" "No," Anders said. But the barrel tickled like a stiff finger, and he had to fight back the titters. He did this by making himself stare into the man's eyes, which were clearly visible behind the holes in the mask, pale blue and rawly red-rimmed. The man's left eyelid kept twitching. He breathed out a piercing, ammoniac smell that shocked Anders more than anything that had happened. And he was beginning to develop a sense of unease when the man prodded him again with the pistol. "You like me, bright boy?" he said. "You want to suck my [BLEEP]?" "No," Anders said. "Then stop looking at me." Anders fixed his gaze on the man's shiny wing-tip shoes. "Not down there. Up there." He stuck the pistol under Anders' chin and pushed it upward until Anders was looking at the ceiling. Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank, a pompous old building with marble floors and counters and gilt scroll work over the teller's cages. The domed ceiling had been decorated with mythological figures whose fleshy, toga-draped ugliness Anders had taken in at a glance many years earlier and afterward declined to notice. Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter's work. It was even worse than he remembered. The ceiling was crowded with various dramas, but the one that caught Anders' eye was Zeus and Europa, portrayed in this rendition as a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome. The bull wore a smirk, and his eyebrows were arched. If there'd been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, "Hubba, hubba." "What's so funny, bright boy?" "Nothing." "You think I'm comical? You think I'm some kind of clown?" "No." "You think you can [BLEEP] with me?" "No." "[BLEEP] with me again, you're history. Capiche?" Anders burst out laughing. He covered his mouth with both hands and said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry," then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, "Capiche, oh, God. Capiche." And, at that, the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head. The bullet smashed Anders' skull and plowed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus. But, before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neuro-transmissions. Because of their peculiar origin, these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some 40 years past and long since lost to memory. After striking the cranium, the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lightning that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, passed before his eyes. It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her before it came to irritate him, her unembarrassed carnality and especially the cordial way she had with his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in, "Uh-oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants to play." Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth. He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will, not "Silent, upon a peak in Darien," or "My God, I heard this day," or "All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?" None of these did he remember, not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, "I should have stabbed him in his sleep." He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek. Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds. He did not remember the surprise of seeing a college classmate's name on the jacket of a novel not long after they'd graduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book. He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect. Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, "Lord, have mercy!" He did not remember deliberately crashing his father's car into a tree, or having his ribs kicked in by three policemen at an anti-war rally, or waking himself up with laughter. He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else. This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whir of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They've been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders, an oppression, like the heat. Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi. Anders has never met Coyle's cousin before and will never see him again. He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they've chosen sides and someone asks the cousin what position he wants to play. "Shortstop," the boy says. "Short's the best position they is." Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to ask Coyle's cousin to repeat what he's just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he's being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn't it, not at all. It's that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself. The bullet is already in the brain. It won't be outrun forever or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can't be helped. But for now Anders can still make time, time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, "They is, they is, they is." Tobias Wolff's story, "Bullet in the Brain." That's from his book, The Night in Question. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors for this show Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Amy [? Takahara ?], Seth Lind, and Sativa January. Our web address, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our shows for absolutely free or buy CDs. Or, you know, you can download today's program and our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who wanders the empty halls of WBEZ after each pledge drive is over saying-- All my pretty ones? Did you say all? Oh hell-kite! All? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. What's so funny, bright boy? PRI. Public Radio International.
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Think for a minute about your first day. Not your first day on the job, or the first day with your spouse, or the first day in the neighborhood. I'm talking about your first first day. The first time you ever had a first day. Up until the time that Tarpeley was three and a half, everything was always the same. She had been in the same day care since she was six months old. Her parents were still together. They lived in the same place. Her house has these rooms in it. And her backyard is this way. And her teachers are the same teachers. Her friends have been the same friends for three and a half years, which in her time frame, is all of eternity. There are no other friends. There are no other people. That's her dad, our contributing editor Jack Hitt. He says that all of this changed the day that he discovered that he could switch Tarpeley to a different school, a preschool that was a lot closer to their house. As he told Tarpeley, it was a school where the big kids go. There was suddenly an opening. So I told her about this, and she-- the idea of moving on to the next stage in her life, the first time she had ever had that option, was so exciting. She literally jumped out of her chair and ran circles around this cafeteria. Screaming, dancing, just sending up hosannas of glee. And we talked about it all weekend long. All the books tell you to do this. And it makes sense. You talked about it all weekend long? What was there to talk about? Well, just, you know, that there would be new people, and new teachers, and new everything. And that would require some getting used to. You say that to a three year old, and you think they understand what you're saying, but of course they don't. Because they don't have any experience at encountering anything new. She had never had a first day before this. And comes the big day. They set out for school. On the morning of her first day, this was Columbus setting off into the Atlantic, right? We walked up the block, and hung a right, and started down to this place that she had never seen before. On the first day-- any first day-- we're expected to live by the rules and customs of the culture that we're entering. But we don't know those rules and customs just yet. It is a very particular time. And all the kids at the school that Tarpeley was entering, they already knew each other from the year before. She was the newcomer. I can't remember if it was the first day or the second day. But I remember the gut-wrenching moment was when I came to pick her up one day and we were walking home. And she started to cry, and said that she wanted to go back to her other school. And the reason was that one of the little children there had told her that she couldn't play with them. That there was this little group, and my daughter wasn't invited to play with them, because they didn't know her, and that she should stay away from them. She had never heard that expression or that idea in her life. And of course what's interesting is that the person who made that remark to her is now one of her best friends. What do you make of that? Well, I think that hazing is a natural part of defining any group. And I don't know why. But there's not a profession or a career or a group out there that, on some level, doesn't have some ritual in which the new member is either tormented, or tortured, or beaten, or humiliated. Jack is kind of collecting examples. When he was a freshman at a military boarding school when he was a kid, the freshmen were called "rats." This is common. Upperclassmen would wake them up in the middle of the night, tell them to go warm the toilet seats for them. Jack's wife is a medical student. And you know residents, they work 40 hours without a break, taking the worst cases, doing the worst work, delirious from sleep deprivation. you have to do all that before the older doctors welcome you into the club, give you the keys to their Mercedes. The whole thing reminds me of the way gangs work here in Chicago. Joining a gang here in Chicago, or really a lot of places around the country, means that you get jumped in. Your future gang brothers or sisters take you into an alley and beat the hell out of you. There is just something primal and intimate about the entire thing, as if the existence of the first day, the simple presence of an outsider who wants to be an insider, is so profound, so disturbing to any group, that they have to crush you, prove you harmless, before they welcome you into the family. This is the disturbing aura that surrounds the first day. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, First Day, the story of outsiders who show up wanting to be insiders, and what it takes to make the jump. Act One, Lost at Sea. How cussing can get you through moments when reason fails. The story of a lowly dishwasher who gets a job on an oil rig off the Louisiana coast. Act Two, Squirrel Cop. The story of a rookie cop that is so, so pleasurable that all week around the office, here at the radio station, we have been cracking each other up simply by walking up to each other and saying the words, "Squirrel cop." Act Three, Bad Sex with Bud Kemp. Sandra Tsing Loh with a story about the first day of new love. Well, an attempt at new love. Act Four, When Businesses Act Like Humans. The story of an entire corporation having its first day, and how it makes all the mistakes that any of us would make on our first day on the job. Stay with us. You will not be disappointed. Act One, Lost at Sea. Well, regular listeners to our show may remember Dishwasher Pete. He is an actual dishwasher who, for over eight years, has been pursuing his quest to wash dishes in every state of the union. He is up to 33 states. To score at Louisiana, he thought that he would try to get a job on an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico, but there was one problem. It would mean breaking what Pete calls the fundamental rule. Basically, the rule is this. Never work at a job where I can't quit and leave the moment the notion struck me. For 10 years, ever since I had established the fundamental rule, I had never broken it. He wanted to try, though. If you could handle two weeks on an oil rig, maybe-- just maybe-- he could dare to head off to a bigger dream of his, to wash dishes on a fishing boat for months off the coast of Alaska. With that in mind, he set off to test the fundamental rule. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] the company that supplied galley hands for oil rigs in a small town outside New Orleans. I filled out a bunch of paperwork and sat around with a half dozen other applicants. When my name was finally called, I walked down a hall to where a guy greeted me. Too stunned to catch his name, I could only stare at him and think, "My god, it's Bill Clinton." He was an absolute dead ringer for Bill Clinton. I couldn't take my eyes off him as he led me into his office. The resemblance was remarkable. He had the same puffy cheeks, the same dimpled chin, and the same salt and pepper hair and haircut. He even had that familiar Clinton smirk, only this guy's smirk seemed to say, I know you think I look like Clinton, and you're dying to ask me about it. The Clinton clone said, I had left a couple things blank on my application, such as the make and license plate number of my car. "I don't have a car," I said. "You don't? Why not?" "Um, I guess I just don't need one." "Well, you need one for this job. In fact, owning a car is the most important qualification for being a galley hand." "I have to own a car to wash dishes on an oil rig?" "That's right. When you're on call, and the dispatcher calls and tells you to be down at the coast in three hours, you have to be there. We can't wait for you to find a car to borrow or to find someone to drive you." "Oh, well, in that case, I do own a car." "Great. What kind?" "It's a station wagon." "And what's the license plate number?" "I'm not sure." "You don't know your own license plate number?" "Well, I'd have to go outside and check on it." "You go do that, then." I stepped outside and wrote down the license plate number of a car that I hoped wasn't his, and then went back in and gave it to him. Minutes later, I was issued a hard hat, safety glasses, and two work shirts. I was now officially on call. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking back to the city, grasping at my last fleeting moments of freedom. I was on the verge of breaking the fundamental rule, and could foresee only disaster. To make my fretting worse, the next day a friend of a friend, who claimed to be familiar with life on the oil rigs, told me I could expect to be hazed. As if overcoming my occupational claustrophobia wasn't enough, I was going to have to put up with idiots hazing me, as well. Two days later, I was flown to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The helicopter approached the center of three connected platforms and landed on the roof of its uppermost structure. I asked the pilot, "Where would I find the galley?" "Go down those stairs, and someone will show you," he said. I took off my headset, put on my hardhat and safety glasses, grabbed my bag, and hopped out. I held the door open, reluctant to break my link to the outside world. "So where did you say the galley was?" I shouted over the roar of the whirling blades. "Just go down those stairs," the pilot shouted back. "Shut the door." I shut the door and ran across the roof. As I dashed down the stairs, the helicopter revved up. I paused momentarily, but resisted the temptation to run back up to the roof. The fundamental rule had been broken. There was nothing left to do but face the consequences. Down the stairs, I popped my head through an open door and asked a guy which way to the galley. "Go this way and that," he said. "Down these stairs and those. Can't miss it." I followed his directions and found myself out in the middle of the platform, surrounded by cargo containers and pipes and assorted industrial junk. "You passed it. The door is back that way." A guy in a tiny window of one of the cargo containers pointed back the way I came. I looked, but didn't find any doors. Apparently, a little fun was already being had at the new guy's expense. Were they going to lead me all over the damn rig searching for the galley? I cursed myself for letting the helicopter leave without me. Then I noticed a piece of cardboard that had scrawled handwriting written on it. It read, "Keep out. This means you. Wet floor. Signed, Redneck." The sign hung from what I realized was a door handle. I tugged and pulled and turned the handle every which way, but couldn't get the damn door to budge. I was so green, I couldn't even unlock a simple latch. I was helpless until, almost magically, the door opened from the inside. In front of me stood the guy I had seen through the window. "[BLEEP], son," he said. "Don't just stand there playing with yourself. Come on in." He introduced himself as Redneck, the galley steward. My boss. I stepped inside and asked him where the galley was. "Man, you're in the mother[BLEEP] galley," he scoffed. Looking around, I was pretty sure he had to be putting me on. Even though I could see a small kitchen, the whole space was barely bigger than the kitchen and dining room of a house. "Where does everybody eat, then?" I asked. "Right [BLEEP] there," Redneck said, kicking one of the two benches that faced the counter along one wall. Obviously, 100 employees couldn't fit on those two benches, but since he seemed to think I was gullible, I played along. "Yeah, OK," I said. The rig clerk, acting as the official welcoming committee, arrived right behind me. He instructed me what to do in case of an emergency. "If there's an explosion," he said, "run to whatever platform isn't burning." Redneck, as I would later learn he insisted on being called, introduced me to Cuz, the other galley hand, who was mopping the kitchen. My job instructions from Redneck were simple. "As long as you keep them [BLEEP] dishes clean, there ain't a mother[BLEEP] on this rig who'd give you [BLEEP]." After a brief tour of the small kitchen, Redneck showed me to my station. I stepped up to the sinks and assumed by preferred dishwashing stance. Looking straight ahead, I saw heaven. Right there above the sinks, perfectly at eye level, was a porthole. I immediately knew that this little window to the world would play a huge role in helping me survive for two weeks without quitting. I looked out at the endless expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. There wasn't much to look at-- a whole lot of sea, a whole lot of sky, and dozens of rigs off in the distance-- but already, I felt at ease. My gaze was broken by Redneck repeatedly saying, "Hey, pardner. Hey, pardner!" I didn't initially recognize my new nickname. "Hey, pardner," he said. "You don't [BLEEP] cuss much, do you?" "No," I answered. "Not really." "Well [BLEEP]," he said. "I'll have to mother[BLEEP] cuss for the both of us, then." And he did. Then it was time for lunch. Redneck explained that, despite the fact that the rig was comprised of three connected platforms, the crew was actually pretty small. Altogether, there were about 30 people to be fed. Their mealtimes were staggered. So there were never more than five or six guys in the galley at any given time. This slow but steady pace applied to the dishes as well. There were always dishes for me to wash, but never any rush to get them done. Several times during lunch, crew hands walked up to me in the kitchen with big grins on their faces and asked, "How's it going, bro?" "OK," I'd shrug. They waited. For what, I had no idea. They waited, and then they grew irritated with me and stomped out of the kitchen. One guy said, "What's this quiet-ass mother[BLEEP]'s problem, Redneck?" "He likes looking out that [BLEEP] window. What can I say?" I didn't understand. I washed the dishes, I looked out the window, I minded my own business, just as Redneck had instructed. Why would anyone have a problem with that? After a few more of these encounters over the next couple of days, I finally realized what was going on. The rig hands, after working a gritty shift of roustabouting and roughnecking, expected to be greeted in the galley with some witty remark or joke, maybe even a song or dance. They expected the galley hand to provide some comic relief, like a court jester. What they got instead was me washing dishes and staring out at the sea. Well, too bad. I wasn't there to entertain anyone. If I wanted a job shucking and jiving for diners, I would have become a waiter. Redneck was never at ease. He raced back and forth across the tiny kitchen when he cooked, a constant stream of chatter flowing from his lips. He was a fun and funny guy, but he had a nervous edge that was attributed by all, including himself, to the seven years he spent as a CIA mercenary in southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. I never saw Redneck sit down for more than 30 seconds before he jumped up again and resumed his frantic pacing. He grew especially nervous when he and I were alone in the galley, and I stood staring out my porthole. "Goddamn, pardner! Say [BLEEP] something!" If I had nothing to say, usually I just cursed, since he got a kick out of that. "[BLEEP] it," I'd say. "You got that right, pardner," he'd laugh. "[BLEEP] it." Then, after further contemplation, he'd add, "Mother[BLEEP] it." Not an hour passed without Redneck raising one of his favorite topics for discussion, sex with farm animals. Redneck was raised on a farm in Arkansas, and was quite knowledgeable about having sex with farm animals, and wasn't stingy with this information. He was also always prepared to discuss his other favorite topic whenever Cuz was around, the various ways to kill a man. Between Redneck's experiences in southeast Asia and Cuz's experiences in street gangs and prison, they had plenty of stories to share and information to exchange. Sometimes when I broke from my daydreaming at the window, I found it difficult to decipher exactly which topic Redneck was presently discussing. "You just sneak up behind them and get your arms around his [BLEEP] neck like that, and that [BLEEP] is all yours." Every day, the Gulf went through a metamorphosis. For hours on end, I watched the endless expanse of water slosh up and down, back and forth, as the parade of fish, porpoises, seaweed, stingrays, driftwood, and jellyfish swam and floated past. Seabirds soared by on a fixed course to some unseen destination beyond the horizon. I eyed the dozens of other oil rigs that stood 5, 10, 20 miles across the watery plain. Some appeared no bigger than a blip on the horizon. I wondered a lot about the galley hands on those rigs who were staring back at the blip that was our rig. The more I stared out at the Gulf, the more transfixed I became by the water. There was water as far as I could see, in all directions. I was surrounded by it. I was trapped by it. My hands soaked in it. I drank it constantly. The more I stared at the water, the less I understood it. The hazing I had feared as a greenhorn never materialized. As each day passed, I felt more confident I could last the full two weeks without quitting. The countdown to departure ticked away rapidly. Three days and a wakeup, two days and a wakeup, one day and a wakeup. Finally there was nothing left but a wakeup. No more shifts to work, no more dishes to wash. Just had to wake up and jump on the helicopter. I thought back to the day I landed on the rig. At the end of my first shift, Cookie, the night cook, had asked me, "This your first day on a rig?" "Yeah," I said. "Well, the first day is the worst, and all the rest are just the same." Dishwasher Pete's story was first published in the zine he writes and publishes, Dishwasher. Act Two, Squirrel Cop. The first day, among other things, means human error. It means mistakes. It means mishap. It means fiasco. That is true on a job or anywhere else that the first day occurs. You don't know the ropes. What else could happen? We have this story from a police officer, now a veteran of the force, in a suburban community on the East Coast. There was nothing, nothing going on. Saturday night in this village. Really quiet. Super cold. And this call came over for unknown animal in a house. And it was on my post. It was about five minutes away. So myself and another car were assigned the call. And we show up there. And luckily for me, it was another guy who was pretty new. So we walk up to the door with all our stuff on. The nylon coat, the vest, the belt, the whole nine yards. And the door opens, and the guy who is behind the door, he's about 30. I was 23 at the time. He's about 30. He looks like a broker, a lawyer. Just really well put together. A nice guy wearing glasses. He's wearing these silk pajamas with a monogram. Got my attention. And he's going, listen, I'm really sorry to bother you. Normally I'd handle this sort of stuff on my own. But my wife really insisted I call. And so we ask him what the problem is. He says, well, we were having kind of a romantic evening down in the living room, and we heard this scratching upstairs. So I ran upstairs to see what it was. And it turns out it's coming from the attic. There's something up there, and it's just running around, knocking a few small things over. I can't tell what it is. It could be a squirrel or raccoon. I really don't know. So the other cop that I was with said, well, you know, we really don't handle that. It's not so much a police function. But we do have numbers of these private contractors who will come in and they'll put a humane trap down, and they'll remove the animal for you. It's really not such a big deal. But it's really not our thing. So right as he was in the middle of saying that and getting us off the hook, the guy swings the door back, and there is his wife, who was just beautiful. She was beautiful. She was probably about 26 or 27, but just really beautiful. Perfect skin, long blond hair, great teeth, brilliant blue eyes, a really nice smile. Just, like, beautiful and friendly. You know? If she had said, eat this broken glass, I just would have said, OK, broken glass it is. It's fine. But she seemed really nice. So I was going to be, like, Galahad. So I just threw my arm back into this guy's chest, into my partner's chest. And I said, Mark, we can handle this. It'll be OK. And she was just, oh, thank you so much. And she was really sweet. And I was, like, struck dead. So we walk inside. And she goes, I'm going to throw a pot of coffee on. And we go upstairs. We follow the man of the house upstairs. And we're underneath one of those trapdoors that goes into the attic with the staircase that folds out. And we do hear an animal upstairs scratching away, just kind of scuttling around the floor. And there's definitely something up there. And it's making pretty good speed going from one end of the roof to the other. So I reached up, and I took the trapdoor down. We unfolded the ladder. Now I have this big, heavy flashlight, your cop flashlight. The 4 D-cells, the metal case, the whole thing. I shine it up through the hole in there. And it's pretty black. I can see the rafters, but really nothing else around there. And I start up the latter. Now, the guy who owned the house is standing almost directly underneath me, just to the side of the latter, looking straight up at me. And my partner's at the base of the latter, right behind me. So just before I stuck my head through this black hole, I just kind of pause. I crunch my body up underneath, because I'm realizing, gee, I don't know where this thing is. The second we pulled down the trap door, all noise upstairs just ceased. So I was kind of nervous. And I was like, well, you know, I look like an idiot, just crouched up here on the top of the ladder. So I took the flashlight, and I just popped my head up, turned the light on again. And about six inches from the front of my face was this squirrel, at eye level with me, kind of reared back on its legs. And I swear, from where I was standing, it looked like Godzilla. It just scared the heck out of me. I thought, it's a squirrel. It's going to be hiding somewhere. It's going to be terrified of me. It was six inches away from me. And it really startled me. So I kind of went, "ah!" And jumped back. And the flashlight slips out of my hands-- and it's heavy-- and it falls directly onto the nose of the guy who's looking straight up at me. And I don't think it broke it, but it did some damage. And his nose-- his hands up to his face, blood just started pouring out between his hands. This is the homeowner? This is the homeowner. I lose my balance and fall backwards, directly onto my partner, and I just pancake him. We're both our backs. He's on his back. I'm on his stomach, on my back, scuttling around like a beetle, trying to get up in this really narrow hallway. It's a mess. The squirrel, while we're floundering around in the hallway, jumps down the stairs-- boink, boink, boink-- lands on me, and takes off down the stairs. How undignified. It was terrible. It was terrible. So we're wondering, gee, where is the squirrel? And right at that second, the woman who lived there, you hear her scream. So my partner goes, well, we found the squirrel. It's wherever she is. So we go running downstairs. And the squirrel had come into the living room, where they had been having their romantic evening. They had a fire going. They had pillows arranged around one corner of the couch next to the fire, and they had champagne flutes out. Nice house. Really nice. I mean, it just smelled brand new. New carpeting, new rugs, new paint. They hadn't been there for that long. So the squirrel, when it bolted down the staircase, took off into the living room and ran underneath the couch for cover. So we run downstairs. This guy is bleeding all over the place, on his carpets. His wife looks and says, what have you done to my husband? I start going, oh, it was an accident-- and then I just stop in mid-sentence. What's the point? We've only been there about two minutes. So the squirrel is underneath the couch. And my partner is going, let's get out of here. This is just-- it's not going well. So I am not beaten yet. I always have another idea. So the squirrel is under this couch, which in the middle of the room. So I have this bright idea. Why don't we move the furniture away from one of the corners? And we'll put the catch in the corner. And the squirrel will probably move along with the couch, because it's the only cover available to it. And once we get into the corner, we'll only have two open sides of the couch to worry about. So we did that. That is so tactical. Yes. Yeah, I was very proud of myself at that instant. But you know. I asked her for a box. And she says, sure, we've got boxes. We just moved in. We have nothing but boxes. She runs out to the garage. And she comes back with a box. And the box is long enough. And it fits across the entire short side of the couch, where the armrests would be. So I start sweeping underneath the couch with my nightstick, trying to move the squirrel toward the box. Figuring we'll capture it and just get rid of it. And we'll be out of here. And there'll be no more mayhem. So it's actually working very well. And the squirrel's moving down along. You can hear it. It's chittering. And I'm trying not to hurt it. I'm nervous about the thing. It might bite me. I don't want to hurt it, really. It's just an animal. So I'm moving it along. And everything's going very well. And then with about eight inches to go, I took one more swipe, and the thing just bolted out from underneath the couch. It was lined with tassels. I couldn't really see under the couch. It bolted out from underneath the couch and ran directly into the fireplace, which is about three feet away. The fireplace was directly head of it, and it ran into the fire, and caught on fire, and ran directly back out, and directly back under the couch. Is it on fire? It was on fire. Yeah. The tail, the bushy fur, the whole bit. I mean, it wasn't, like, flaming or anything. But it was smoking. And there was a little bit of fire coming off the tail. So it runs back under the couch. And the couch catches on fire in seconds. I mean, in seconds. It must have had dust under there or something else. But it just caught on fire immediately. And my partner and I just don't even talk. We just grab the couch, heave it upside down. And now there's plenty of oxygen for the fire to really get going. And it starts up. And we're patting it out. And it's sort of getting away from us. So we grab the only thing that's really available. And those are these really nice silk pillows. And we have one in each hand, the both of us. And we're just windmilling away at this fire on the couch. And we put it out. But it's smoking terribly. And it was just a disaster. The couch is upside down. The bottom of it is burnt. The house is filling with smoke from the couch. The squirrel, when it went under the couch, in its death throes, just latched on to the bottom of the couch. It's like this smoking piece of gristle underneath the couch, latched on there with its claws. And we're pounding, smearing it all over the place. And the smoke alarms are firing away. The guy is standing with handkerchiefs and paper towels up around his nose, which is still bleeding. His pajamas are a mess. They're covered with blood, the front of them. And we finally get the fire out. And we're both completely red. Sweating, because we're dressed for like zero degree weather, and it's hot there, by the fire. We're mortified. The house is full of smoke. The wife just looks around and just starts to cry. She goes, what have you done? What have you done to my house? You can see her just clicking things off on the fingers. OK. The dead squirrel, ruined pillows, need a new couch, the walls are covered with soot, the fire alarms are going off, my husband's disfigured. And then she really kind of just lost it. And he was just looking at us and shaking his head, like he couldn't believe that these two idiots showed up and did this to his house over nothing, really. And he just goes, you know, you really haven't done anything wrong. I can't point to any one thing that you did that I have a reason to get angry about. You really haven't done anything wrong. I mean, we did call you. But I just, I can't thank you for this. They call for a squirrel. They end up with $3,000, $4,000 worth of damage and a broken nose. And this is all within about five minutes. Could that have happened to you now, 13 years later? There's always a new mistake to be made. I don't think I would make that particular mistake. I mean, you make plenty of mistakes. That's just part of that job. You just try not to make the same one twice. But there's such variety that you're going to make hundreds, you're going to make thousands of mistakes, until you really get a handle on what you're doing. That's interesting. That is a very particular thing about a new job. Is that in order to learn the job, you literally have to make the mistakes. There's no way around it. Right. And with police work, they afford you plenty of space to make mistakes. But there are things that just aren't your responsibility-- if you get involved in things that aren't your responsibility, or that you're really not equipped to handle, or that you don't have a specific plan-- a plan that's thought through to a conclusion-- you probably should reevaluate what you're doing. Yeah, now that you mentioned that, that's right. You walked into the house, thinking, OK. We'll get this squirrel. Like, how were you going to get the squirrel? What was the best case scenario? That's a great question. I guess I was thinking that I would go up there in the attic, and find this cowering squirrel, and somehow kind of lure it into some kind of trap, and then walk out with it and be like a hero. But as it turned out, it was a Pyrrhic victory for the squirrel, but the squirrel definitely won. The squirrel really kicked our ass. That is not what you want to be saying at the end of the day. No, no. It took me a long time to even tell people about it, you know? I was so new. I didn't want to know what a bonehead I was when I first came onto the job. Describe what you thought police work was going to be the day that you entered the academy. What I thought it would be was one adventure after another, kind of. And that sounds childish. But that's sort of what I did envision. And then one of the very first days I was on, I had the school crossing where I used to go to school. So at 23, I was crossing these kids where I had went to grammar school and I went to high school. Freezing cold. And I knew just about every third or fourth car that went by. And everyone's beeping and honking. And there was some slush on the ground. And my mother drove by. And she stopped in the middle of the intersection. And she goes, what are you doing out here without a hat on? Loud enough for others to hear? Not at all. Not at all. Thank goodness for that. You know, she just, what are you doing out here without a hat on? Mom, I have the hat I'm supposed to wear. She's like, but it doesn't cover your ears. It's freezing out here. And that's when I started to realize, hey, this isn't all about car chases and everything else. It's just like living at home. Our interviewee has two years to retirement. He has been on the force for 18 years. Coming up, when friends try to act like more than just friends. When corporations try to act like high school freshmen. Bad sex, bad radio stations, and the power of a fuzzy navel. That's all in a minute, all of it, from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers and everyday people to come on and take a whack at that theme. Today's program, First Day. The story of outsiders arriving on the scene, trying to become insiders, and the peril inherent in that. We have arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Bad Sex with Bud Kemp. How can you do a program about first days without some story about the first day of a new relationship? We have this story from Sandra Tsing Loh in Los Angeles. Bud Kemp was a guy I'd known for eight years, first in college, then at the pharmaceutical corporation where I worked. I had always thought of Bud as a nice guy, and not unattractive. Not exactly attractive, either. I mean, he had good features-- tall, wavy brown hair, lanky build-- but there always seemed to be this kind of beaten quality to Bud-- in his sad smile, stooped shoulders, pear shape-- as though he were being flogged by life. Sexually, Bud Kemp was an inert object. That perception changed dramatically one night early in the summer of my 31st year. Although not really intimate, Bud and I were in the habit of going to the movies every Thursday night. This movie night tradition had been started by a little dorm group in college, although of course as members drifted towards 30, pairing up or marrying people from the outside, they'd left Bud, I, and movie night behind. No doubt, Bud had also tried to leave Bud, I, and movie night behind. I tried myself. But it was difficult. I mean, I've never been the sort of woman who walks into a room in a Lycra mini dress, hair moussed to staggering proportion, and the men just drop dead all around. No. My charms are more subtle. I'm the kind of girl guys fall back on. Tireless listener. Lender of money. Provider of Xanax. Ride to LAX. And so, as though held together by gravity, eight years later, Bud and I would still find ourselves sitting together in the darkened movie theater, clutching separate containers of popcorn, not saying a word. Hardly a date, I'd think. But one night during the opening credits, I looked over at Bud. And for the first time I realized what a sharp profile he had. What relatively clear skin. And his hands clasped together over one big knee. They were nice, too. Suddenly a phrase popped into my mind. "The strong, capable hands of Bud Kemp." Strong. Capable. Silent. Could this Bud Kemp be used for sex? So things are getting hot, if in kind of a lukewarm way. The coming of our pharmaceutical corporation's summer softball league in Torrance makes them even hotter. Oh yeah. Once a year, summer softball provides we who labor in sector D7 with an excuse to just go wild. Wear funny raccoon hats with our team names on them, yell "whoo, whoo" for no reason at all. My team, the Fly Balls, is composed mostly of the four Fs of the softball universe. Skinny guys in Greenpeace teachers, reluctant wives and girlfriends, little [UNINTELLIGIBLE] from the mailroom. No wonder today we are being beaten, whipped dominated by Terminator 2000, the league leaders. Pitching for them today? Bud Kemp. Oh, yeah. This is a little known fact about Bud Kemp. He did play a year of junior varsity basketball in college. So what if it was at a small science school with a 57-game losing streak? So what if Bud Kemp was thrown onto the court mainly for use as a human shield? The point is, in sector D7, Bud Kemp is our sports stud. And a damned good-looking one, too. Hair faintly blonded under the sun, skin lightly tanned, and are those new glasses? God, yes. Instead of sad clown sideways teardrops, these are cool wire rims. Sting wears wire rims. Bud steps up to the mound, pulls off his t-shirt, and his naked torso is-- OK. 33 and holding, is the triumphal message here. Although he is so Schwarzenegger, there are definite suggestions of biceps and pecs. More than suggestions. Announcements, even. Not very loud announcements, but the point is, situps are being completed, racquetball played, body parts attended to, secretly anointed, perhaps. Is it just my third fuzzy navel talking, or is Bud Kemp ready for sex? We're at Pizza Hut now, talking and laughing. Sex is definitely in the air tonight for everyone in sector D7. Beers slosh, music thumps, lamps sway. People in funny raccoon hats worm up against each other. Bud Kemp and I are no exception. Underneath the table, thigh to thigh, sweatpant to sweatpant, we're doing kind of a sensual leg thing. Laugh and kick out. Laugh and kick out. Obviously, it's driving him wild. "So, you wanna go somewhere?" he says. "Like where, Bud?" I say. It is so loud and wild in here, no one would notice if you tore your own bra off and used it as a lasso. My case would be the sexy black bra I'd slipped on in the bathroom for a guy called Bud Kemp. "Away from here." "How about your place?" "Sounds great." "All righty, then." "All righty." We are using secret code now. Bud Kemp and I are talking, moving as one. I sense almost by telepathy he wants to swing by the Lucky for a six pack. We skate effortlessly through the gleaming, luminescent supermarket aisles like Torvilll and Dean. We pause calmly, almost worshipfully, before the glass refrigerator cases, which present their dramatic panoramas. Endless vistas of possibility. Heineken, Dos Equis, Tsingtao, Kirin, Moosehead, Foster's. The whole world is ours, literally, through beer. He chooses Coors. I say, "I like it too." "I guess we both like it," he says. We both like it. And suddenly I have a vision of Bud Kemp and I together on a Sunday morning, reading the newspaper, drinking our favorite General Foods International Coffee, Amaretto Hazelnut, the one we both like. And instead of my weekends yawning empty, I will be spending them with someone, together, liking things. First it was movies. Now it is beer. Soon it will be cars, vacations, houses, children. This is the vision I cling onto as we returned to his condo in Long Beach, drained the beer, moved to leftover Gallo, as I sit in the living room and rub and rub and rub Bud Kemp's shoulders, and Bud Kemp talks and talks and talks about-- what else?-- Bud Kemp. "So sometimes I wonder if I'm really, really suited for a career in pharmaceuticals marketing management. I mean, what if my calling is something a bit more in the applied plastics field?" "What kind of plastics did you have in mind, Bud?" "Oh, I don't know. Single cell liposome polymer blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, me, me, me, blah, blah, blah, me, me, me, blah, blah, blah, me, me." He is making me lose hold of my vision. We need to escalate things to the next level. "Bud," I say, "let's go to bed." The moon slants in through the shade, transforming everything into misshapen lumps. It is uncomfortably warm and stuffy. Bud is lying on his bed, fully clothed, frozen. "This is so weird," he says, "after all this time." "I know," I say. "But I think you'll like it." I sit on the edge of the bed, remove one shoe, then the other. Bud Kemp does not move, make any invitation. I shove in next to him. Suddenly horny, in a kind of confused, primeval way, we grapple each other like circus bears. Bud Kemp's head is buried in my shoulder. He is stroking my hair with these odd petting motions, making this kind of humming sound. [HUMMING] I find myself energetically massaging his shoulders. I don't know why. Move down. Lower back. Move down. Buttocks. But it seems invasive to be massaging the buttocks of such an old friend, so I find myself merely patting them as though in congratulation. Oh, if only we could get that sensual leg thing going again. Laugh and kick out. Laugh and kick out. But there is no laughter here. Only worry and sweat. How I long for Pizza Hut with its pepperoni-laced orgy-like ambiance. Sex between two people can be such a lonely thing. Grimly pushing on, I tear my t-shirt off, revealing my sexy black bra, his cue to just go wild. But Bud Kemp is rubbing his eyes with both hands. Still I wait, with accusing breasts. Still Bud rubs, making that kind of faint humming sound. [HUMMING] And I realize that Bud Kemp can not bring himself to face my breasts in all their terrible candor. They blaze in the darkness like headlights, illuminating the falseness of all of those movie nights. Eventually, Bud stops running and just lies there with both hands cupped over his eyes, as though expecting to be flogged. His nostrils quiver. Is that a snore? My idea is that we will never speak of the incident again, see each other, or even continue to live in the same state. But no. The bouquet that arrived the next morning is the ugliest I have ever seen. It is a chaos of white baby's breath, purple lupin, pink carnations, yellow daisies, all stabbing against each other in frantic counterpoint. Even worse is the card, which reads, "I saw these flowers and thought of you. Love, Bud." Love, Bud. One thing is for sure. He is not my lovebud, and this is not me at age 31, a frantic bouquet slowly wilting. Sandra Tsing Loh's story "Bad Sex with Bud Kemp" is not collected in her books Aliens in America, A Year in Van Nuys, or any of her fine books. She has been happily married for years to a man who is not in any way, any way, Bud Kemp. They live in Los Angeles. Act Four, When Businesses Act Like People. We have this case study from Alex Blumberg, a radio listener-- a radio listener like you, a radio listener like me-- here in Chicago. This is a story about a first day that's in denial that it's a first day. The story starts when I was in my car. And I just realized that I have my preset station buttons arranged in order of preference. One, two, three, four, five, six. And so I sort of go down. And this station number six was the classic rock station, Rock 103. And number six is often just awful. Every once in a while, they'll have a good Led Zeppelin song on, and that's why I have it set. So I hit it, and there's that song, which I don't know the name of, but it's that one that goes, "ooh, child, things are going to get easier." And I think to myself, that's certainly an expansive definition of classic rock. So then I think, wow, this is great. And then another song comes on. And it's "Disco Inferno," or something like that. And I think now, something must be wrong. So I look and I think, the first thing is that somebody's been messing with my dials. Like somebody got into my car and rearranged my radio stations. But then I look at the numbers. The numbers are the same. And then I hear this announcement that comes on. And it's like, "You've found the new 1035, Jammin' Oldies." And I think to myself, what the hell is a jammin' oldie? And you have to keep in mind that the day before, this station had been playing Anthrax and Slayer, and every once in a while, like I said, a Led Zeppelin song, but basically heavy metal gearhead music. And now all of a sudden, there's just no mention being made of it. And it's just like the old station was disappeared. You've found the new 1035. Chicago's new station for jammin' oldies. We don't play moldy oldies, and we don't play doo-wop-- Now what has happened is that this station had a format change over the weekend, basically. And they didn't mention it on the weekend, when I had been listening before. There was no mention of it. They were doing their concert promotions and having people call up to get Anthrax tickets or whatever. Nothing had been said. And so obviously, everybody who has been tuning in before is expecting the classic rock. But they don't want to seem like they're a new station. They don't want to seem like the new kid on the block. So what they do, is they do what everybody does on the first day. They pretend like it's not the first day. They want to establish this illusion that they've been around forever, so they have these little promo spots that come on, these little [UNINTELLIGIBLE] where they have people they've interviewed-- like, man on the street interviews-- where people are talking about how great jammin' oldies are, and how wonderful it is to have this station that plays jammin' oldies which has been on the radio for three hours. Everybody's talking about the new station that plays Chicago's jammin' oldies. You know, when you hear those songs, it brings you back, like you're right there. You know? Like, what did they do? They just start broadcasting, and immediately send a squad of people out to find people who are accidentally tuned in? No. And that also comes through. I mean, if you hear the spots, it's like this sort of desperately-- It's like they're trying too hard. And it's just exactly what happens when you're trying to fit in too hard, and you're pretending like you've around forever, and you know the ropes, and it just falls flat. And these spots just fall flat. The one that I love is where they have, like, "This is the station that plays jammin' oldies." And then they cut to this voice of somebody going, "jammin' oldies!" Now here comes more of Chicago's jammin' oldies. Jammin' oldies! On the new 103-- I don't quite understand what it is that is just so ridiculous about that particular "jammin' oldies." But it's just like it's so earnest and so wrong. It's just not right. It's just not what somebody would say if they were actually excited about jammin' oldies. They would never-- I can't imagine a situation in which somebody would authentically be shouting "jammin' oldies! Jammin' oldies!" A jammin' oldies pep rally? I can't imagine where it would be happening. I mean, I have nothing in common with the station formerly known as Rock 103. And yet, all the behaviors that they are exhibiting on their first day are behaviors that I would exhibit on my first day anywhere. Like they are trying to fit in, they're expressing sort of this anxious enthusiasm, the false bravado. They're pretending to have experienced things that they have, in fact, not experienced. And they're failing miserably, just as I would fail miserably, and have, on many occasions, on my first day. Alex Blumberg. Well, it's This American Life, the radio program that can not resist a dare. Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alix Spiegel, Julie Snyder, and Emi Takahara. Our staff for this show includes Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, Todd Bachmann, and Starlee Kine. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Marketing help from [? Marge Estrusco ?] and the friendly folks at PRI. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. We've been meaning to thank Jorge Just for a few weeks now, so let's do it now. Thanks, J. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. 312-948-4712. Or visit our website where you can order tapes. Or you can listen to our programs for absolutely free online at www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Funding for our show comes from the listeners of WBEZ Chicago. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who walks into our studio at the end of every single show to grimly assess the damage. Dead squirrel. Ruined pillows. Need a new couch. The walls are covered with soot. The fire alarms are going off. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. You really haven't done anything wrong. I mean, we did call you. But I just-- I can't thank you for this. PRI, Public Radio International.
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There's certain conversations that those of us who do not live on farms get into with people who do live on farms, where you know, you just know. As the city person, or the suburban homeowner, you know that the farm person you're talking to is just thinking the entire time you're talking to them, "You are so naive." A lot of these conversations have to do with animals and their deaths. Take this example. The woman who runs the website for our radio show, Elizabeth Meister, was at the annual exhibition run by the American Poultry Association in Columbus, Ohio. And here she is. She's standing in a room with 12,000 chickens. And she gets into this conversation with an 11-year-old girl. I've only been in poultry and waterfowl for a year. I'm more into waterfowl. This is Kamiko Overs from Bliss, New York, who was at the convention to show some of her own birds. So do your friends think it's weird? Do they think it's strange that you show chickens and stuff? No, because a lot of people show. They'll either be showing pigs, or cows, or rabbits, or something like that. A lot of people in our school show different things. Kamiko and Elizabeth talked for a while. And then Elizabeth tried, very, very gently, to ask a question that was on her mind. Do you-- this is sort of a hard question for me to ask. But do you ever eat them? Yeah, I do. You do. And does it make you really sad when-- do you raise these chickens from little chicks? Yeah, we hatch them out. And then, yep. We get them right from the hen. And we eat them a lot. We do raise a lot for eating. And so when you're cooking up this chicken that you've raised from being a little chick, do you feel a little bit guilty that you're eating this chicken? No. No? No. Do you ever eat the chickens that you show? If they're no good for show, the losers, yeah. Kamiko is untroubled by this. If a bird has bad feathers or a lopsided comb, it might be a nice bird. But it's not going to win competitions. You eat it. That's life. Those of us who do not live on farms, we divide animals off into those we love and those we eat. In Kamiko's world, there's not such a hard line separating the two. You can get to know a bird on an up-close and one-to-one basis and still eat it. An animal's transition from buddy to dinner is a great deal less problematic than it is for us city folks. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And every year, during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the highest poultry consumption time of the year in these United States, we bring you a program about poultry, our annual Poultry Slam, stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, birds of all kinds, and our relationships with them. In past years, we have brought you an opera about the life of Chicken Little. We've brought you the story of a hand puppet duck that would not leave people's lives. And naturally, we've brought you real stories of actually growing up with turkeys, and chickens, and other birds. And in putting together this year's show, a very few particular ideas and questions kept coming up in story after story. Without us ever intending for it to happen this way, a lot of this year's show has turned into a kind of referendum about where you draw that line between friend and food. Act One of today's program, Still Life with Chicken. Food writer Jonathan Gold tells what it's like to pan-fry a chicken with a live chicken watching you the entire time. Act Two, Last Meal. When Francois Mitterand knew he was about to die, he decided that the last food to cross his lips would be poultry, a tiny bird that is actually illegal to eat in France, a bird that, by tradition, is eaten with a napkin covering your head. Michael Paterniti set out for France to try the contraband capon himself. He has a full report. Act Three, People who Love Chickens and Hate This American Life. Last year, a woman named Karen Davis started a national letter-writing campaign to try to get This American Life to stop the very program you're listening to at this very moment, the annual Poultry Slam. In this portion of our show, she explains what it is that we just do not understand about poultry, and why the whole idea of this poultry show was wrongheaded from the start. Act Four, The Meaning of a Bird. David Rakoff explains how his life was changed in a single evening in a room of 5,000 chickens. Stay with us. Act One, Still Life with Chicken. It was an accident that Jonathan ended up living with the chicken. He was not living the kind of lifestyle that one usually associates with chicken. This was during the period when I considered myself to be a performance artist of a sort, a naked performance artist, to be specific. These days, Jonathan Gold is a food writer in Los Angeles. This all happened 15 years ago. He was putting together a performance. He had a PA system which could put out the requisite amount of annoying feedback sound at high decibels. He had the two full bottles of Glade American Beauty air freshener, which he would spray, in their entirety, in the performance space. And he had a live chicken, which he bought the day before the performance in one of those Chinese poultry markets in Los Angeles. And it comes the day of the show. An audience gathers in a darkened warehouse in West LA. I don't know if you've been to a lot of performance art, but this was really typical of the stuff that was going on in the period. And I showed up, and I was naked. And I was carrying a machete, and I was blindfolded. And I stood in the middle of this pile of supermarket chickens, the broilers that you buy. And the chicken that I bought was tethered to a three-foot rope around me. And I hacked up and down blindly with a machete. Toward the chicken, or just in general? Well, I was blindfolded, so I didn't know if it was towards the chicken or not. And I had fully intended that, in fact, I would kill the chicken in the midst of this performance. But chickens aren't that stupid. And this chicken wanted no part of the machete, stayed at the end of its rope the entire time, apparently. And after 10 minutes, when I was completely exhausted, I fell to a heap, and everybody left. And the performance was over. I don't know if you've stuck around after an art performance, but the few minutes after an art performance are some of the most depressing in the world. How so? You've done your wad. You've done your bit for art, which has either worked or it hasn't. But you're sitting there. You're covered with chicken effluvia, in my case. It stinks to high hell. Everybody's gone, and you've got to clean up. And you're naked. It's really not a pretty picture. So Jonathan cleaned up. And when he was done, he had a chicken. And he didn't feel like he could kill the chicken. Destiny had brought them together. He felt like he could not turn his back. He says it was the same as if a kitten shows up on your back door, scratching, and lonely, and needy. So he took the chicken home. And in doing that, he stumbled across that thin, thin line that separates food items on the one hand from pets on the other, that divides the animals we eat from the animals we love. So I get home, and I have this chicken. And I don't know what to do with it. So I spread out some newspaper on the top of my refrigerator, and I put the chicken up there. I get a can of Green Giant brand niblets from under the counter. And I open it, and I put it in a little bowl for the chicken. And I give the chicken a little water. And the chicken's on top of my refrigerator. Because you think chickens eat corn. You had read that or something. And that was the available corn. That was the available corn. I wish I had thought better of the niblets idea. Why? Because in fact, if you're buying three or four cans of niblets a day, which is what the chicken ate, and you're existing on almost nothing, which I was, then your niblet bill turns out to be some two-figure percentage of your total income each week. If you can imagine living on $50 a week, but $10 of it goes for niblets. It's just hard to justify an expense like that. Though at the remove of 15 years, I think I can probably safely admit to you now that one of the reasons that I stuck with the niblets is because I liked saying the word "niblets" so much. And this gave me the excuse to use the words like "niblet" in general conversation several times a day. Usually, it just doesn't come up. And the chicken stayed there, on top of my refrigerator, for a long time, months, six months, I think. This is a one room apartment? A two room apartment. I had a kitchen and a bedroom. So I didn't have to look at the chicken when I was sleeping, though I did have to look at it when I was cooking. Did you ever cook chicken? Of course I cooked chicken. Didn't you feel intensely disloyal? No, I felt no particular loyalty to this chicken. I don't know if you've ever had chickens, but it's not like-- you don't pet chickens. Chickens don't really like you to pet them. And you don't hold them. There's really no love that you feel for a chicken in your life, I don't think. But yet you kept the chicken. I kept the chicken because I couldn't bear to do anything else. And it's not like I could have carried it out onto Pico Boulevard and said, "Be free, little chicken. Be free." Did you give the chicken a name? I never named the chicken. When I referred to the chicken in public, I always called it "the hen." How did you not name it? It was a creature in your house. The chicken always seemed temporary. It never occurred to me that I might have the chicken as long as six months. The chicken always seemed like something that I would have for just a couple days. And then what did you think was going to happen? A, I thought about the chicken expiring. B, I have to admit that there was a possibility that someday, I would actually cook the chicken. I went through a lot of chicken recipes, hundreds and hundreds of chicken recipes. Thinking, "Maybe this'll be the recipe for my niblet-fed chicken?" Exactly. Possibly, I have to say, the most delicious chicken that you could ever eat, because of those niblets. You can't buy niblet-fed chicken for love or money, I don't think. I'm not sure that a recipe existed that would have lived up to the fact of the chicken, this animal who you have come to know on fairly intimate terms, and who you have raised, and you have put a certain amount of emotion into. A chicken, if I might say, who has seen you naked. The chicken did see me naked, damn it. The fact is, we need food to be just food. And as soon as it becomes a living thing, especially if we're city people-- we're not used to the conversion of living things into our food-- it's hard to handle without thinking it has to be bigger than food, without wanting to make it ritualized or something bigger than food. Exactly. Can I tell you a small story? Yeah, of course. A few weeks ago, I was in this Korean restaurant in Koreatown in Los Angeles. It was this place called the Living Fish Center that I'd always wanted to go, because the name of it was so splendid. Living Fish Center, I imagine some sort of vast vivarium where Flipper was jumping through hoops and stuff. And I go in there, and of course, it's just a crummy Korean restaurant. It's not that clean. And there are tanks and stuff, but I didn't know what to order. So I order a fish soup because it looks like they have a small fish soup specialty on the menu. And it comes, and it's just really strong-smelling and not that great. And I try squid fried with bean sauce and onions, which wasn't that happening. And I'm about to give up and pay the check and go home with a vast table filled with uneaten stuff. And it suddenly occurs to me what the specialty of the restaurant is. And I wave the waitress over, and I tell her that I'd like a prawn. And she is puzzled. She didn't expect me to ask for a prawn. But I repeat my request. And she shrugs and goes and tells the sushi chef. And he goes to one side of the restaurant. And he climbs on this chair, this ordinary folding chair. And he reaches into this long tank that's running just below the ceiling. And he wiggles his fingers in the water. When he wiggles the fingers, the prawns just become enraged. And they start nipping at his fingers, and they start attacking him. And he picks out a couple of the liveliest ones and brings them back to his counter and, without washing his hands, mind you, just makes a few motions over it. And a couple seconds later, the waitress comes over with the prawns on this huge mound of ice. Now what he'd done is he'd taken off the exoskeleton. The head was intact, and that little part of the tail that is always on prawns was still there. But the middle part is naked, like a grub. And I picked up the prawn with my chopsticks. And it was not dead, this prawn. It was extremely alive. And it was wiggling its legs. And it was wiggling its antennas. And its eyes were swiveling madly on its eye stalks. And it was looking back at me, seeing me as actually the predator, the creature that was going to eat it. And that was a really freakish moment, because as much stuff as I eat, and as low as I eat on the food chain, and as many prawns as I have dispatched in my life, I have never before killed a living being with my teeth. And the prawn knew what I was going to do. And he did not like it. And I wasn't quite sure what to do, but if I put it down, the prawn would have died anyway. It's not going to live without its shell. Somebody else would've eaten it, blah, blah, blah. So I bit into it. I bit its body off with my teeth. And the prawn just relaxed in this way that was really eerie. And the taste of the prawn, the taste of the meat of it, was extraordinary. It was sweet. It was like there was life coursing through it. It was the most alive thing I've ever eaten, obviously, literally. But again, it was freaky. It was getting too close to the actual nature of consumption, which is killing a living creature with your teeth. When you bit into the prawn, did you actually bite off its head, its living head, and have its head and its eyes in your mouth? No. I bit off its body, and I held the head in my hands. So you held the head in one hand and the tail in the other, and you bit the center. Right. And I thought that I'd killed it. But in fact, when I put it down, it still had so much life in it that it grabbed a piece of salmon sashimi and wouldn't let go of it. And I don't think I ever want to do that again. Did you feel like there was something about the experience that made it more-- this word is a little cornier than I intend, but it's the only word that I can think of-- sacred, that took it out of the mundaneness of the way that we eat, which for most of us is eating without actually tasting and experiencing and thinking about what we're eating and what on the earth it is that we're killing to survive? Do you think in some way that it's more acceptable to eat an animal if you are more awake to the fact that it is an animal and what's happened to it? Or do you think it really doesn't matter? I think it matters a great deal. One of the greatest metaphors in Western civilization is that of Christ, who gave his life so that others might live. And I don't want to be sacrilegious, and I don't want to belittle that myth in any way. But a pig is giving its life so that we might eat. A chicken is giving its life so that we might eat. And I think the least that we could do is to think about that chicken, to think about that calf that we're eating. Not necessarily to be sad for it, but to celebrate it, to be aware of the being that it was, that it wasn't just this bit of bioengineered protein that somehow managed to find its way onto our plates. Jonathan Gold writes his food column, "Counter Intelligence," for the LA Weekly. He's also the restaurant critic for Los Angeles magazine. Act Two, Last Meal. Consider, please, poultry consumers, the role of poultry in Francois Mitterrand's last meal. Mitterrand, you'll recall, was the president of France, died at the beginning of 1996. A contradictory and enigmatic man, the French press used to call him the Sphinx. He once actually staged his own assassination to help himself in the polls. Obsessed with history and his place in it. Michael Paterniti wrote about Mitterrand's last meal for the magazine Esquire. Mitterrand found out that he was dying of cancer. Our story begins just weeks before his death. Right before Christmas, Mitterrand went to Egypt to commune with the pharaohs. Even though he was extremely ill, he decided that he had to go there one last time. You said he went to Egypt commune with the pharaohs? Yeah. Literally with the pharaohs? Well, he felt this spiritual connection to these leaders of the past. And he studied the lives, and in particular, how many of these people died, what their last gestures were. And he felt that his last gesture would have to be equally fitting. Equally grand. Yeah. And while he was there, he decided that he was going to have this amazing last meal. What he did was call back to France and made sure that they had this menu that he decided would be it, which was this amazing feast of oyster, and foie gras, and capon, and finally, this little songbird called ortolan, which symbolizes the French soul. And it was this completely forbidden thing to eat ortolan. It's illegal in France to do so. Because it's an endangered species, right? Yeah, and people who have served ortolan, chefs who've served it in France, have been fined. And I think in one case, a chef was imprisoned for serving it. Did you look at all into why the ortolan would come to represent the soul of France? It was the food of kings in France. And once it was caught in these tiny traps, in very old times, they would actually poke the eyes of the bird out. So the bird would live in complete darkness and just eat 24 hours a day. And then when it was fattened, they would drown it in a kind of cognac. And there was this ritual associated with the preparation of the bird, as well as with eating the bird. Actually, in Proust and Fielding, ortolan appear. And they symbolize seduction, and adultery, and virginity. And one of the things about ortolan is that people eat it with a napkin over their head. Right, people put a large cloth napkin over their head. And apparently, what the napkin does is it keeps the aroma inside this tent in which you're eating. And the French say that it also keeps God from seeing you eating the little birdie. Meaning what? Meaning that it's sinful, that the bird is so innocent. And the pleasure so great? And the pleasure so great that it's a sin. And Mitterrand, when he had his last meal, he knew he was dying. Right. And he continued to survive for quite a while after the last meal, right? He lived eight days. And he didn't eat or drink during those days. He just decided he wanted the last food that he had eaten to be the ortolan. Yeah. That was what was most incredible to me is that he had this huge dinner, and then consciously decided that would be his last meal, and then just readied himself for death. So you arranged to go to France to try to taste this bird and have this meal, in fact, to try to recreate Mitterrand's last meal. Right. And it started with 100 phone calls just to try to locate somebody who would even entertain the notion. And after, literally, months, there was one chef in Bordeaux who said that he would cook the meal. And so you have this massive meal, ending with the bird. Yes. And what do we know about when Mitterrand ate the bird? Well, we know that during the meal, he slipped in and out of consciousness in between the courses. And he would eat ravenously, and then he would just sort of pass out. And he sat at a table separate from the table where all his guests were seated. There were about 30 people there, extended family and friends. And Mitterrand would rise up with each new course and eat. But he really wasn't talking to many people. And he was really focused on trying to finish the meal and taste, apparently, every note in that meal. When you had your meal, do you feel like you were able to achieve that level of awareness, where you were tasting every note of the meal? It seems like such a high standard to aspire to. I felt like it was the most incredible meal I've eaten. And it was because I was very focused on everything that went into my mouth, and also, because when it came to the ortolan, there's no easy way to eat ortolan. You are forced to taste every bite. And it goes from being completely sublime to being excruciating. Describe what it's like to eat the bird. We should say that the bird, you describe it as the size of your thumb, smaller than your thumbs. Yeah, it is. It's about the size of your thumb. And they serve it in a white cassoulet. And you put the napkin over your head, and you duck down toward the cassoulet. And so you are in this space that is completely white, the white napkin, the white plate, the white cassoulet. And then you have the bird on its back that you lift up and put into your mouth. You cool it by breathing in and out. And this is the entire bird, every part of it. Yes. In our case, the chef insisted that we bite off the head and leave the head on the plate. I think in Mitterrand's case, he ate the head, too. OK. So you bite off the head. You leave the head on the plate. And then you cool it, and then you begin to chew. And that first bite is incredibly difficult to describe, because it's terrifying. I was terrified. I was nauseous with the idea of it. But the first bite of the bird changed that. It was incredibly and almost immediately delicious. And all these juices were flowing out of it into your mouth and mingling and commingling with everything that was already in your mouth. And it's like this very finely evolved consomme. And then you begin to taste the meat. And they're little, tender bits of meat. And then, I think you begin to taste the organs. And it becomes more bitter. So the sweetness and the tenderness turns bitter. And then? And then, well, you keep chewing ortolan until you have chewed it completely. And then you're supposed to swallow it all at once. And there's no other way, really, to consume it. And as you continue to chew, it gets harder and harder, because you're working the bones, finally. So the meat and the juices fade. And you suddenly are chewing these bones. And that is when you really, I think, fall into a bit of an existential crisis. Like, what the hell am I doing? And then also, I really think I'm going to throw up. And how am I going to swallow these bones? And how am I going to swallow them? Many people who have never had ortolan before end up spitting it out on the plate. And in fact, at Mitterrand's last meal, a number of the people in the room did spit out their ortolan. That seems like incredibly bad form, though. You're spitting out the soul of France. Yeah, you're incredibly gauche if you pull that stunt. Did this experience change you? Yeah, it definitely changed me. I didn't eat chicken for a long time. Why? Because I think I felt guilty. Guilty like you didn't feel like it was right to eat a bird without the sacred quality that it had to eat the ortolan? Yeah, I think it has everything to do with feeling, in some ways, like I had actually eaten the last meal. And for me to put anything else inside of my body would mean that it would have to be somehow as sacred, or holy, or as good. And it's not like I am suddenly a vegetarian now. Finally, I ate whatever, because I was hungry, without thinking about, for instance, the life that I was putting inside of me. Was it a relief not to taste the food again? Yeah, because it takes a lot of energy and concentration. And it takes faith, and all of these things that we don't associate with eating, when you really taste a meal. It takes concentration and silence. And at the same time, understand how that meal came to your table. The way you describe it, it's almost like you're saying that if we were really awake to what the world is giving us in a given meal, it would be hard eat the meal every single time. Yeah, I feel like we would age really quickly. Do you think we would age because we'd be doing so much thinking and so much mental work during the meal? Yeah, it'd be like a time-lapse version of your life, if you were psychically, spiritually, physically, intellectually, erotically present at every meal. But you're saying that we have to deaden ourselves in order to live. I think we do, to a degree. But I think-- I have to say, what's radical about what you're saying is you're saying, maybe that isn't such a horrible thing. Maybe that actually has to be the way. I wish it weren't. But I don't think we make enough time to eat. And if we haven't made enough time to eat, then it's better not to taste what we are eating. It's easier. Michael Paterniti in Portland, Maine. Coming up, a woman who thinks that This American Life is bad for an entire species, and when a perfumed handkerchief does not do what you want it to do. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today, during the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the time of year when poultry consumption is at its greatest in this country, we bring you our annual Poultry Slam, stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, fowl of all kind, and our relationship with them. We have come to act three of our program, Act Three, People who Love Birds and Hate This American Life. Well, I hold in my hand a stack of, I'd say that it's about 50 letters that I've received from around the country. Here is one from Yonkers, New York. It begins, "Dear Mr. Glass, I was profoundly shocked to learn that for two years in a row, during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season, you have produced a Poultry Slam program, in which cruel and demeaning jokes and anecdotes are told about chickens and turkeys." Here's another letter from Santa Monica. It begins, "Dear Mr. Glass, we were profoundly shocked to learn that for two years in a row, during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season, you have produced a Poultry Slam program--" The wording is identical in these. In fact, the wording is identical in most of the letters. The first wave of mail was organized by a woman named Karen Davis, head and founder of a group called United Poultry Concerns. We invited her onto the program to correct whatever misinformation she thought we were spreading. She, in turn, invited me out to her home, out in poultry country in eastern Virginia. OK, birds, let's go. Every morning, Karen lets 55 birds out of the converted garage behind her house. They stay in there overnight as protection against predators. It's OK. Come on. Hi, birds. Come on out. It's a lovely, friendly chaos, like a scene from Dr. Doolittle. All right, good. Go on outside. Nearly all of these birds are refugees from the commercial poultry industry. Karen started taking care of birds that had fallen out of trucks, or had been left behind, or escaped. She let animal shelters know that she would care for chickens. People started bringing her birds. She gets birds from school hatching projects. And now, she's got a big, fenced-in back yard full of them. These two roosters are the kinds of birds who are used by the meat industry. As you can see, they're extremely large, very overweight. They're crippled. They're typical. When you say crippled, how are they crippled? Well, one is sitting because he can't get up. And they have skeletal problems. It's their entire skeleton through their system is just not able to accommodate the rapidly growing body that's imposed upon the skeletal system when they're young. So they are very susceptible to being crippled and to having a wide range of skeletal diseases. In nature, it takes a chicken six months to grow to full maturity. But with selective breeding and specially formulated feed, the poultry industry now raises a bird to full size in just six weeks. Then they're butchered. What Karen Davis is doing is keeping birds alive that are not designed to live very long. Putting on all this extra weight so fast, so young, strains the heart and lungs, she says. And typically, their bodies give out when they're just two years old. That's versus traditional breeds, which can live 10, 15 years. And what she finds when she cares for these birds in a loving way, outside the crowded chicken houses they were born into, is that they defy the stereotypes that most people have about chickens. They're not stupid, or dirty, or cold-hearted. Take Henry, one of the first birds Karen brought home. Henry had fallen off a truck. He was from a breeder operation. He had a severely debeaked upper beak. And he was covered with filth. He eventually became very snowy white. And he was very scared of people. And he was like anybody who's lived as a creature with no identity in a mass situation. He had no sense of who he was or where he was. But this changed. After he had been with me and my husband for about three or four months, he became very, very affectionate. He liked to be held. His feathers came in very beautifully. And he became a very sweet, affectionate bird. And he would come when I would call him up the back steps. And he-- Here's one area where Karen Davis is completely in the right, and I and my radio staff have been absolutely wrong. In our earlier Poultry Slams, three or four times, people referred to chickens as stupid, as having no personality. In last year's show, at one point, I myself declared that if chickens had a personality, that personality seemed to be that they're a pain in the ass. And while this may be true for the chickens I observed, which were raised in the crowded gulag of commercial production, chickens raised properly, well, they can be kind of sweet. Want to demonstrate your sweetness? Do you? This hen has been with us since she was 10 weeks old. Haven't you been? Karen showed me Ella, who likes her neck stroked. And Elise, who jumps over the fence every morning and jumps back in every night. And Lois and Lambrusco, a pair who stick together all the time. And Dolores, who's sort of shy. She says meat-eaters like me usually don't like to think that chickens have personalities, because then it would be too hard to eat them. They're very homey birds. That's another thing is if you brought a chair out here, and you were sitting out here reading a book, or working on something, or you sat out on the steps, they'll all collect around you. They like to be with you. They like to sit with you. They like to preen themselves next to you. And they'll sit with you for hours. That was one of the first things that drew me to them. We hung around the yard for half an hour and then went inside. She made a pot of coffee. And when we got to discussing This American Life, I have to say the mood got a good bit chillier. Karen Davis sees our annual Poultry Slam as one long piece of insensitive, anti-chicken propaganda. I thought it was a disgusting show. And it was just in the typical tradition of let's make dirty jokes about poultry and do it in a variety of voices. And it's just a mean-spirited show. It's very irresponsible, very irresponsible, to present lies, to really just take a collage of hostile attitudes and complacent, smirking voices and put them all together and feel that we're doing something worthwhile. I understand that the show says something to the effect that this is about America, and this American life, and how we see ourselves. And it's really about us and not about them. But it's the birds who get the bad rap. If you've heard much of today's program at all, if you didn't just turn on your radio a moment or two ago, then you got a pretty good sense of the tone of our previous Poultry Slams. And even stories that actually tried to document cruelty to poultry, for instance one woman's rather grim memoir of growing up on a turkey farm, even this, Karen found offensive in tone and in spirit. I pointed out that half the stories in previous years had not even been about real chickens. One was about a duck hand puppet. One was about a radio superhero called Chicken Man. One was an opera about Chicken Little, staged entirely with finger puppets. But Karen would have none of it. I remember this woman speaking about the chicken as opera diva, which again, of course, was just a joke, and about Chicken Little being an opera diva. That itself is, again, disparaging. It's not the worst kind of thing you can do. But the woman's whole voice, the very tone of her voice, the attitude, the way she talked about chickens, was not in a spirit of goodwill. It's an ill-willed presentation. I just have to differ with you. When I think about the woman in that story, she's very affectionate towards the characters in her opera. She made some hostile comments about chickens, again, that had no connection to who chickens even are. And maybe she doesn't even know any chickens herself. She's just doing what so many people do. She's just talking off the top of her head. And chickens are easy to, again, make into characters who you can laugh and smirk over. But I guess I'm saying, she's not laughing and smirking. She loves her chicken characters, like all the birds in the thing. She clearly loves them. She said something to the effect on that show that chickens had no personalities and didn't know who they were. I don't remember exactly what it was. But it was one of those kinds of statements. But that was just one moment in a story that, in a certain way, had less to do with chickens and much more to do with what it means to create something emotional and grand out of something so small as finger puppets. Karen Davis and I argued for a long time about whether there was anything in our program at all, besides slander against chickens. And in the end, we simply do not agree. I asked her why, if there's this genocide of millions of chickens a day, with ads on television encouraging people to tear at chickens' flesh with their teeth, ads that reach many more people than we do on our radio show, why go after us? Do you feel like somehow by stopping us, that that's going to change the situation for chickens, that that's going to have an impact on the number of birds killed and mistreated? It could. You're part of the problem. As long as you do this show called a Poultry Slam, you're part of the problem. You're one of the reasons. You're one of the many components of the abuse. You're part of the problem. Act Four, Meaning of a Chicken. For most of us who have little to no contact with living, breathing chickens, the fact is that chickens mean what we decide that they mean. We have this story from David Rakoff, which begins far, far away from any chicken house. Friday nights of my childhood and early adolescence were spent at weekly meetings of a socialist, Zionist, youth movement. My brother, sister, and I were members. The meetings took a variety of forms. There were the earnest discussions of Marx and the great labor Zionist thinkers like Theodore Herzl and A. D. Gordon, bull sessions about who in the group had hurt whose feelings, and playing air guitar to "Come Sail Away" by Styx. All activities that formed us into pretty deeply committed young socialists, ready at the age of 15 for the ultimate prize the movement could bestow, a summer living and working on a kibbutz, one of the collective farms that were a central part of settling the Jewish state. There, we would meet other members of the movement from all over the world and spend many a happy hour engaged in honest labor, laughingly baling sheaves of wheat, picking olives, oranges, peaches, grapes, the sweat on our brows a shining reminder of the nobility of collective farming. In the evenings, we would gather together and dance around the fire, sing Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young songs and, if one's older siblings were any indication, lose our virginity. Years later, we would renounce our bourgeois upbringings and return to Israel, making lives of simple, agrarian bliss. This would all change for me in one single evening, in a shed of 5,000 chickens. The kibbutz I was assigned to was one of the oldest in Israel, settled in 1928 by Jews from Russia, Poland, and Germany. For the most part, our arrival was met with little to no notice. We were just another group of volunteers, no different from the countless other Europeans and Australians just passing through, taking time out to pick fruit, work on their tans, and contract cystitis from their rampant and unchecked coitus. But we were different. We were members of the movement. I thought that our political ardor would be immediately apparent. I had visions of our bus being greeted by garlanded, folk-dancing youth, so happy to have us there to share in their dream. I had been raised on a fairly steady diet of just such socialist, utopian Ziegfeld numbers, songs, film strips, and oral histories that all attested to just this scenario. Trees weren't simply trees. They were jungle gyms of plenty, with smiling children clambering over their branches. A field was somewhere you brought your guitar, so that your comrades could dance down the rows after the day's work was over. I was assigned to pick pears. Work would begin at 4:00 AM and finish sometime mid-morning, before the heat had set in. How filled with fervor I was that first morning, the light barely dawning as I headed out in the back of the truck, wearing my simple work shirt, a pair of shorts, and the traditional sun hat worn by so many pioneers who had come before me to make the desert bloom. I should pause here to point out that we actually said things like "make the desert bloom," all the time. So off I headed to the orchard. I know I sound like the Central Casting New Yorker I've turned myself into with single-minded determination when I say this, but the main problem with working in the fields is that the sun is just always shining. Dyed-in-the-wool Northerner that I am, it became apparent after about two days that I was completely unsuited to working outside. And I was moved around among the kibbutz's various interior jobs, the furniture factory, the metal irrigation parts factory, and the kitchen, assured all the while by the group leader that there was nothing emasculating or ersatz socialist in being moved inside. After all, each according to his needs, each according to his abilities. My abilities seemed to lie in passing out from heat stroke after a scant two hours in an orchard. This continued for weeks. It was a somewhat idyllic, if not a mite monotonous existence, that is, until the long night of the chickens. The boys of our group were gathered together one day and told in the hushed tones reserved for trying to avert impending disaster that we would forgo our regular work details and spend the night from midnight until dawn packing truckloads of poultry. Why this needed to be done with such urgent secrecy under cover of night and why the girls were excused was never explained to us. And we didn't ask. We greeted the news with the respectful Hemingway silence of the Y chromosome, no dopey girls allowed. It was all imbued with nocturnal, testicular melodrama, like some summer stock production of Das Boot. We slept that evening from 9:00 to 11:00, what I would come to know later, in a far different context, as a disco nap. We rose, drank some tea. The girls sprayed perfume into some handkerchiefs for us to wear around our noses and mouths. And we were off in trucks to do battle with the insurgent chickens. The scene had everything but the diner waitress standing in the road watching us go, worriedly wiping her hands on her gingham apron. The chicken coop of the kibbutz was a one-storied structure of corrugated iron, about half the size of a football field. It emitted a low rumbling, a vague buzz that you could hear from far away. And of course from even farther away, there was the smell, a smell of such head-kicking intensity as to make a perfume-sprayed handkerchief almost adorable in its valiant naivete, Wile E. Coyote warding off a falling boulder with his paper parasol. And the combination of floral scent and dung merely increased the vileness. Chicken [BLEEP] is horrible stuff. Unlike cow manure, which according to David Foster Wallace, smells "warm and herbal and blameless," chicken [BLEEP] is an olfactory insult, a snarling, saw-toothed, ammoniac, cheesy smell, needlessly, gratuitously disgusting, a stench of such assaultive tenacity that it burns your eyes. Rather than making you never want to eat a chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You'll eat chicken again, by god, and you'll chew really, really hard. One of the barrel-chested Israelis shows us what to do. Pick up four chickens in each hand. This is done by grabbing hold of the birds by one leg. "If the leg snaps," he says, "it doesn't matter, just to get four in each hand. B'seder?" he says. OK? He faces us, holding the requisite eight, four in each hand, living masses of writhing feathers. He looks like some German expressionist cheerleader, his pom-poms alive, convulsing, filthy. "Who will see their dreams fall away into the abyss and eventually succumb to the crushing sadness and meaninglessness of it all? We will. And what does that spell? Madness. Louder. I can't hear you." He crams the chickens roughly into a blue plastic crate smeared with wet guano. "And you close the lid, and tchick tchack," he tells us, clapping his hands with "that's that" finality. Before I even try, I know that I will not be able to do this. It is midnight, and we will be here until dawn, or until the truck is piled to capacity with crated birds. I walk out into the sea of chickens. I reach down and grab one, its leg a slightly thicker, segmented chopstick. I recoil and stand up. I take a fetid breath, regroup, and bend down with new resolve, grab the chicken by its body with both hands, thinking somehow that might be preferable. Although how I think I'm going to get eight of them this way, I'm not sure. Its ribs expand and contract under my fingers, a dirty, warm, live umbrella. I drop the bird as if it were boiling hot. I leave the coop and go out to the trucks. Hoisting myself up onto the flatbed, I start to help with the stacking of the full crates. I know that my unilateral decision to change my task is met with displeasure on the part of the men who run the coop, but I do not care. Their muttered comments are predicated on a direct poultry-penile relationship. I might as well have spurned the stag party whore or gone to the woodshop and fashioned myself a sign that said "fag." "Ma ito? What's the matter with him," the head of the work detail asks when he sees me on the truck. [SPEAKING HEBREW], he is answered, using the female pronoun when referring to me. "The lady doesn't like the chickens." It would be years before I was referred to as "she" again, and then very rarely and only as a joke by friends. I turn around to look at the man, making it quite clear to him that I understand what they are saying. The man who called me "she" avoids my eyes and busies himself with straightening a pile of crates and tightening the tarpaulin on the side of the truck. "You're right," I tell him in Hebrew. "She doesn't like the chickens." Have you ever had one of those moments when you know that you are being visited by your own future? They come so rarely and with so little fanfare, those moments. They're not particularly photogenic. There's no breach in the clouds to reveal the shining city on a hill, no folk-dancing children outside your bus, no production values to speak of, just a glimpse of such quotidian, incontrovertible truth that after the initial shock at the supreme weirdness of it all, a kind of calm sets in. So this is to be my life. At that very moment, I saw that I would never live on a kibbutz. I would not lose my virginity that summer to any of the girls from the group. Indeed, I would not care to do so. I am grateful to that macho blowhard. He made me consciously realize what I had always known but been somehow unable to say to myself. He's right. I don't like chickens. I like men. Now, I live in Manhattan, the un-kibbutz, where nobody would dream of touching a live chicken, where whatever spirit of collectivist altruism people might have had dried up long ago. At camp, when I was young, I and the other children of affluent professionals would gather under the trees every day to sing before going into lunch. One of the songs was always "The Internationale," the hymn of the proletariat. One summer, we were even taught to sing it with our left fists raised. We were, none of us, by any stretch of the imagination, what could be described as prisoners of starvation, wretched of the earth, or enthralled slaves. Admittedly, they are all catchier metaphors and easier to scan than, "Arise, ye children of psychiatrists," but they had little to nothing to do with us personally. And yet, for those few moments when we were singing, those words seemed so true. How can I describe to you that 11-year-old's sense of purpose, that thrill of belonging to something larger, something outside of my own body, the sheer heart-stopping beauty of a world of justice and perfection rising on new foundations. And that one line, "We have been naught. We shall be all." Naught. It spoke as much about my wish to be delivered from this pre-adolescent self-loathing as it did to any consciousness of liberating the masses. But it held such promise of what I might hope for that even now, as I write this, I can still call up that old fervor. It still makes my breath catch in my throat. David Rakoff's a writer in New York. Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder, contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from [? Emmie Takehara, ?] Sylvia Lemus, and [? Leah Pogatchnik. If you would like to buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who describes the experience of listening to our radio program this way. You really, I think, fall into a bit of an existential crisis. What the hell am I doing? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Every night, when I was a kid, my family would sit down to dinner together. And every night, as best as I can remember, when the meal was done, my mom would take the ice from her glass, tip it back into her mouth, and chew on it loudly. And every night, all of us would ask her, "Please don't crunch the ice. Please never, ever, ever do that again." And every night, she would ignore this request. And in retrospect, I have to say, I got to hand it to my mom. She is not somebody to be pushed around. This is just who she is. She is willful. She gets her way. It's something to be admired. And of course, this story happened at the dinner table. The dinner table is the stage for so many family dramas. Today on our program, we bring you three stories about families at mealtime. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, You Gonna Eat That? Three families, three stories, in three acts. Act one, Breakfast, a story of eating and not eating, and what you learn when you view the world through the prism of a single meal. Act two, Lunch, we hear a father's lament about sippy cups, chewing with your mouth closed, and why it is not good to apply tape to the cat. Act three, Dinner. We have a story from Dave Eggers about what family dinner's like when the parents are suddenly gone, and the kids are left to run things themselves. Stay with us. Act One, Breakfast. In every family, there are the family legends that everyone in the family repeats over and over. And then there are the stories that are suppressed, disappeared with a kind of Stalinist thoroughness. This next story falls more into that second camp than the first. It lay dormant for a long time before Annie Cheney decided to tell it here. It was produced by Jay Allison. This morning for breakfast, I had a toasted everything bagel with eggs and cheese and a cup of Earl Gray tea with-- A reporter where I used to work taught me to ask people what they had for breakfast at the beginning of an interview. He said it was a good way to set your recording levels. In 1996, Seattle police officers faced a tense situation when they were called out-- That's me on the radio in Seattle. I was a reporter for a public station. They didn't pay me or anything. I was just a volunteer. But I was still a reporter. I had a microphone and a tape recorder, and I went to press conferences. --department, they flooded it with tear gas. I wasn't very good at it. I couldn't stand being told what to say, and I was too cowardly to figure out the truth for myself. --came out firing his gun, and officers retaliated, shooting him nine times. A lot of times, the most revealing response I got from people was what they had for breakfast. And it was the most interesting to me. --program is working. I'm Annie Cheney for KUOW, 94.9, public radio. So I decided to follow my instincts and tell a story about breakfast. I got on a plane to New York, and I looked up my old friend, Vivian. OK, so tell me what you had for breakfast. Oh my god, you don't really want to know. Eight ounces of nonfat, plain Stonyfield yogurt, mixed with one whole 35-calorie, non-sodium rice cake, mixed with a five-ounce cup of Kashi cereal, mixed with a half an ounce, one of those little boxes, of raisins, mixed with a tablespoon of flaxseed powder-- Vivian is a friend from my past. I met her when I was 15. She was 36. And sometimes, I think she saved my life. A cup of black coffee, and guilt. When she agreed to meet me, I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't seen her in 10 years. And I didn't know if I'd hug her and just feel bones, or if she'd be strong, the way I remember her. It turns out she's had a hard time. She didn't get better. And she almost died. When I was going down towards 60, I would crawl out of bed, out of the futon. I'd be lying there having a panic attack that I was having heart palpitations. And it was, it was hard to breathe. And I got to get some food. And I thought about the food I'd get. And I was alone in the house. And I would crawl to the kitchen. I'm getting dizzy even thinking about now. And I'd crawl up to the fridge, and I'd open it up. And I'd be on my knees. And I'd take out a spoon. And I'd open a yogurt. And I'd take a spoonful. And I could feel it go down and really feel it go down my chest, the coolness of it, like it was flip-flopping every rib down and dripping off my ribs into my stomach. And suddenly, one heaping teaspoon, and I would got, "Wow, that was just what I needed." And I'd get standing back on my feet, and I'd go, "I'm fine." I met Vivian when I was anorectic. We shared a room in a hospital where there were other anorectics. I'd lost my period then, and my breasts. My bones stuck out, and I wanted to die. Vivian pulled me out of that. She convinced me by example to get better. And so I did. But sitting here, looking at her now, I realized that she never planned on getting better. They had to take out most of my back top teeth because they were deteriorating and there was bone loss. It was the malnutrition that did that. So they took them out. And I thought, "This is really great," because now my cheeks would sink in the back, like the models. You did not. I did. Oh, absolutely. And then, he said he'd have to make me a removable denture. So I said to him, when you make it, make it so that the back of it slants in, so that my cheekbones-- my face will be as sunken as it can be. When was this? Well, I've had it maybe for a year and a half. I don't know. Or less. Would you still say that today? Probably. Vivian's wrist bones could easily fit in a child's fist. She wears a little T-shirt, and you can see the way her stomach sticks out, hard as bone, as if someone had inflated her like a balloon. I still think she's beautiful because I hold on to the way she was when I first met her. But listening to her talk scares me. It makes me worry that change is impossible, and that we're stuck with who we are. Anorectics are good at PR. They can make you believe anything. I should know. My whole family's good at Public Relations. My father was even a PR man. They still issue press releases for my illness. My father says, "You made us a better family." My mother says, "It showed how sensitive and artistic you are." My brother says, "It was a testament to your strength that you got better." But I don't know how it turned out, or if it's over, or if any of the things they are true. I had half a croissant, toasted, with peach jam, Dad's peach jam that he makes, the non-cook method. That's my mother. Her recording levels are too hot. She's distorting. Well, I buy these calendars for every year, and they show a month at a time on a page. And I've saved them back to the '60s. It's very interesting. I can see in here when Mrs. Boyle is picking you up from school and who's coming to play, and dentist appointments. As a reporter, I was taught to get the hard facts first. So I start with a written record. And I see here that all I have on the day that you went in the hospital is that we had a dinner with the Anthonys. And I also had an appointment at your high school, which I gather I didn't keep. But I did put a red star on there, which meant that was the date that you went in the hospital. There's no written record after all, just a red star and a calendar full of details. It's as though that day never happened. I think it was sort of a denial. I just couldn't believe it. Even though it's not on the calendar, it turns out she remembers everything from that day. Well, it was the middle of January. It was bitterly cold. I think there was something like an ice storm. There had been terrible ice. There were no cabs, and we had this very early morning appointment. You refused to put on enough clothing to confront that kind of cold. And so that was horrible enough as it was. And you had no socks, as I recall. So we had the terrible difficulty that those situations entailed of struggling with you, trying to convince you, and finally deciding we just had to get out of there. And so I think I took some extra things with me, just in case we could persuade you to put them on. And we went outside. And people were rushing off to offices, and parents were taking their children to school. And we couldn't get a cab anywhere. So we finally went down to the corner and got on the crosstown bus. I think all three of us were standing up in the bus, holding on. It was very crowded. All three of us were standing up, but we were not standing together. But now that I think about it, it was remarkable that you actually stayed with us. In the past, you'd walk away. You'd leave. You wouldn't come. We got off the bus, and I remember somehow walking those last six blocks. And it was so bitter. And we tried to cross the street, and it was a sheet of ice. And Dad was slipping, and you were, I think, slipping. And it was extreme discomfort and despair. And of course, the situation was the same way. My mother's story fits my memory of that whole period, me in the middle of my two parents, slipping in my leopard skin high heel shoes. My mother doesn't mention what got us there, though. In fact, no matter how hard I try to remind her, she won't remember. Do you remember when I took all those pills? Was that before you went in the hospital? Oh yes, I do remember that, but not too clearly. I remember you were in your room, and you were in your bed. And you were-- what had happened? What kind of pills were they that you took? They were antihistamines. And what was that supposed to do for you? Sleep forever. Forever? Oh my god. I guess I must have focused on that. But that's just a terrible memory. Was that in the fall? and what happened? Did you vomit them, and then somehow you woke up? Or did you not take enough, or what? We didn't have to get any emergency service. I didn't take enough. Oh, that was wonderful. Now, just like then, sometimes the most obvious things go unrecognized. I almost was wishing that this wasn't happening in what I otherwise thought was a really ideal life. I though, "Ah, everything is so wonderful now. It's so much fun, and I'm enjoying everything. I can't believe this. How could this be happening when everything is going so well?" Starvation gets people's attention when nothing else will. Anorectics know that. I knew that. I learned it when I was 14. I, at one time, could play all of the movements, which were four movements, I think. And the reason why I played the piece in the first place was that I used to listen to the version that Horowitz played. When I was sick, I would play it over and over and over again in the living room on my father phonograph. And I remember sitting in this big chair by the window. And I would drink this tea that I always drank when I was sick, because I was freezing all the time. And I would eat a carrot because carrots are the vegetables that are the lowest in calories. And then I would eat the carrot like a corncob because carrots have many layers. So you nibble around the outside level, and then you come to another carrot inside. At 5:00 in the morning, when it was still dark, the night nurse would come by to check on us. I can remember the sound of her keys clanging. She had a face like an owl and short dark hair that was always a little bit greasy. At night, she gave out medications and extra Tylenol for anyone who couldn't sleep. We would line up like fluttering, bony birds, hunched over in hospital gowns, waiting patiently for a dose of peace. Then it was snack time, a can or two of chocolate Sustacal for the skinniest and least compliant of us. 10:30, to bed. There's nothing worse when you're sick than to have to lie down with a full stomach. I can remember shaking my legs under the covers, flexing my feet, tightening every muscle to burn up my snack. When I first moved in, I shared a room with a tall, blonde flight attendant. She was also a nurse. Before she moved into the anorectic ward, she took turns at both jobs, a 12-hour shift at the hospital, and then off on a plane somewhere. She worked 24 hours a day, she said, just to wear herself out. She was the one who taught me how to do aerobics in the closet. We would get up at 5:00 together, turn on our radio just barely enough to hear it, and then we'd jump up and down in our socks. At 7:00, the day nurse arrived and herded us into the bathroom, where we were supposed to get rid of as much as possible before we got weighed. I remember Vivian standing at the sink, drinking cup after cup of water to throw off the scales and convince the doctor she was eating. But this was in the beginning, when I still wanted to starve and expected everyone else to want to, too. Weigh-in was sometime after the bathroom visit. We'd go down to the room that had a scale and line up outside, one person at a time only. I'd stand with my back to the scale because I didn't want to watch the numbers. Afterwards, I'd ask how much. There was always some commotion at weigh-in. Someone would start wailing or shaking or screaming. They didn't want to get on the scale. They didn't want to eat. Go to hell. There we all were, in a frenzy about our bodies and about facing the truth of the scale. Women with children and husbands, young girls and 20-somethings who looked, at times, 80, and at times, like infants. And then, it was time for breakfast. Well, I had a blueberry muffin, fresh mint tea, fresh raspberries, fresh black raspberries, and a half a bagel and strawberry jam. That's my father in a lounge chair in his favorite spot. We're in historic Columbia County, in the back yard of our home, in what we call "the oasis," looking out over the pool, with a huge tree over our head, rock wall around, and tables and chairs here, so we could eat out here if we ever want to. The thing you have to understand about my father is that he grew up poor, and then he got rich. There are times he remembers when he didn't have enough to eat. Sometimes, he even stole food for his dinner. Now, he's known for his brilliant gourmet cooking. The thing that, of course, absolutely destroyed me, came close to destroying me, was when you suddenly decided you weren't going to eat. And I couldn't believe that I'd worked all that time and tried to provide food and undergone a lot of humiliation in work, where somebody's your boss, and you have things you don't like about it, and everything else. You work to bring home money to help everybody have a good living and eat. When somebody decides not to eat, that really does throw it back in your face. What the hell have I've been living for? I've been trying to help this family and self-sacrificing and a lot of other stuff. And all of the sudden, somebody's trying to kill themselves by not eating. And you ask yourself, did I have anything to do with this? Anorexia is embarrassing. It embarrassed my father, humiliated him. The thing that still strikes me in my memory, the height of the defiance, was we had gone out to dinner at some restaurant along Columbus. And you got angry at dinner, for a reason I didn't fully understand, because you wouldn't eat, and I was trying to get you to eat, because I thought, this girl, if she keeps this up, she's going to starve to death. I suppose she'd also disgrace me by starving herself to death. And then what? Everyone would just think-- Well, no. Everybody would say something was wrong in that household. The parents had something wrong with them, because their child starved herself to death. And it must have been terrible, that she'd want to starve herself to death to get out of that family. So anyway, and I felt like I had an obligation to get you to eat. You're supposed to keep your children alive. So I followed you down the block there, behind the museum. And I was saying, "Come back. Come back. You have to eat." And you bit me in the arm. I was trying to take a-- And then this man ran up to you and me. And he turned to you, and he said, "What's going on here? Are you all right?" he said to you. I could see he thought I was an abusive parent. And he was asking you if he should do anything. It was totally humiliating to have a total stranger say, "Should I be helping you," meaning you, not me, "take this brute away," beating him up or getting him out of here so you won't be abused by this guy. I'll tell you, that was very humiliating. What I wanted by whittling myself down to the core was to get my father to see me more clearly, to realize that I was separate from him, and that he should love me anyway, maybe even because we were different. That's what I wanted then, although I never told him. Today, I had scrambled eggs, toast, raspberries, orange juice, and coffee. When I got sick, my older brother was away at college. Even though he wasn't around that much, he knew something was wrong with me, even before I started to lose weight. And it bothered him because of what it meant about me and what it could mean for him, and because it wasn't supposed to happen. It was a little strange because you don't really understand why it just pops up, like a mushroom on your lawn one day. Suddenly, it's there. And you're like, "Oh. What is this?" But I just didn't understand how we could be so closely related and have such different interpretations of things and experiences of things. So you felt everything was fine? Well, I think I didn't want to think that things weren't fine. What do you mean? Well, I think there was always an emphasis on being perfect in the family. Everything had to be perfect. I liked that idea. I still feel that way in many ways. I get upset when there's evidence to the contrary that I'm perfect, which is often. I don't like to admit that. Maybe you provided evidence that things might not be perfect by the way you were acting. And I was very upset that you were shattering the glass on this nice window, you know? One way our family was perfect, I mean really perfect, was at the breakfast table. In our family, there's a lot of dishes. And there's a lot of dishes for different types of courses, and cutlery and silverware. Our table, sometimes I'd look, and there'd be so many plates on the table, you could barely see the table, even for a simple breakfast. So no meal was simple. Everything was very elaborate and formalized and ceremonial, and had a lot of different-- it was very complicated. You could never have a simple breakfast. Like a bowl of cereal or something? No, no, that could never happen. A lot of people like to cut corners and not have a full breakfast. But I've always felt it was nice. It was a pleasant experience. And it's one that stays with one. Four glass plates. What are those for? Well, that goes under the fruit, or whatever else somebody might have, poached eggs, or it depends. I suppose the whole basis of it is that I just like it to look nice. And I think gives you a lift, even if you're just passing through, and you're called to breakfast. And you sit down, and ugh, you think. Oh god, another day. But somehow, it registers. Or at least, it registers with me. If I have a nice breakfast, and I'm not feeling just great, it helps to improve my mood. So I think it's a nice thing to do. And I don't like the plates just thrown on the table. I like them to look organized and neat and thoughtfully placed. So sometimes people help me, and they just scatter it on the table. Would you like some raspberries? We ate in the day room, which was always full of stale smoke from the night before. Someone from the kitchen would come up with a contraption on wheels full of trays, each one with a name on it. We'd take our places. Everyone had a special table. One woman had her own, where no one else could sit. No one could touch her tray, either, or talk to her during meals. Our trays came laden with various pre-measured parcels, Melba toast in packets of four, plastic containers of raisins and peanut butter, all things that we had gone over with the nutritionist the day before. I remember sitting in her office in the afternoon. She'd take out a calculator and the next day's menu and say, "What do you want to eat tomorrow?" "I don't know. I don't want to eat tomorrow." Every day, there was a schedule, mostly meals interspersed with activities like dance therapy and art therapy, with some snacks in between. At night, after dinner, we'd sit around in a circle next to the television, holding hands and listening to music. A few of us would cry. Some people would smoke cigarettes. And then we'd go to bed. It went on like that for a while, until one morning, the doctor said he'd put me on the tube if I didn't start eating. I remember leaving his office and turning down the hall and seeing some girls there, who were taking turns walking up and down, judging each other's thighs. Each one said hers were bigger, but none of them were. And it dawned on me then that if I kept going, I might never come back. And so at lunch that day, I asked the girl next to me if she'd dare me to finish what was on my plate. She did. And from that day on, I ate. And they finally let me out on April Fool's Day, 1988. I think I had some flowers in your room, where I'd put your favorite sheets on the bed. And you seemed pleased by that. But I very quickly realized how fragile you were. But the helpful thing was that while you were fragile, you also seemed so appreciative of my help. And there were times when it was so overwhelming that you would just collapse in sobs on your bed. And I remember the nice thing was that I actually felt that I could be helpful to you. And so sometimes I'd just sit and talk to you. And afterwards, you'd say, "Well, you know, I really appreciate your support." And so that made me feel much better because it was so different than it had been six months before, when it was impossible to reach you. Well anyway, that was a wonderful turning point. When I came home, I ate my breakfast somewhere else until eventually, it got easier, and I started to sit at the table across from my brother again. There were still a lot of plates. And we didn't talk about what had happened. In fact, we haven't really talked about it until now, 10 years later. Oh, why didn't I keep some kind of journal about this? This was just astounding. Because after a while, your memory's so selective, you don't remember the worst things. To tell you the truth, I'm pretty hard on my parents and the part they played in my illness. But looking back on those times, I also think about my mother and how she kept trying, no matter how often I retreated into my body and refused her help. She sat with me and waited until I was ready to face up to my feelings, I mean, any feelings. I'll try it again. The same area where I made the mistakes before, I can't remember how to get out of the mistakes. I mean there's a certain chord, and then if I play that chord, then I can get out of the mistake I'm going to make. But I can never remember which chord it is. I still don't know if I'm completely better. There are times even now when I prefer hard bones over softness and sorrow, when I don't want to know the truth. For instance, I never asked my brother if I could interview him for this story. I thought he might embarrass me or tell me something I didn't want to hear. It was my mother who told me later that he felt left out and that I should talk to him. Yeah, I think that just played into a lot of the feelings I had at the time, when I was like, "Well, why haven't I been asked?" I'm not going to go over and ask you, "Why haven't you interviewed me?" Because I had assumed there was-- Well, why not? Well, because I don't feel it's my place to come and like, "Oh, can I please be interviewed?" Because I feel like if you have to ask, it would be very demeaning. It felt demeaning to me. And I feel like you should have, as a reporter, looked for all the sides of the story. You want some selective version of what happened. And you were afraid I was going to bring up something-- I have to admit, I did want my brother to come to me. You're not doing your job as a reporter. In some ways, anorexia was about having other people come to me. --avoiding the landmines and just sticking-- I wanted relationships on my terms. My father's like that, too. When I was still in the hospital, and I was starting to get better, I called him up and asked him if he'd take me to the movies. He said he'd take me if I gained half a pound. And so we didn't go. We were trying to coerce each other and defy each other. We were locked in some kind of a grip of anger and defiance. It was as if one of the Greek gods had decided to punish us for hubris. Where'd that come from? The hubris came from our presumably thinking we were doing all the right things, going to a private school, being able to afford what we were able to afford, and buying things and having a materially successful life and whatever set of-- having some kind of reverence for each other. What did I tell you? Sometimes I think the only thing that makes a difference is the passage of time. You make all kinds of mistakes. But time passes, and then somehow, things get cured a little bit. And life goes on in a new way. Yup. Well, I'll take you to the movies sometime. Tell me what you had for breakfast. I had anxiety laden with a very thin coating of agitation. And it was coupled with a cup of very lukewarm pseudo-comfort, in the form of an anti-depressant. After I finished interviewing my parents, I went back to talk to Vivian again. And I asked her how she felt, and if she thought she'd ever get better. She said she realized, finally, what she'd done, and how her body would never be the same again. I realized I've lost all my back teeth due to my illness. I'm getting old. I've hurt myself. I'm falling apart. And I started crying. Ten seconds later, she told me this. I desperately want to lose weight. I am desperate to lose weight. I could tell you she's going to find a way out, and I could tell you she's never going to change, and both things would be true. And she'd tell you the same thing. As for me, I've started going out with my microphone looking for stories that I want to tell. I talked to one woman named Louise who started making hats out of carpet scraps when she was diagnosed with skin cancer. And they really do a good job. They healed my cancer. She told me she's really excited about the rest of her life because she finally feels like she can be herself. I'm past 90 now. You are? Mm-hmm. And someday, I'll die, whether I want to or not. She played the piano for me, a song she learned when she was 12 and still remembers. Here's the Chopin prelude. I went out and got the sheet music for the Schumann piece. I've even played it and gotten past that chord. Annie Cheney's story was produced by Jay Allison as part of his Life Stories series, with help from Tina Egloff and funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Coming up, Lord of the Flies enacted with tacos, baby carrots, and a gallon of 1% milk. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's program, You Gonna Eat That? Three stories of three families at three meals. Act One was about breakfast. We have arrived at Act Two, Lunch. In this act, we hear things strictly from the parent's point of view. We have this story from Ian Frazier, "Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father." Of the beasts of the field and of the fishes of the sea and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the hoofed animals, broiled and ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cloven-hoofed animal, plain or with cheese, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cereal grains, of the corn and of the wheat and of the oats, and of all the cereals that are of bright color and unknown provenance, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the quiescently frozen dessert, and of all frozen after-meal treats, you make eat, but absolutely not in the living room. Of the juices and other beverages, yes, even of those in sippy cups, you may drink, but not in the living room. Neither may you carry such therein. Indeed, when you reach the place where the living room carpet begins, of any food or beverage, there you may not eat. Neither may you drink. But if you are sick and are lying down and watching something, then you may eat in the living room. And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you, as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke. Drink your milk as it is given to you. Neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for. If you will dip your blocks in the milk and lick it off, you will be sent away. When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table and do not by bite it upon its edge and by your teeth, hold it to your face in order to make noises in it, sounding like a duck, for you will be sent away. When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within. I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister has done the same to you. Eat your food only. Do not eat that which is not food. Neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment or the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is. And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why. And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that, that is why. Sit just as I have told you and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me, for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass. For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, than you shall have dessert. But of the unclean plate, the laws are these. If you have eaten most of your meat and two bites of your peas, with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total, six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert. But if you eat a lesser number of peas and yet you eat the potatoes, still, you shall not have dessert. And if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof. And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know. And you shall have no dessert. Do not scream, for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand. But I say to you, scream not. Only remonstrate gently with the server that the server may correct the fault. Likewise, if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat. Neither cover your face nor press your fingers to your nose, for even now, I have made the fish as it should be. Behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die. Cast your countenance upward to the light and lift your eyes to the hills, that I may more easily wash you off. For the stains are upon you, even to the very back of your head there is rice thereon. And in your breast pocket of your garment, and upon the tie of your shoe, rice and other fragments are distributed in a manner wonderful to see. Only hold yourself still, hold still, I say. Give each finger in its turn for my examination thereof, and also each thumb. Lo, how iniquitous they appear. What I do is as it must be, and you shall not go hence until I have done. Bite not, lest you be cast into quiet time. Neither drink of your own bath water, nor of bath water of any kind, nor rub your feet on bread, even if it be in the package, nor rub yourself against cars, nor against any building, nor eat sand. Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done that you should so afflict it with tape? And hum not that humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you will drive me to madness. Nor forget what I said about the tape. O my children, you are disobedient. For when I tell you what you must do, you argue and dispute hotly, even to the littlest detail. And when I do not accede, you cry out and hit and kick. Yes, and even sometimes do you spit and shout "stupid-head" and other blasphemies, and hit and kick the wall in the molding thereof when you are sent to the corner. And though the law teaches that no one shall be sent to the corner for more minutes than he has years of age, yet I would leave you there all day, so mighty am I in anger. But upon being sent to the corner, you ask straight away, "Can I come out?" And I reply, "No, you may not come out." And again you ask, and again I give the same reply. But when you ask again a third time, then you may come out. Hear me, O my children, for the bills, they kill me. I pay and pay again, even to the 12th time in a year, and yet again, they mount higher than before. For our health, that we may be covered, I give 620 talents 12 times in a year, but even this covers not the 1,500 deductible for each member of the family within a calendar year. And yet for ordinary visits, we still are not covered, nor for many medicines, nor for the teeth within our mouths. Guess not at what rage is in my mind, for surely, you cannot know. For I will come to you at the first of the month and at the 15th of the month with the bills and a great whining, and moan. And when the month of taxes comes, I will decry the wrongs and unfairness of it and mourn with wine and ashtrays and rend my receipts. And you shall remember that I am that I am, before, after, and until you are 21. Hear me, then, and avoid me in my wrath, O children of me. Ian Frazier is a humor writer, essayist, and nonfiction writer. His collection of humor pieces is called Coyote v. Acme, from Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux. This story was read for us by Peter Sagal, a new father himself, and host of NPR's news quiz program, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Act Three, Dinner. Well, all this hour, we've been hearing stories of parents and children. Now, a story of when the children have to become the parents, and what happens. When Dave Eggers's parents died, he was 21. His sister, Beth, was 23. And his brother, Toph, was 8. Dave took custody of Toph, and the two of them moved from Illinois to Berkeley. His sister lived nearby. This story takes place about a year into his sudden and unexpected turn at parenthood, parenting his brother. Dinner is really the only meal we treat in any remotely formal way. Our days work like this-- first, Toph wakes up at 4:00, 4:30 in the morning, so as to allow 10 minutes to shower, 10 minutes to dress, half an hour to make and eat breakfast, finish his homework, and pack his launch, and at least three and a half hours for cartoons. At 8:45, he wakes me up. At 8:50, he wakes me up again. At 8:55, he wakes me up one more time. And, while yelling at him because he's late, I drive him to school. I park our little red car next to the school on the east side, where I've been told in four separate flyers and one personal note, is not to used for the loading or unloading of children. Then I grab a piece of paper from his backpack and compose a note. "Dear Mrs. Richardson, I am sorry Toph is late this morning. I could make up something about an appointment or a sickness, but the fact is that we woke up late. Sincerely, Dave Eggers." He reads the note. "We woke up late?" I give him the look. "Fine," he says. Then, depending on whether or not we like each other that day, I try to do the across the bucket seats hug. I reach over, pull him near, and say, "Your hat smells like urine," because it does. "No, it doesn't," he says. It does. "Smell it," I say. "I'm not going to smell it," he says. "You should wash it," I say. "It doesn't smell," he says. "Whatever," I say. "Whatever," he mimics. "That's good," I say. "I like that." Then I go to work. After school, my sister, Beth, picks him up, and she stays at our house until I get home, at which point, Beth and I try to fight about something extremely important and lasting. "Can you not make such a mess when you come over here?" "Mess? Look at this place? Mess?" And once we have done this, she leaves. Then Toph and I cook. The menu from which we choose consists of seven items and seven items only, which we rotate with mathematical precision. Here are the highlights. One, stir-fried beef. Sirloin strips, sliced and sauteed in Kikkoman brand soy sauce, cooked until black, served with tortillas, and eaten by hand. On the side, we have potatoes, served in the French manner, and sliced oranges and apples, in a bowl. Two, tacos en fuego. Ground beef sauteed in Prego spaghetti sauce, traditional style, served with tortillas and without additional embellishment. Pillsbury crescent rolls and iceberg salad served on the side. Three, pizza pronto, served with pepperoni, courtesy of Pizza Hut. Served with a small salad. Four, grilled cheese quesadilla dinner. Grilled cheese served with one slice of Kraft American cheese set in the middle of two pieces of seeded Jewish rye, toasted in pan and cut diagonally. Quesadillas prepared in skillet with tortillas and American cheese. Note-- no spices are available. There is no salt, no pepper, no parsley, sage, rosemary, or thyme. No vegetables are available, except baby carrots, pre-cut celery, cucumbers, green beans, and iceberg lettuce, all served raw and only raw. Pasta is not available because it smells funny and is too slithery. All meals are served with a tall glass of 1% milk with the gallon jug resting on the floor next to the table for convenient refills. Alternative beverages are not available. Anything not on the menu is not available. Any complaints will be handled quickly and with severity. We cook about four times a week. "Hey, I need your help," I say when I need his help cooking. "OK," he says, and then he helps out with the cooking. Sometimes we sing while we're cooking. We sing regular words, words about pouring the milk or getting the spaghetti sauce or microwaving the tortillas, but we sing them in opera style. We can sing lots of different ways, but the opera style is pretty impressive. People have said so. Sometimes while cooking, we have sword fights with wooden spoons, or with the dowels that used to hold up the drapes. It's an unsaid mission of mine, the source of which is sometimes clear and sometimes not, to keep things moving, to entertain the boy, to keep him on his toes. For a while, we would chase each other around the house, from bathroom to kitchen to bathroom, mouths full of water, threatening to spit. Of course, neither of us would have ever thought of actually spitting a mouthful of water at the other inside the house. Until one night, when I had him cornered in the kitchen, I just went ahead and did it. Things have been devolving ever since. I've stuck a half cantaloupe into his face. I've rubbed a handful of banana into his chest, poured a glassful of apple juice on his head. It's all part of an effort, I'm guessing, to let him know, if it weren't already pretty obvious, that we're not in Kansas anymore, or Illinois. There's a voice inside me, a very excited, chirpy voice, that urges me to keep things merry, madcap even, the mood buoyant. Because Beth is always pulling out old photo albums, crying, and asking Toph how he feels, I feel like I have to overcompensate, keep us occupied. I'm making our lives a music video, a game show on Nickelodeon, with quick cuts, crazy camera angles, lots of fun, fun, fun. It's a campaign of distraction and disinformation, leaflets dropped behind enemy lines, flares and fireworks, funny dances, shell games, magic tricks. What's that? Lookie there. Where'd it go? In the kitchen, when the inspiration strikes, I take out the family's 17-inch turkey knife, plant my legs square to him, squat a little, and hold the knife over my head samurai style. "Hiiiii!" I yell. "Don't," Toph says, backing away. "Huaa!" I yell, stepping toward him, because threatening children with 17-inch knives is funny. "Not funny," he says, halfway up the stairs. I put the knife away. "Dad used to do that all the time," I say. "Out of the blue, he'd get this look on his face, this bug-eyed sort of look, and act like you he was going to split our heads open with the knife." "Sounds funny," says Toph. "Yeah," I say. "It was real funny." Sometimes while we cook, he tells me about things that happened at school. "What happened today?" I ask. He gives me the full rundown, who's a dork and who's OK, what everyone wrote their papers on, the whole thing. One time, he said this. "Today, Carl told me that he hopes you and Beth are in a plane, and that the plane crashes, and that you both die, just like Mom and Dad." "They didn't die in a plane crash," I say. "I told him that," he says. Sometimes I call the parents of Toph's classmates. "Yeah, that's what he said," I say. "It's hard enough, you know," I say, pouring it on. "No, he's OK. He's fine. I just don't know why Carl would say that. I mean, why do you suppose your son wants me and Beth to die in a plane crash? I just couldn't help wondering," I say. "No, no, he's fine. Don't worry about us. You should worry about young Carl there. I just wanted to let you know," I say. They'll let anyone be parents. During dinner, when there's basketball on, we watch the Bulls on cable. Otherwise, between bites, we play gin or crazy eights. If the dining room table is in ping pong mode, we eat on the coffee table. If the coffee table is in homework mode, we eat on the family room floor. If the family room floor is covered with plates from the night before, we eat in Toph's room on the carpet, watching his portable TV, which sits next to his bed. I know, I know. The kitchen table, which is usually clean and has chairs around, and has room for plates and glasses and silverware, is out of the question. I mean, where's the fun in that? And where's the challenge? After dinner, we play games for our own amusement and the edification of the neighbors. One game involves the cracking of the leather belt to simulate some well-deserved corporal punishment. Most involve Toph pretending that he's a kid, while I pretend I'm a parent. "Dad, can I drive the car?" he asks as I sit reading the paper. "No, son, you can't," I say, without looking up. "But why?" "Because I said so." "But Dad." "I said no." "I hate you I hate you, I hate you, I hate you," he shrieks. Then he runs to his room and slams the door. After a second, he opens the door. "Was that good?" He asks. "Yeah," I say. "That was pretty good." Dave Eggers edits the journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and is finishing a book about raising Toph, from which this story was taken. Toph is now in high school, doing just fine. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder, contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from [? Emmie Takehara, ?] Todd Bachmann, and Sylvia Lemus. Music help today from John Connors. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this program or any of our programs, they make perfect Christmas presents. Call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] Or you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who warns you, if you do not pledge to your public radio station-- You will fall into iniquity, and I will know. And you shall have no dessert. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Aphrodite, the goddess of love, is looking down on earth one day. Spots a mortal woman named Psyche, who is so beautiful Aphrodite is jealous. Sends her son Cupid down to earth to destroy her. Cupid sees Psyche. Naturally falls in love with the woman his mother hates most in the world. Only surprise about that part of the story is they're not all Jews. Cupid marries Psyche. But he doesn't want Psyche to know that he's a god. He thinks it'll ruin things. She won't love him for who he is in his heart. She'll just love him because he's famous and powerful. So he makes her promise to never look at him. They have this passionate love that takes place entirely in the dark. But her girlfriends talk to her behind his back. They tell her that if he never wants her to see him, it must be because he has something to hide, must be a monster. So she comes to him at night while he's sleeping, with a lit candelabra. And she sees him there. He's naked. He's perfect. He has wings. He's beautiful. And she's just about to go when some wax from one of the candles falls on him, and he wakes with a start. And their eyes meet. He sees that she's betrayed him. She broke her promise. She doubted his love. She wanted to see. And the gods punish her. This, I say to you as somebody who works in a medium, radio, where you never see anything-- this is what seeing is all about. Right there. We do not listen to our hearts. We doubt, and then we want to look. And seeing is about something else. It's about power. I checked with an actual humanities professor, and this is what he told me. Richard Klein teaches at Cornell. The power of the look to dominate and even destroy is a very old story in human history, and may have biological origins. When a dog, for example, looks directly in the eye of another animal or human, as if to stare it down, that's a certain sign of hostile feelings, a sort of challenge, a prelude to aggression. It's an ancient rule, he says. It's why slaves don't look in the eyes of their masters. It's why you don't meet the eyes of a king while you bow in his presence. It's why parts of British royalty, even today, prefer not to be seen in public, not to be photographed, even after Princess Diana became the most photographed woman in the world. And I mean, the monarchy itself, Queen Elizabeth in particular, has long sort of felt that it was, on the contrary, more sort of appropriate to the monarchy, and perhaps even necessary to its survival, that it appear less in public. I think that's one of the reasons why they were so alarmed by Diana. I mean, de Gaulle, in France, believed powerfully that leaders should be little seen and rarely heard, that the power sort of comes from the invisibility. I've been thinking a lot lately about why somebody would pay $30 to come to a theater and see a show that you can get for free on the radio. And I think that this is the very reason. Right here, on the radio, invisible, we are just too powerful. Seeing us, seeing anybody that you hear on the radio, it makes them human-size-- which seems like a healthy thing, actually. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass, today bringing you a co-production with WNYC in New York, a live show from Town Hall in New York City. Today on our program, as hundreds of people watch us do this show, our theme is What Are You Lookin' At? Stories of what it means to be seen and to see. Act One, American Goth, the story of one woman's ongoing quest to look meaner. Act Two, Lifesavers, the story of a teenage girl who would hit you if you looked at her the wrong way, and what happened when suddenly hundreds of people were looking at her, all at once. Act Three, Climb Every Mountain. Die-hard New Yorker David Rakoff heads off to a land of incomprehensible people who, he worries, are always noticing how different he is, a land called New Hampshire. Onstage also here at Town Hall, They Might Be Giants and the This American Life Orchestra. Stay with us. Act One, American Goth. There are the people who take hours to get dressed, who dress primarily to be seen, and then there are the rest of us. Sometimes someone tries to make the jump from that second group into the first group. Please welcome writer Sarah Vowell. I'm sitting at my desk quietly minding my own, as they say in the rap songs, when my torturer darkens the doorway. She drags me into a cramped bathroom, shoves my head under a faucet, shines a blinding light in my eyes, cinches my neck in plastic sheeting, and comes at me with scissors. She douses me with chemicals and makes me sit there, dehydrating under the plastic, while the acid stings my flesh. And so when I look up from my desk and see her standing there with the scissors, I shudder. "Hi, Mom," I say. "Guess you think I need a haircut." My mother had been a hairdresser before my twin sister Amy and I were born. More precisely, she was a hairdresser in Oklahoma in the 1960s-- the beehive's golden age. Since she gave up her career to take care of us, all that energy that used to go into whipping hundreds of heads into an architectural frenzy was focused on the two of us. And since we were as bald as pharaohs, she killed time while our hair was growing in by Scotch-taping bows to our newborn noggins. Her ardor for our appearance increased as we got older, and her attentions never stopped at the neck. There were clothes. There were shoes. Accessories. Amy liked to think about such things, shop for such things. Unlike me, my sister did not threaten to call Amnesty International every time Mom wanted to give her a home perm. I was a bit of an embarrassment to my mother-- all scuffed shoes and stringy hair and lint. Once, when Amy and I were 14, the three of us were getting out of the car after a trip to the mall. The neighbor woman, who was out watering her yard, saw the shopping bags and asked what we'd bought. Amy showed off her new candy-colored sweater and her hoop earrings and hot pink pants. The woman congratulated Amy. She then turned to me, pointing at the rectangular bulge protruding from the small brown bag in my hand. I reluctantly pulled out my single purchase-- a hardback of The Grapes of Wrath. My mother looked at the neighbor, rolled her eyes in my direction, and stage-whispered, "We're going through a book phase." And it's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word "phase." And now that we are finishing up the third decade of the book phase, we ask ourselves if we have changed. Sure, we still dress in the bruise palette of gray, black, and blue, and we still haven't gotten around to piercing our ears. But we wear lipstick now. We own high-heeled shoes. Concessions have been made. Still, I have been called a curmudgeon by Bitch magazine. And that's the image I'm cultivating. But truth be told, I'm not as dour-looking as I would like. I'm stuck with this round, sweetie-pie face, tiny, heart-shaped lips, the daintiest dimples, and apple cheeks so rosy I exist in a perpetual blush. At five foot four, I barely squeak by average height. And then there's my voice-- straight out of second grade. I come across so young and innocent and harmless that I have been carded for buying maple syrup. Tourists feel more than safe approaching me for directions. Telemarketers always ask if my mother is home. And waitresses always, always call me "hon." So the last time I got my hair cut, I asked my hairdresser if he could make me look more menacing. I said I admired Marilyn Manson's new hairdo, and could he make me look like that? And even though my hairdresser is German and everything, when he was done with me, I have never in my life looked so sickeningly nice. Is it too much to ask to make strangers nervous, to look shady and untrustworthy and malcontent? Something needed to be done. I happened to hear about a group of goths in San Francisco who offered goth makeovers to civilians and then take them to a goth club to see if they can pass. Goths, for those unfamiliar with this particular subculture, are the pale-faced, black-clad vampiric types with forlorn stares framed by raccoon eye makeup. The name derives, of course, from gothic, a style, according to my dictionary, emphasizing the grotesque, mysterious, and desolate. So I called Mary Mitchell, aka Mary Queen of Hurts, and asked for a private lesson in goth. She just told me to come to San Francisco and pack some black clothes, and she and her team of expert goths would handle the rest. Coming up with black apparel for the occasion wasn't particularly problematic for me. One might describe my closet as Johnny Cash once described his-- "It's dark in there." And I've always admired the goths. There's something brave about them, something romantic and feminine and free, not to mention refreshingly honest. If the funny T-shirt slogans and crisp khaki pants of the average American tell the lie that everything's going to be OK, the black lace garbs and ghoulish capes of goth tell the truth-- that you suffer, then you die. The goths literally wear their hearts on their tattered sleeves, frankly daring the world to stare at their inner ugliness, and stare hard. I reported to a Market Street address where I met the five members of my death-warmed-over beauty squad. I met Indra, a gorgeous blonde in a long velvet skirt; Terrance, dashing in a velvet smoking jacket; the tall, dark Monique; Elizabeth, in strappy black leather; and, of course Mary, whose seven-inch patent leather heels would relegate her later on to dancing only to the slowest songs for fear of tipping over. Prior to meeting Mary Queen of Hurts, I found her sadistic nickname entirely appropriate, as she assigned me goth homework to do before my arrival. The assignment consisted of going through a punchy little primer she wrote with Indra and Terrance which outlines the seven steps to "gothitude." Step number six asked me to go through my records and pull out the darkest, saddest song, and play it over and over again. Though the darkest, saddest stuff in my collection is all old country music. So my goth soundtrack is Roy Acuff's godless drunk-driving car-crash number, "Wreck on the Highway." Hit it, boys! The whiskey and blood ran together mixed in the glass where they lay. Death played her hand in destruction but I didn't hear nobody pray. Before anyone breaks out the eyeliner, we all sit in a circle and go through my homework. The whole thing reminds me of graduate school seminars, except these people are smart and funny and have something interesting to say. They outline and debate the finer points of goth theory. They all turned goth in their early teens, and they are, as Indra puts it, "So in our thirties." Step one of the guidelines is choosing a goth name. Indra says, "Most of us have changed our name to be something more gothic. A lot of people legally change their name." According to Mary, "If you go into any of the goth clubs nowadays, you'll find a lot of spooky names, like Raven and Rat and Sage." When I was pondering a good goth name for myself, I paged through my reference books on death and dying, looking for something gruesome. But nothing felt right. Maybe it's because I came of age in the '80s and I've seen Blue Velvet too many times, but to me, the really frightening stuff has nothing to do with ravens and rats. The truly sordid has a sunny, WASP-y glow. Therefore, I tell them, the most perverse name I can think of is "Becky." It turns out, that by saying the magic word "Becky," I have suddenly moved to the head of the class, goth-wise. As Monique puts it, "You are understanding the pink of goth. You've skipped a couple levels, and you went straight to pink." The group's consensus is that pink is the apex of expert goth, that newcomers and neophytes should stick with basic black, but those confident enough, complex enough, can exude gloom and doom while wearing the color of sugar and spice. Indra argues that pink can be an intelligent, sarcastic color, though Terrance says of experimenting with pink, "Proceed with caution. I can't warn you enough." As if they need to warn me. It would never occur to me to wear pink, just as it would never occur to Michael Douglas to play a poor person. These, I realize, are my people. Simpatico. I think that's why, at that moment, I'm willing and able to do something with them that I was never able to do with my mom-- namely, sit still while they poke and prod and paint me, without complaint. I know I'm in the right hands when Terrance reassures me that "when we're done with you, no one will call you 'hon.'" It's an astonishingly slow process. Indra decides to make me up like the silent film star Louise Brooks, shading in concentric circles of eyeshadow and then liquid eyeliner, which takes a full five minutes to dry. She agonizes over lipstick, applies a birthmark in the shape of a snake on my cheek. Then they dress me. By the time they're done cinching up the corset and stabilizing my bustle, I'm in so many layers of black lace scarves and fringe and fishnet stockings that I could play strip poker for three weeks straight without baring my belly button. The finishing touches are applied in a full-on pit stop. I sit in a chair and Monique curls my hair while Terrance fusses with my lipstick and Mary paints my nails black, all at once. I find I enjoy this loving, methodical attention. I'm so pleased with the results that I keep looking in the mirror and smiling. I smile so much that Elizabeth reminds me that technically, a good goth is supposed to pout. But I'm too giddy. Something occurs to me. What if all those years, my mom wanted to do just this-- sit me down and fiddle with my hair, not because she wanted to torture me, or because she was embarrassed about how I looked, or because she missed her job. What if she wanted to do this for me to show me that she loves me? If all along, she was trying to give me the feeling I'm getting from these strangers? I thought she was the oppressor and I was the victim. But it's just as true the other way around. It was time to go to the club. But after two hours of primping, I was tired. I ask them if they ever spend so much time doing their hair and makeup that they're too pooped to go out. They said that for this very reason, there is a goth rule. You have to stay at the club at least as long as it takes to get dressed up. The club we go to is called Roderick's Chamber, cheerfully named for a character in Edgar Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher." Everywhere blackness, leather, lace, frowns. And music. But while regular dance club music clips by at the pace "wah wah wah wah-wah wah-wah wah wah," the goth club music is sluggish, slowed down. "Wah-- wah-- wah-- wah wah wah wah-- wah wah." The thing I love most about the goth club is how passive it is. Hardly anyone talks to anyone else. It is free of the normal social pressures to smile, and interact, and appear content. There's none of that "getting to know you" pick-up crap. In fact, the mood is antithetical to pick-ups. It's more like, stay away. No one cares if you dance. No one cares if you don't. As someone who often dreads strangers, the anti-social nature of this social situation makes me feel communal and part of something, one of us. Like, "hey, I hate talking to you, too!" It is completely liberating. The whole point of going there is to stare and be stared at. Someone walking in off the street might think, what's the fun in that? And the answer is, all the interaction, all the fun, all the real moments happen at home when you're getting dressed, talking to your friends about how you'll look. The club is about being seen, which is so inferior. After the mandatory two hours, I hug my goths goodbye and hail a cab. Usually I am a cab driver's dream-- polite, small, nonthreatening. Perhaps that is why cab drivers always talk to me. But tonight, I am Becky. I am goth. Not a word from the driver. Bless him, he keeps staring at me and my eye makeup in the rear-view mirror, watching his back. She is menacing, he's thinking. I can tell. His fear pays off. I tip him extravagantly. So extravagantly that I blow my cover. He turns and gives me a look that says, "Thanks, hon." Sarah Vowell. Mr. Dan Hickey, ladies and gentlemen. Act Two, Lifesavers. Last month I was doing this project as a favor for a friend where I was interviewing a lot of kids in arts programs around the city of Chicago. And as part of that project, I met this 18-year-old girl named Lucia Lopez. Back when she was 16, through a sort of fluke, Lucia joined a group called Music Theatre Workshop in Chicago. And it happened some kids basically just came through the neighborhood interviewing teenagers about their lives, and then those kids wrote a play about what they got, and invited Lucia to be in the play, to play herself. And at first, when she joined the group, the other kids were scared of her. She was much tougher, much more street, in a gang. Most of her family was in the gang, which in Chicago is a kind of common formulation. She herself had served time in juvie. Yeah, I went to people, like, what are you looking at? Do have a problem? Well, do I look like somebody or am I somebody? And then people would be like, no, I ain't looking at you. I was just wondering who you are. And I'm like, well, keep on wondering because you know, whatever, but don't be looking at me like that. Because, you know, something could kick off. Since I grew up in my house with having violence. Like when my stepfather is a very violent man. So it was like one of those things that it was an instinct. If anybody touched me, it was right there and then, we had to hit. And plus, like-- You had to hit? Well, you know. It was just like that. If anybody even stared at me, it was like, what are you looking at? Do you have a problem? [? Because you know it would ?] start it off, so we could just kick it off right here and there. Not long after she started with the theater group, she missed two rehearsals in a row, and the head of the group, Meade Palidofsky, replaced her in the show with another girl. Rules are rules. Then Lucia came back. What was especially galling to her was that this other girl, Ruchelle, was going to be onstage, reciting Lucia's life story, things that had happened to Lucia that were in the script. Meade and another girl in the group tell what happened when Lucia showed up again. Well, she was upset, but she was-- when she came back in and I told her that Ruchelle had taken her place, she was like, I'm going to go beat her up. I mean, I had to stop her. I said, no, if you're going to beat somebody up, you should beat me up, because I'm the one that gave her the part. And the rest of us were sent to an early lunch that day. Exactly. So I had to calm her down and say no, don't beat Ruchelle up, you know? It's all right. And we talked to her, and eventually we split the part up. We realized how much it meant to her, but then she also had to realize that if it meant that much, she needed to come to rehearsal. Back when she entered public school, like a lot of kids from her neighborhood, Lucia didn't speak English, didn't do well. As she got older, she found herself getting mad at the other kids, fighting all the time. And I can't get a decent sleep ever. I go to school with this image in my head, like, oh my god, I see my mom's head getting bashed in the walls. And it's just like, I think that's what turned me into a very violent kid. Just, you know, the kids being happy was very tough for me. Because I was like, why can't I have fun like that? Why can't I live like that? Why is it so difficult? I was really bad. I was very bad with teachers. If a teacher were to even tell me, Lucia, be quiet! Whatever. I felt that as an attack, so I was like, well, they're going to attack me. I should attack first. There was points where I smacked teachers, throwing chairs, whatever. You name it. And since I was a little girl growing up, I never, never had an OK day. Do you understand me? I never had anything like, you know, it's going to be cool today. It's going to be OK. You're not going to hear one of your friends dead, and you're not going to hear your dad coming in the house, beating up on your mom. You're not going to hear that. It's just going to be OK. And that was just one of the things that-- I just go into a whole different world. To hear Lucia tell it, she had never met kids like the ones in the theater group-- kids who were strong and independent, but who weren't in a gang. And at first they were literally incomprehensible. The way they goofed around with each other, the way they talked to each other-- she'd just watch them, trying to understand why they acted the way they did. Why were they so happy all the time? I just started seeing, these kids weren't in gangs. And they had the time of their lives, you know? And I had a lot of them telling me, you don't have to be there. You don't have to do this and that. You mean, the MCW kids were saying, you don't have to be in a gang. And then just to hear somebody from my age to tell me that, that really turned me on. I was like, huh. To have this person's my age and they're thinking like this. Why don't I think like that? I always thought, man, what's wrong with me? They were the only people in her life who were urging her to change, to quit the gang. Everybody else in her life was either in the gang or close to it. And I should just point out, this is very common. So many gang kids that you meet in Chicago-- if you ask, is anybody trying to convince you to quit the gang? They'll tell you no. And central to the change that Lucia had to go through was this whole idea of, what are you looking at? Is it OK for somebody to just look at you without it turning into some kind of fight? And for a long time, even in the theater group, she struggled, and she just thought, no. And if you looked at me in any wrong way, no matter how you looked at me, man, you'll be dealt with. You know what's so weird, is that you got out of the whole thing by putting yourself in a position where you're onstage and people are looking at you. Yeah, exactly. I'll be like, wow, you know? I guess I got to get used to it. I was thinking, I can't be attacking everybody who's looking at me doing the play. So you'd be standing onstage, in a play, in costume, and you'd look out, and you'd see all these people looking at you. And going through your mind would be-- Yeah, like, what the hell are you looking at? [INAUDIBLE] What's your problem or whatever? Yeah, just like, oh, what are they looking at me for? Just like, man, should I tell them something? Should I go on the mike and say, do you all have a problem? Should I be attacking? This is what's going through my mind. A researcher at Stanford University named Shirley Brice Heath has done this remarkable study where she sent a team of researchers into 120 afterschool programs for kids over the course of 10 years. And seven years into the study, she found this result that she was not even looking for. It turns out that arts programs were more effective in changing kids' lives than any other kind of program for kids. More than sports and academic programs, more than community service programs, the art kids not only tended to come from worse backgrounds than kids in the other programs-- that is, they were more likely to have a parent who was unemployed, they were more likely to have friends who were dropouts, they were more likely to get into fights at school. But after being in these programs, they became kids who were more likely to read for pleasure, they were more likely to be in honor societies, get academic honors, they were more entrepreneurial, they started projects, they were more willing to teach other kids. Shirley Brice Heath said that's because the arts programs tended to involve kids in more complicated collaborations with each other. They were just doing harder stuff, and they were critiquing it, and making big plans, and contingency plans, and reevaluating plans. And they learned all these verbal skills. Her study also showed that although those programs are the most effective at helping the kids who are the most at risk in our society, they have a terrible time staying afloat. Nine out of ten of them can't find funding sources and die within eight years. The program that Lucia was in is constantly struggling for money. Music Theatre Workshop, great program. Constantly struggling for funding. I asked Lucia if it mattered that this was an arts group that she was in, that they were doing a play. Wouldn't she have changed if she had fallen in with any group of kids who she liked, who were not in gangs, who she could get to know this way? And she said, absolutely not. She said part of what helped her change so much, part of what helped her quit the gang and go to school had specifically to do with the fact that it was a play, that it was art doing what art does, if you're lucky, which is change you. I think the play did it a lot, the play itself. Because like I said, since it was part of my life story and stuff, and playing it-- since you're doing it over and over, it's like one of the things that you're just letting it go. You put just everything. Like how can I say it? The whole drama skit of your whole life, just on paper. Let it fly away, whatever. Let it be thrown in the garbage. Just-- it happened. Time to move on. Yeah. Exactly. Just live on, just live on with peace, finally. So that's one of the good things. Just with peace. And going to sleep better. Well, it seemed wrong to fly all the way to New York from Chicago, to this huge, beautiful theater right off Broadway, and tell Lucia's story, and not give her the chance to come and perform herself. So doing a scene adapted from her Music Theatre Workshop play, please welcome 18-year-old Lucia Lopez. They call it a walk by. It's five or six guys from another gang coming in slowly. Screaming and representing, wearing the masks on their face. Bullets are flying everywhere. And then I see Roberto, my brother's best friend, on the ground, holding his chest while he was trying to breathe. A lot of the ladies in the neighborhood start screaming from the windows, "We call 911!" The old ladies are praying with the rosaries. Then the cops come to investigate. It takes a long time before the ambulance shows up. The cops even have time to question us, question the neighbors, and look in the bushes. The ambulance guys move really slowly. They pull out the stretcher. They talk to the cops. We scream at them, "Do something!" Meanwhile, two other guys who shot Roberto are walking around, making sure he's dying. If he doesn't die, then they'll wait to do another walk by. So they change their clothes so we can't recognize them. They took a look around to see who else is there or to see who they'll go after when they come back. Roberto's still breathing. Everyone's telling the paramedics to hurry up while the ladies are still yelling at them in Spanish. [SPEAKING SPANISH] I hope it happens to you. The paramedics just take a look at them like, what are you saying? They take a look at Roberto. They see his baggy clothes, his gang colors, his gold chain. They see that he is Mexican and they don't care. They don't want to go near him. They don't want to touch him. But I see him, bleeding with his eyes, breathing, trying to grasp what little life he had left. One of the paramedics says, "Why should we even bother? He's in a gang. We fix him up and he'll just got shot again." I'm thinking to myself, he's still alive. He heard them say this. His eyes are looking into mine. Please, get them to do something. Finally, they pick up Roberto. They throw him in the ambulance, slam the door shut, and drive off. Everybody stands there a moment, not knowing what to do. But I wanted to run after them. Strangle them. Show them what we have to go through. Walk over their dying bodies and do nothing. But instead, I turned around like everyone else and went home. Roberto died before he even got to the hospital, before his mother even got to see him. The only people with him when he died were those paramedics. He spent his last moments of his life with those three guys. Thank you. Lucia Lopez. They Might Be Giants. Coming up-- climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow. Just do it without me. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Coming to you today from the stage of Town Hall in New York City. Each week on the program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to take a whack at that theme. Today, from the stage, with hundreds of people looking at us-- What Are You Lookin' At? We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Climb Every Mountain. Adulthood means, among other things, pretending to be confident in situations where you feel anything but. "What are you looking at?" is the question that blares through our heads in moments when it feels like the veneer of adulthood is not convincing anyone. David Rakoff was born in Toronto, moved to New York when he was a teenager. He has so successfully learned to pass himself off as a native New Yorker that usually even he believes he's one. The only problem is, sometimes he has to actually leave the five boroughs of New York City. Please welcome David Rakoff. I do not go outdoors. Not more than I have to. As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach. Paradoxically, I am being sent by an outdoor adventure magazine to climb a mountain on Christmas Day with a man named Larry Davis. Larry has climbed Mount Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire every day for the last five plus years. I will join him on ascent number 2,065. The trip up to New Hampshire will involve a tiny plane from Boston. I tear my medicine cabinet apart like Billie Holiday and still only uncover one Xanax. The hiking boots the magazine sent me to buy, large, ungainly potato-like things that I've been trying to break in for the past four days, cut into my feet and draw blood as if they were lined with cheese graters. I have come to hate these Timberlands with a fervor I usually reserve for people. Just think, the shoes I wouldn't be caught dead in might just turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in. It bears mentioning here that Monadnock is not Everest. It is 3,000 feet high and the most climbed mountain in the world. It's not even a real mountain. I do not let this sway me from my worrying. I have other reasons for concern. My status as an adult perpetually teeters on the verge of being exposed as a sham and revoked. Plus, I am only playing at reporter here. I have, up to this point, relied upon my relentlessly jokey, glib, runny-mouthed logorrhea and the unwarranted good graces of magazine editors who just let me make stuff up. I have never been sent anywhere on someone else's dime, and it takes all of my strength not to call my editor and tell him that the jig is finally up, that I cannot do this piece. It seems too bad that the jig has to be up so far from my home in New York, with its excitement, bright lights, and major teaching hospitals. The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas. that's a complete lie, really. The central drama in my life is actually about being lonely and thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play. At the connecting airline at the Boston airport, I sit, the only dark-haired person among the broad-faced butter-eaters, wondering if my outdoors journalist drag-- flannel shirt, jeans, most hated boots of Satan's workshop, down jacket-- is fooling anybody. A brief flight and half a Xanax later, I land in New Hampshire, horrified to learn that the place where I'll be staying is a bed and breakfast, not a hotel. My heart sinks. That means there is probably neither television nor phone in my room, and I have very little patience for what is generally labeled charming. In particular, country charm. I have an intense dislike of flowered wallpaper. Ditto jam of all sorts. The former is in all-too-abundant evidence when I enter, and the latter, I'm sure, lies in ominous wait somewhere in the cheery kitchen. There is a knotty pine bar off the entrance hall with a settee with several embroidered pillows. "I'd rather be golfing." "On the eighth day, God created golf." "Golfers have sex in some humorous, golf-related manner." Et cetera. The proprietress is the kind of tall, stalwart woman of a certain age that used to be called "handsome." She is approximately nine feet tall. Her eyes are blue, resolute. Her faithful dog Charlie at her side. She smiles at me warmly and introduces herself as Annie, extending a hand the size of a frying pan. "You must be Dave," she says. In New England, everyone calls you Dave, regardless of however many times you might introduce yourself as David. I'm reminded of those fanatically religious homophobes who stand on the steps of Saint Patrick's Cathedral during gay pride, holding signs that say, "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." I have always wanted to go up to them and say, well, of course not Adam and Steve. Never Adam and Steve. It's Adam and Steven. "You're in room three," she continues. "Why don't you go into the dining room, and have some lunch, and then we'll talk some. Come on, Charlie dog." In spite of myself, I am charmed. She puts on a dark green slicker and knee-high Wellingtons and is out the door, presumably to chop the ice off the pond, deliver a calf, or simply raise a barn. I eat a club sandwich and drink some coffee to try to eradicate my Xanax buzz. I am trying to appear legitimate, masculine, adult, like I deserve to be there. Larry Davis stops by the inn. I shake his hand in a hardy, hale, fellow-well-met way. As my reward, he gives me dispensation to climb the next day in my $20 plastic Payless shoes. I realize I've done almost no research for this trip, so I walk into downtown Jaffrey to check things out. This seems to smack to me of journalistic realness, a kind of topography as destiny, New Journalism, Joan Didion opening, perhaps. I am taking notes by speaking into a little tape recorder. Perhaps that is what attracts attention. Or perhaps it is that there is not another living creature out at 5:00 PM on Christmas Eve, because a car passes and immediately circles back. The driver rolls down his window and asks me if I want a lift. I do not. But "how nice," I think. He drives on. I'm charmed by the congeniality of this interchange. How friendly. How uncreepy. I speak too soon. He circles back. He hands me a rectangular package in tartan wrapping paper. "Take this. The most-watched video in the world," he says. This man is giving me a copy of Forrest Gump? "It's The Life of Jesus." I beg off politely, claiming Judaic immunity. He drives on. Here's an interrupting thought. If your therapist calls to reschedule your appointment, as mine did just at the moment I finished writing this part of the story, and you make him laugh, as always, and if in wrapping up, you say, "Well, I'll see you on Wednesday at 12:30 then," and he responds, "I'm looking forward to it," is that bad? I return to the inn, now wreathed in the kind of Christmas-in-New-England, warm-hearthed cheery verisimilitude that Ralph Lauren would burn down a synagogue to achieve. Nat King Cole's Christmas album plays at tooth-loosening decibels. I go upstairs and continue reading the new Truman Capote biography. The inn starts to fill up with families and couples who have come for Christmas Eve dinner. Alone, Jewish, and awash in unkind thoughts about Christmas and the countryside as I am, I stay out of sight, for the most part. I can hear general revelry and prandial merriment coming from the dining room. Finally, I head directly into the bar of golf pillows. Annie is there with a couple. "Merry Christmas, Dave," she greets me. A retired airline pilot sits at the bar enjoying a decidedly un-New England cocktail with an orange slice, maraschino cherry, and pineapple spear crowding the glass. The bartender is a woman in a sweater knit with a portrait of a family of snow people. The wife of the couple also wears a sweater, knit with a smiling, holly-festooned teddy bear. The husband presents Annie with a very well-rendered framed watercolor of a widemouth bass. It's really very good, and I say so. "Well, we'll put it here to keep you company," says Annie, propping the frame up on the bar stool next to mine. I make sure to look at it attentively, my face frozen into the art appreciation rictus until Annie and the couple go into the dining room. Cricking my neck, I order a steak and a red wine. "Are you the writer?" the bartender asks me. "The writer." Finally. Despite the fact, or precisely because this is just what I wanted, I reply, my voice far too bright, "Oh, god, no. I'm a complete idiot." She doesn't entirely know how to take this. She gives me the careful half-smile one levels at a very large, possibly erratic dog. The pilot is the anti-me, a man so utterly comfortable with himself that he can drink a cocktail with no fewer than three different pieces of fruit in it, and still seem the very picture of adulthood. He talks a while about fixing up houses. It's what he does in his retirement. His voice is velvet-soft and Atticus Finch-authoritative. But there's a sad whiff of mortality, a smell of old leaves, underneath everything he speaks of. It's a bit like watching This Old House hosted by Baudelaire. The pilot leaves fairly early in the evening. I hope he had somewhere to go. Then again, I think, I don't have anywhere to go. Why am I so concerned with the imagined loneliness of a total stranger? Then again again, I actually am somewhere. I'm sitting in a bar of a New England inn on Christmas Eve. I am the writer, eating a steak, drinking alone, talking to the bartender. And even though I loathe animals, I lazily toss bits of popcorn to Charlie as he sits at the foot of my bar stool. It's just me and the bartender and my faithful dog. Plus my date, the widemouth bass, whom I've been ignoring. I fairly drip with authenticity now. I have let go of my paranoia about being scrutinized. I feel completely comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that inexplicably, I find myself asking the bartender if there's either a synagogue or a gay bar in Jaffrey. I clearly feel the need to out myself to her in every possible way. Why stop there, I wonder, and not just go ahead and ask if there is a Canadian consulate nearby? She keeps refilling my wine glass as we talk. She cuts me an enormous piece of baklava. More popcorn for the dog. I have a mountain to climb in the morning, damn it. My reverie is undone by the strange series of glottal kecks and surds coming from below. I look down to Charlie dog, whose neck is arching forward and back in an ominously regular, reverse peristaltic fashion. I find the words as my voice Dopplers up to a fairly effeminate and vaguely hysterical pitch. "I think the dog might be getting sick. The dog is getting sick. Oh my [UNINTELLIGIBLE], the dog is sick!" Charlie vomits out a small, viscous puddle for which, from my quick and queasy perusal, I am largely responsible. The bartender cleans it up without a second glance. Thoroughly unmasked, I settle up for dinner and take myself upstairs to sleep. And to all a good night. The climb hardly bears mentioning. It was fairly awful-- cold, slippery, kind of arduous, in the middle of an ice storm. Although kind of monochromatically silvery, pale, and glamorous at the top. A lot of the talk focuses on "1028's." "Think we'll see any 1028's?" "She was a real 1028." "All we need is some 1028's to make this a perfect Christmas." "1028" is code for babes. I realize that everything about me-- my inappropriate footwear, my effete lexicon, my unfamiliarity with such natural phenomena as trees, rock, and ice-- are all met with great equanimity and good grace. They're friendly. It becomes quite clear to me that the only one casting strange glances of disapproval my way is me. At the summit, I made Larry take my picture a number of times. When the film comes back, I will look at the photos of myself, scanning them for evidence. Looking for the face of an adult, the face of a man who climbs mountains, the face of a Dave. Thank you. David Rakoff. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Our musicians, John Linnell, John Flansburgh, Dan Miller, Dan Hickey, Dan Levine, Danny Weinkauf, and Jim O'Connor. Production help from Emi Takahara, Sylvia Lemus, Chris Ladd, and Todd Bachmann. Onstage, this show has lasted for an hour and a half. If you want to hear the entire thing, unedited, visit our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. Or you know you can download today's program in our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who says this to me at least once a week-- There is a Canadian consulate nearby. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. Public Radio. Public Radio International. So when I heard that a woman named Samantha Martin had trained raccoons to play basketball, and hires them out for parties and corporate events, I pictured raccoons. You know, in three-on-three or four-on-four games, in little Chicago Bulls uniforms. You know, Raccoon Scottie Pippen passes to Raccoon Dennis Rodman. Raccoon Michael Jordan, you know, takes it in for a layup or dunks it. The team is a little raccoon Orlando Magic or Los Angeles Lakers. I could see it all. But that is not what it was like. No, no, no. That was naive. Ricky. Come here, Ricky. Ricky, Ricky. Snacks, hmm? There you go. Shoo. Shoo. Ricky, shoo. Come on, Ricky. Ricky, come here. Samantha Martin chases after one of her two basketball-playing raccoons, holding a bag of blue and pink cotton candy. She alternates, actually, between taking a fingerful of cotton candy for herself and giving one to the raccoon. Yummy. Sugar. Sugar, Ricky. Come here. You don't want the snacks? Ricky, Ricky, Ricky. Samantha is actually a skilled and successful trainer, but the animals are not cooperating this day, probably because Samantha went away for the holidays and they're still feeling neglected. Samantha puts a grapefruit-sized ball in the raccoon's hand and then pushes the raccoon's hand toward a Fisher-Price basketball net that rises perhaps a foot and a half off the floor. Oh, she missed. Shoot again. Shoot. Good girl. The fact is, there are things that raccoons like to do, are born to do. And playing basketball is not one of them. Oh, I know. It's frustrating. You have to have a lot of patience. Especially when I was first training them to play basketball, do you know how long it took me? It took me a month to get them to play basketball. Every day I had to come down here and play with ball, net, ball, net, treat. And you just see, going through their mind-- OK, if they touched the ball and then they touched the net, they'd get a treat. They'd be like ball, net, treat, treat. And then, I started getting them to hold the ball, and then I got them to push the ball into the net. And finally that day came where they picked up the ball off the ground and popped it in the net. And I was so thrilled. I was like, oh, they got it. He got excited. He was like, [PANTING SOUNDS] and he was picking up the ball and putting it in the net, picking up the ball and putting it in the net, over and over again. He got so excited. Taming animals means basically teaching them to conform to the human world, teaching them human expectations. And with many of the animals that Samantha raises, it's possible to make them more human while they're little. But then once they reach a certain age, their real animal nature kicks in. A baby cougar she was raising started stalking her friends, biting at their throats. The raccoons also go for the throat. You know, if he's out of his cage, he'll run up. He'll look at you, and he'll recognize me as, like, Mom from years ago. He'll be like, Mom, and he'll race up to me, jump up, climb up to my shoulder, and then realize, wait, I'm wild, I don't like you anymore. And he'll bite my neck. You see it inside. Their eyes go from crazy to tame, crazy to tame, crazy, crazy, tame, tame. It's almost like they're saying, no, Mom, love you-- must bite, must bite, must-- no, no, nice, nice, Mom, nice, oh, yes, we love Mom-- bite, must bite, must bite-- no, no. They just fight it. You just see this battle going on in their heads. They're like, [SOUNDS OF STRUGGLING]. What do we want from animals? To run her business, Samantha has had to figure this out, and at parties, at corporate events, in commercials and films, Samantha has her raccoons pick pockets and play basketball. She has rats that bowl, rats that answer toy telephones? Do people want to see animals do animal things? No, they don't. They want to see animals acting like people. Most of us, the only animals we ever see are animals who act like humans-- cats and dogs. We watch movies and TV shows and commercials that are filled with animals that fetch beers from the refrigerator and solve crimes. And we forget the sheer animalness of animals. We don't see it. Maybe we don't want to see it. Well, this brings us to the topic of today's program. From WBEZ, of course, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, The Animalness of Animals. Our show today in three acts. Act One, Staging the Food Chain in a New York Apartment. Act Two, Animal Court. That's an original radio play by David Sedaris. Act Three, The Moment Humans Stopped Being Animals. That's a story by Scott Carrier. Stay with us. Act One. You know, usually when we see pictures of animals, they're fluffy and cute or they are noble and dignified. Well, compare that to this set of photos by Catherine Chalmers. In this first picture, we have a caterpillar eating a tomato, a brightly-colored close up of that. In the second picture, a praying mantis eats the caterpillar. And in the third picture, a tarantula eats the praying mantis. Catherine Chalmers takes these pictures in her own apartment in New York City, where she also raises the animals that she feeds to each other. Paul Tough stopped by for a visit. Growing up, Catherine Chalmers wasn't really an animal person. She always had a pet or two, nothing unusual. Then a few years ago, she was working on these sculptures where she would take dead insects and glue them onto plants and flowers. She needed a lot of dead flies, more than she could buy anywhere, and so she decided to start raising live flies in a glass cage in the corner of her apartment. She would just let them breed and wait for them to die. But then one day, she picked up a camera and looked at the flies through a close-up lens. And the world changed. Because instead of just seeing patterns of swarming flies, I saw leg hairs and genitals and mouths and I saw them. And I saw their lives, how they would greet each other, and what they would do. And I could see them being born. I could see them having sex. I could see them eating. I could see them flying. I could see them hanging out. And it was great. It was fascinating. So I'd sit there for hours until they went to the bathroom on the glass enough that I couldn't see anymore. And that's when I kind of got hooked into animals past a certain point of return. She realized that there were two basic moments of life that she couldn't see in the flies' cage. She couldn't see them eating and she couldn't see them die. So she came up with this project that she called The Food Chain. She decided to raise a few different animals-- caterpillars, praying mantises, frogs, spiders-- and take pictures of each animal eating the one that came beneath it in the natural food chain. When I first thought of this project, when it first dawned on me, what I was kind of fishing around for, it kind of made my stomach hurt. The idea of raising animals to be eaten, to photograph them specifically to be eaten, was repugnant and made me kind of sick. But the more I thought of it, the more interesting I thought it was. And so Catherine began to fill her loft with animals. There isn't much furniture, but every surface has got terrariums and cages on it. Frogs and mealworms and a snake on one table. Goldfish in the kitchen to feed the frogs. Crickets which chirp constantly. A tarantula and two cages full of mice. On a spare corner of the table where the frogs and the snake live, she's got a lightbox set up, and we sit down there to take a look at some of her pictures. So this is basically The Food Chain. The photos don't look like normal nature photography. They look more like fashion shots. The animals are brightly lit and sharply focused, pictured against a clear white background. It starts with caterpillars that eat tomatoes. The praying mantises eat the caterpillars. And my original idea was for the tarantula to eat the praying mantises. But spiders are really undependable predators. If there were two emotions competing in Catherine Chalmers, her fascination with the food chain and her disgust with what she was doing, it becomes clear to me, as she shows me her work, that in the end, her fascination won out. She lays out a sequence of shots that begin with the praying mantis about to attack a caterpillar. That's the part that's really great, is she springs on it, and she wraps her arms around it. And she just starts biting into it. And the thing's live and it's still kicking. And with the caterpillars, since all they do is eat, basically their body is just one long digestive system. And so whatever they are eating, as soon as she bites into it, it just spills out. So if they're eating leaves when she bites into it-- and this totally surprised me when it first happened. It comes out green, or it comes out bright red, the color of the tomatoes, or it comes out bright yellow, if you're feeding them yellow tomatoes. So I did different sequences of caterpillar with different color guts coming out. And it was just beautiful. I mean, I didn't know that an animal eating something live could be so attractive. It was like spilling a tube of paint out on a white piece of canvas. It just blobs out. It's gruesome, if you think about it in terms of your brother or your sister, but in terms of the fact that it is an insect and we seem less attached to the insect world than, certainly, the human world, it was very beautiful. You'd think it would be easy to take pictures of predators eating their prey. That's what they do, after all. But it turns out to be more complicated than just putting a couple of animals together and snapping away. There are considerations of timing and staging. When she tried to have frogs eat the praying mantises, the problem was the frogs were simply too fast. Photo One would show a hungry frog and a praying mantis, and Photo Two would just show a well-fed frog. Then there was the tarantula problem. Tarantulas can go for months without eating and days without moving. She put the spider and the praying mantis up on her set, and the tarantula would just stare at the praying mantis, completely still, one leg in the air, for hours. Finally in one session at three in the morning, after staring through her camera all night, Catherine got what she wanted. She slides the photos onto the lightbox. You see the shot where the two of them are looking at each other. And then basically the spider pounced on it and flipped it over. And the praying mantis is upside-down, still looking straight at you and perfectly alive, looking at you, as the spider is munching on the middle part of its body. And then you see his head, and his antennas are waving around, and then slowly the head gets drawn more and more into the jaws. And it's still alive. And then the spider basically mushes it up into a ball and extracts the juices out of it. And it took maybe, I can't remember, maybe three or four hours for it to eat the whole thing. And for at least half of that time, the praying mantis was perfectly alive. And it was hard, because you'd spent so long raising this thing. It was really hard to see it being eaten alive like that and having it take so long. At this point in The Food Chain, her pictures were becoming more and more vivid, but so was the suffering that she was watching through her lens. I got attached to the praying mantises. Yeah, seeing the praying mantises die was definitely much harder than seeing the caterpillars dying. Unlike most insects, they have a head that moves, like ours does, on a neck. And so they turn and they look at you. And they've got these big eyes sticking out. And they have some of the characteristics of the things which usually win human sympathy, which is big eyes and kind of an expression. And their mouth is red on the inside. So when they would eat something, it looked like they had red lipstick on. It was much easier to get attached to them. One of the things that the Food Chain photos have made Catherine think about is how we humans choose which animals we love and which ones we hate, the distinction we make, basically, between pets and pests. She says most of us are attracted to animals that are like us, that are mammals, that have round faces and big eyes like human infants. And she's not immune to that instinct. Her favorite animal is her dog, Leo. But she also finds herself drawn to the animals that we are supposed to fear, and the moments in their lives that we usually turn away from. At the lightbox, she puts down four new photos from a different project, a series of shots of two praying mantises having sex. So that's the female. That's the male. She's a lot bigger. Then they mated. They look like a nice happy couple. He has green eyes. She has brown. So he's on top of her. He's on top of her. And it's just like a classic doggy-style sex position. And they stay that way for hours. Hours and hours and hours. I mean, I'll take a few pictures, come back in 20 minutes, take a few more pictures, come back in 20 minutes. Isn't that kind of rare for animals? I thought animals were sort of-- do it quick. So did I, especially insects. I don't know. I think it's somewhat rare. I was surprised. I mean I've waited four hours and finally just went to bed and woke up in the morning, and the male is nowhere to be found. But then one time, instead of him getting completely off of her, she caught him and wrapped her arms around him, like she was holding him around the neck, like walking arm in arm. And she just started eating him. I couldn't believe it. I've mated them two years in a row now and hadn't had them do that. The photos aren't exactly grisly. There's no blood, not really even any color, but they're still pretty disturbing. Here, you see he's still kind of halfway on, and she reached around and grabbed him by the neck and bit his face off. See, he has no head there. What's that? Oh, that's one of his arms. There was kind of a fight. It's like the tip somewhere. And she's eating straight down his abdomen. See, he's already past his waist. Whatever. She finished when she got there. She even ate some of the wings, munched on some of those. And when does he die? When does he die? Do you think he's dead there? Well, insects, it's like their bodies are more democratic. They don't have a central nervous system the same way we do. You bite their head off, and the whole theory is that their body keeps functioning. So she can bite his head off when they're in this position, having sex, and he continues to have sex with her and continues to give her sperm, or whatever they call it in bug stuff. And there were some scientists who measured the inside of her cavity. And when she bit his head off, she got more sperm. So his head actually acted as an inhibitor, and when that's gone, then she gets the rest. So in the cases where the female bit the head off, she actually got more sperm. I suppose theoretically, therefore, more of her eggs are fertilized. What do you mean, his head acts as an inhibitor? Well, he's very cautious around her. And his caution seems to originate in his head. So at this point, he's definitely still alive, when she's only eaten his face off. At the center of Catherine's studio, there are two glass cages where her mice live. There are about 20 mice in each cage, of all ages. Some have just been born, still nursing from their mothers, some pregnant, some have been around for a few generations. It's the nicest part of the studio. The mice are all very clean and healthy and cute, and the cage even smells good. These mice are the centerpiece of Catherine's current project. She photographs them being born, and then photographs them being eaten by various predators. Today she's going to take pictures of a two-day-old mouse, which is called a pinkie because it's too young to have fur. It just has pink skin. Its eyes are still closed, and it can barely move. Her 10-inch, pencil-thin snake, Pumpkin, hasn't eaten in almost a week. Today, Pumpkin's going to eat a pinkie. She puts the pinkie and the snake up on what she calls her set. This is where she takes all her pictures. It's chest-high, about three feet by three feet, with a white Formica surface that curves up at the back to form a seamless background. There are only two strobe lights, plus a third light underneath the surface to make sure the animals stay warm. Do you have to keep the snake away from the pinkie when you first put it down? No. It takes a while to figure out that it's there. Now, the pinkie started moving. Do you think-- No. I don't think the pinkie understands there's a snake there. The snake's moving slowly, putting its head up right next to the pinkie and flicking out its tongue as if it wants to lick it. She's checking it out, smelling it, sniffing it, making sure it's OK, I guess. It's very friendly. I don't know if I'd call it friendly. I mean it just looks that way, the two of them together. The two of them hanging out together. Yeah. Their faces are about the same size. Well, no, the mouse's face is bigger. You see what I mean? There's no terror in the mouse. But the mouse doesn't look that happy. Well, hard to tell what makes something that small unhappy. stood there for 15 minutes watching as the snake tried to decide what to do. The pinkie didn't move much, just sort of quivered, raising its head every once in a while. Then, finally, the snake made its move. Hmm. Very strange. What was strange was the way the snake attacked. Pumpkin is a constrictor, which means that usually when it goes for its prey, it quickly wraps its body around it and squeezes it to death. It hasn't happened like this before. This time it bit the pinkie and held it in its fangs, alive, for a couple of minutes before it finally constricted it. Does the pinkie always struggle like that? No, and it has never squealed before. What's the difference, do you think? The pinkie was bigger, older. Is it still alive now? If you look at the tail, you can usually tell. When the tail starts to droop down. Although it's getting so much blood pushed through there that that could keep it up. I know you can be charged for being cruel to a dog. Can you be charged for being cruel to a mouse? No, I don't think so. Now, maybe if I took one of my mice, went out into the middle of Broadway, and started ripping it apart where everybody could see-- I don't know. And probably a legal person wouldn't know, because it never comes up. Catherine says that we've developed a hierarchy of death. Some animals we're prohibited from killing. Some we're encouraged to kill. And most of them we just don't care about. I asked her whether doing the Food Chain project changed the way she saw animals. And she said that it hadn't changed the way she saw them, it made her see them for the first time. Before she started photographing animals, she was like most people. She never really thought about them at all. And do you ever feel like you're taking sides when you set up a photograph like this? Yeah, your sides change. Yeah. I mean, at one point, you feel really bad about the pinkie, and at one point, you're really happy your snake ate and therefore it's healthy and it's going to live. So in something like this, your sides always change. And when you put the pinkie up there, before you put the snake up there, you feel really bad. You think, oh, well, this little thing doesn't know it's about to be eaten. And with the Food Chain project, that was one of the points. You take the side of the underdog, and then the underdog becomes a predator, and then you have to change sides again, and then you change sides again. And it's arbitrary and relative anyways. So you just kind of get all confused, really. It's getting to the point with the mouse project where those feelings are starting to have real repercussions. Right now, Pumpkin can't eat anything bigger than a pinkie, but she's growing. Eventually she'll be three feet or more. Before long, she'll be eating full-grown mice, the ones that Catherine feeds and holds and plays with every day. It's one thing, I was telling you this before, to feed something to something where the pinkie has no senses yet. It can't see. It can smell, but it can't see. But it's another when you pick up a full-grown mouse who is aware of what's going on when it sees a snake. And I don't know what I'm going to do when she starts eating full-grown mice. Right now, it's still something within the realm of something I can do. I don't know. Is there a line at which it starts being hard to do? Yeah, probably. Catherine talks about her apartment being like an oasis in the middle of Soho. She loves coming home from the cars and concrete of Manhattan into a place that's filled with life. But in another way, it's Manhattan, it's our world, that's the oasis in the middle of a planet that's full of nature. All around us, things are eating and having sex and dying and suffering, and we don't notice or even think about it. Do you think the pinkie's still alive? No. It's getting kind of blue. So did you feel weird at all when he was squealing at the end? Did that make you feel strange at all? Well, you never really like something to suffer. And it definitely was not very happy. But the pinkie was going to die anyways. I guess there's a difference if it's being fed, if there's a purpose to it, if it's part of the chain. Well, it's no different to the snake. The snake doesn't really seem to care if the mouse squeals or not. Is it any different to the mouse? Yeah, maybe a little bit, but it's dying anyways. It dies a little faster, or it dies a little slower possibly. So I cared more. The snake didn't care. Who knows if the mouse did. So who matters? Whose opinion do I go by here? Why should I go mine? At the end of our photoshoot, Catherine carefully picks up the snake and carries it back to its cage. There's a bulge about a third of the way down the snake's body where the pinkie is being digested. Before I leave, Catherine pours us a glass of wine, and we sit on the floor for a little while playing with a couple of her full-grown mice, letting them run over our hands and up our arms. They're tiny and warm, and through their fur, we can feel their little hearts beating. Paul Tough. Catherine Chalmers' pictures are in a book called Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators, and Prey. Coming up, animal radio theater by David Sedaris, and animal research from Scott Carrier. That's all in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a topic, and tackle that topic with documentaries, short fiction, radio monologues, found tape, anything we can think of. Today's topic, animals and the animalness of animals. We've arrived at Act Two of our program, which is basically more animals eating other animals. But first a little story. A little girl is given a new sweater, an ugly new sweater which she hates. She takes the sweater, puts it on the floor, takes a nap, and when she wakes up, her sweater's been chewed to shreds. She, of course, could not be happier, but her mother's very upset, cries a little. The girl blames the dog, a little spaniel named Kathleen. I demand a fair hearing. I won't take the blame. Kathleen the spaniel then stood to proclaim. I didn't do nothing. I'm just not the sort. I'll see you in hell first, or animal court. David Sedaris has written a play for our program. This play is an original radio play entirely in rhymed couplets. In this play, the animals do lots of things that humans do. For example, they talk. And they hold court out in the forest. But in this play, also, every now and then-- unlike most fairy tales, unlike most movies about animals or stories about animals-- these animals reassert their animalness. Our play begins as Kathleen the spaniel heads out into the forest and our narrator, the little girl who owns her, follows behind. I waited till late and crept out. It was dark. I was deep in the forest when I heard a bark. It was Kathleen, my spaniel, kneeling before an old dog, a judge. And this elder, he wore a dark floor-length robe. I think it was silk. He paused then and lapped from a bowl of skim milk. This court is in session. Oh, Jesus, I oughtta lay off the scraps when they serve enchiladas. He patted his chest with potato-sized paws, then pounded his gavel and laid down the law. There'll be no witness-leading, no swearing or shedding, no tampering, catcalls, or evidence-shredding. I call on the state now to start prosecution. Defense will then counter to prove absolution. The clearing was silent. A cat took the floor, a smooth-talking tongue with a high pompadour. Your Honor, destruction's no small misdemeanor. The accused here is vicious. We should quarantine her. Now I plan to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Kathleen the spaniel engaged in a bout of senseless destruction. She's got no remorse, a fact that I'm hoping to prove in due course. I call to the stand now one eyewitness worm. She was there on the scene. Her memory's firm. It seemed like a lifetime. The worm took forever to inch to the stand and begin her endeavor. Yes, I'm a worm, true. I live in the soil. Only in rain do I earthwards unfoil. On this day in question, we had a fierce shower, so using my well-known abdominal power, I lifted myself from the earth's muddy ground. I crawled and I climbed and eventually found myself on a window ledge, me, just a worm, a fact I would like to now briefly confirm. My eyesight is faultless. I know what I've seen. The defendant herself, the spaniel Kathleen, engaged in destruction against this thing's sweater. She used it as a sort of an appetite-whetter. She gnawed at the fabric and tugged at the collar, and knowing no way I could stop her or stall her, I stood a mute witness. I watched in disgust. I think it's appalling. I find it unjust. That dog's no puppy. She should have known better than to lie on a mattress digesting a sweater. If you want my opinion, I think you oughtta put her away. She's a heinous marauder. The worm had concluded. She'd finished her say and reached for a thimble of cold consomme. Your witness. The cat said. I watched as a wren hopped to the floor where the cat once had been. Your Honor, it's clear that this worm is deceptive. I'm wondering now if she might be receptive to proving her eyesight is all that she claims. I'd like her to read from this short list of names. The bird took a book written in Lebanese, and carried it out past the pond to the trees. Can you read this name here? It's first on the list. That's too far away. The angry worm hissed. I can't read that far, not even in day. You might as well post it in Rome or Pompeii. So your sight-- Said the bird, keen on proving a point. Is something you boast upon when you anoint this court with your presence, the all-seeing worm. Your sight is on par with an old pachyderm. You're small and deceitful. You crawled to no ledge. You witnessed no crime like the one you allege. Stop talking to me in your harsh legalese. I know what I saw. I can't read Lebanese. Still, though, I saw it. I've seen lots of things. I've noticed you, pooch and take off on your wings. I know all about you. My word is my honor. She looked at the bird then, a certified goner. The wren whispered softly, as if to confirm, and then she lunged forward, beheading the worm. Objection. The cat yelled. She's eating my witness. The bird, in a grand show of physical fitness, finished the worm and returned to her perch, the lowest-hung branch of a young silver birch. The cat called a witness, a chubby black cricket I'd seen once or twice in my room eat a ticket to movies or plays. This thing, it ate paper. It's body was small, just the size of a caper. I'm a cricket, I am, and to hell with your court, Said the cricket, her vocal cords fierce in retort. I have no use for your system. It's false and oppressive. The lawyer's behavior is passive-aggressive. You're saying you want me to be more specific? I'll tell you I find your whole species horrific. We live day to day, us and grasshoppers too. You bark and you chirp, you low or you mew, then head to your nest for a night's hibernation, while we're out there fighting for true liberation. You rise from your beds and meet in this clearing to practice your justice. It's all profiteering. Your system's disgusting. It's rotten and stinky, and if you think I'll raise my right hand or my pinkie in honor to you, then you are quite mistaken. I saw something, true, but no statement I'm making. I won't say a word till you promise protection. Contempt, Cried the bird. The cat yelled, Objection. This justice you claim, it's all based on species. I'd rather kneel down on the ground and eat feces than kowtow to you and your justice-achieving. I'm no friend of yours. Do you hear me? I'm leaving. The court was in chaos. The cricket hopped off. She flew through the air just like Baryshnikov. The bird then, she followed it into the thicket and returned having eaten that hot-tempered cricket. There was no objection, no cry of foul play. The judge and the lawyers gave a silent OK. Next witness, The judge barked. Allow me to mention we're holding this court with the sole good intention of seeking the truth, of meriting justice. It helps when you call up a witness who will trust us. Your honor, The bird said. I now call a squirrel, a trustworthy witness, a very nice girl. Hard-working and thrifty, she lives in that elm. I'm hoping my colleague will not overwhelm or badger my witness. She's timid and shy. The judge took an aspirin and shouted out, Why don't you bring on this witness. Enough of your chatter. Let's hope that this squirrel can finish the matter. I'm tired and hungry, so please let's proceed. The cat took a watch from his pocket. Indeed, you're stalling this court with your warbling and rambling. I'm thinking, Your Honor, defense is just gambling. She's playing for time. It's a transparent tactic. Some call it clever. I call it didactic. Your Honor, forgive me. I call your attention to my leading witness, that squirrel I mentioned. There was no need to prompt her, no need to coerce. The squirrel entered talking. She set down her purse. And, crossing her legs, lady-like, at the shin, the squirrel eyewitness began to weigh in. I saw it. I did, the whole thing, and it reeks. I was sitting there calmly, with nuts in my cheeks. I gather them daily. These nuts are my diet. An acorn, a pecan-- you name it, I'll try it. Sometimes I'll hide them. I'll dig them a grave for some later time when we have a cold wave. It ain't easy digging through thick ice and snow. Objection, The cat cried. I think we all know that winter is frosty. It's chilly and tough. In terms of her hardship, we've all heard enough. Get on with your story. Enough of your woes. Yes, sir, Said the squirrel. Well, the rest of it goes, I was searching for food then was out on my rounds. My sister remarked that I'd gained a few pounds in my hips and my shoulders. She thought it looked smashing. I respect her opinion, and so I was dashing to something I saw. It resembled a kernel of corn, so I thought, but it seems the infernal nugget in question turned out to be gum. It was chewed in a wad just the size of crumb. I was out of my mind, man, I wanted a snack. Objection, Your Honor, she's getting off-track, The cat lawyer cried. Let's get on with the crime. Your Honor, The bird said. My witness needs time to set up her scene of emotional stress. She's said to have suffered from mental duress. So, anyway, right, if my memory serves, I was searching the ground for some type of hors d'oeuvres when I heard in the distance the sound of a voice. It sounded quite angry, so I made the choice. I peeked through the window and sat on my haunches, and then I became, for a brief while, unconscious. It happens sometimes. I have these brief spells. I can't say for certain, but something compels my brain to relax, causing me to black out. You know, I was hit in the head with a large brussel sprout last summer. I think it was early July. I think that's the reason. I'm not certain why. I'm sorry, The cat said. Your mind is so frail. I'm wondering, though, if your story entails the facts of this case. Is there any connection between the accused and your brain imperfection? Technically, yes, The squirrel said, beaming. My body was there, but my mind was dreaming. I was there at the scene. That I know for a fact. I was hoping by speaking I might extract some detail, something I maybe could mention to justify all of this lavish attention. I find it exciting, dramatic, suspense. It all suits me perfect, because in a sense, I enjoy public speaking. I love center stage. The bird then approached, feathers standing in rage. You said you had seen things, that you were compliant and had information concerning my client. I might have, you know, but I can't say for certain. I know what I told you, but now I'm reverting. Is this microphone on? Hello? Do you mind if I sing? [SINGS] The bird slapped the stand with the tip of her wing and spat in discuss. Your witness, She said. The cat flexed his paws, and then used them to shred that squirrel to ribbons. He tore her to bits. And ate everything but her eyes and armpits. And then he pounced forward and firmly procured between his firm jaws that lawyering bird. Objection, Your Honor. I feel I'm being eaten. I don't like the way my colleague is treatin' the legal profession, especially me. I'm soon to become a full-fledged amputee. That was all that I heard. The rest was too muffled. I watched for a while as the two of them scuffled. The cat took the bird right down to the beak. The judge rose, then asking if now he might speak. To the cat in my chambers, a brief legal chat. The judge then walked off, and I watched as the cat foolishly followed that judge past a stump to a field of tires once used as a dump. I heard the cat hiss then, and then [INAUDIBLE]. I can't say for certain who struck the first blow, but I can say who won. I know that the judge stepped out of his chambers unable to budge. He belched and he sagged, both lips heavy with fur, and looked out at the courtroom where others once were. I find you not guilty, He said to my spaniel. But if I every hear so much as a granule of trouble from you, then I'll put you away. Thank you, Your Honor. I heard Kathleen say. Go on, now. Get out of here. Hurry along. Get back to your home, back to where you belong. I waited for Kathleen beside a small creek. She passed me, despondent, refusing to speak. And me, I returned to my comfortable bed, thinking of how, by some fluke, I'd been led to animal court, that harsh hostile scene, that by chance thought to spare my companion, Kathleen. The Pinetree Gang. Amy Sedaris, David Rakoff, Toby Warey, Stacy Goldstein, Jackie Hoffman, Nora Ladonny, Sarah Tire, and Richard Zaragoza. Story by David Sedaris. Act Three, The Moment When Humans Stopped Being Animals. If you ask anthropologists the moment that humans divide off from the animal kingdom, it's the moment that our ape-like ancestors started walking upright on two legs. For people who don't believe that God created the earth in six days, that moment is our origin. That's our Book of Genesis. That is the mythic point where we began. But nobody knows why these pre-humans started walking around on two legs instead of loping around on all fours the way that most animals do. There are different theories but no consensus among scientists. Well, 10 years ago, Scott Carrier decided to do some research on his own, and he made this radio report. Oh, there they go. What? There they go. Do you see them crossing over there? No. Over to the right, quite a ways away in fact. Way out there. A couple of years ago, my brother and I went to Wyoming to run down an antelope. I only see three over there. Well, there were about eight down there. Yeah. It was August and our plan was to chase one animal until it overheated and collapsed. It just took off on running. Do you want to follow it? Yeah. We had good reasons for what we were doing. One was that it seemed entirely possible. Another had to do with an argument concerning human evolution. It's a scientific argument, so it takes a few minutes to explain. Remember the scene in 2001, where an ape-man realizes he can use a bone as a weapon and murders another ape-man? Then he throws the bone in the air and it becomes a space station orbiting the earth. The theory behind this scene is that we separated from the apes when we stood upright and freed our hands to make and use tools, especially weapon-type tools for hunting and killing other animals. It's called the hunting hypothesis, and there's nothing wrong with it except that we don't have any physical evidence to support it. We just haven't found any tools or weapons that are that old. Well, some of the work that my brother does as a biologist made him interested in another theory of human evolution. You might call it the running hypothesis. He believed that he and I were probably good enough runners to be able to run down big game without using any weapons at all. And he thought that if we could do it, then maybe our early ancestors could have done it too. Shortly before we went to Wyoming, I went to see Owen Lovejoy. He teaches anthropology at Kent State University. We talked about the running hypothesis, and he thought it was pretty funny. I mean, think about it for a minute. I mean, what game are they going to run down? Things like wildebeest or something? Uh-huh. Zebra. And they're just going to start off running after this thing without any advanced weaponry of any kind. They've got no spears, no bow and arrow, and they just start running after a wildebeest. Yeah. Well, I think that's the idea, that they-- Uh-huh. The weak link in that whole behavior that you're describing is the inability of the animal to run any faster because it's so damn slow. And it's so damn slow because it's a clumsy biped. Is that an animal adapted to hunting? Slow, awkward, little, no olfaction, no protective vision. If it were an effective quadruped, it could do everything that you're describing in half the time. I mean, imagine a bunch of Paiute Indians that could run as rapidly and as successful as a German Shepherd dog. They'd catch the thing in three minutes and devour it. Well, I just happen to have a German Shepherd, and I take him with me when I go running. Let's go. And Lovejoy's right. He's a better runner than I am. In fact, most of the time, he'd rather have me take my bicycle. So there's no question about me being slower. But as far as being clumsy, Lovejoy calls bipedalism clumsy because of reasons that have to do with biomechanics. Running bipedally takes twice as much energy as running quadrupedally That is, when my dog and I run, he uses half the energy that I do. So Lovejoy and many other anthropologists think it's crazy to assume that the survival strategy of the early hominids involved running after quadrupeds. They've just got us beat, both in terms of speed and efficiency. But the thing is, if my dog and I go running in the summer in the middle of the day, when temperatures hit 85 to 100 or more degrees, it's a whole different ballgame. He'll come with me and run for a while, but then he walks and lags behind. And sometimes he just goes home. So if I'm an awkward and clumsy biped, why can I outrun my dog? Well, it's because he overheats. The main way that he and most other quadrupeds cool themselves when they run is by breathing. The air coming in and going out of their mouth evaporates water off their tongues. We do this too, but we do it all over our body by sweating, and then we get a nice flow of air directly over our skin, because we don't have a fur coat. So we can't run as fast as a quadruped, but we can run farther, especially in high heat. And when you remember that we're using twice the energy, this seems like a very strange biological paradox. And it was this paradox, combined with the argument about not being able to hunt without tools, that made my brother and I decide that it was time to try to run down an antelope. Antilocapra americana, the pronghorn, the second-fastest land mammal on the planet. We thought that if we could keep one running for two hours on a hot day, we'd have it beat. What happened? They didn't give me a chance. I was able to follow them for about 30 minutes, but the problem was I wasn't sure if I was following the same ones I started following. Because I started out following four-- a buck, two does, and a younger one. And after about 10 minutes, they ran into a group of about five more antelope, went over a hill. And then on the other side of the hill, they broke into two groups again. And so I think I ended up following the same four, but I couldn't be sure. And I followed them for another 15 minutes, and then they ran into a much larger group, ran for a ways. And I followed that larger group for a while, and then that group broke into at least two more groups. And at that point I just sort of gave up and quit following them, because I didn't know which individuals I was chasing. And then I got confused on the roads. Where's the road we were on? Down here? OK, what happened was I came out on this road, way over there somewhere. And I got lost. I didn't know, really, where I was. I was walking along that road for about 15 minutes. I felt like that was the wrong direction. So we started over there. They ran a circle there. I don't remember crossing this road, but I must have, originally, early on. This one? They ran in a circle. They came back. Well, strike one. So what do you think we should do? I think we should go look for some more. Not keep doing these? Well, I don't know where they are. It could have been the Serengeti-- orange and green and purple plains, a hot sun, thin high clouds, blue mountains on the horizon. They just zoomed. And they weren't stopping. It could have been the Serengeti, but we were no primitive hunters. We quickly realized we knew nothing about the animal we were chasing or the land we were running on. We ran after several herds that first day without much success. That night, sleeping out, I remember feeling very high in terms of elevation, like being dizzy. There weren't any clouds in the sky, and it just seemed like too much open space. Satellites in orbit, the moon in orbit, and antelope in the bushes, chewing their cuds and laughing amongst themselves. The next morning, we ate a breakfast of chocolate chip cookies and orange juice, and walked around waiting for the air to heat up. What is it? It's a white-tailed jackrabbit. We found dead animals, bare bones, an abandoned house. You think someone used to live here? We saw dust devils, horned toads, an eagle. We found a small lake, some badlands, and a rattlesnake. Wow. It never did get very hot that day, but in the afternoon, we had a good long chase after a female and two males. They ran in circles around an area of about 10 square miles. There were two hills and a long smooth valley in between, and the chase went up and around and back and forth between these hills, the antelope running short periods of time but covering long distances and then stopping and waiting for us to catch up. The two males ran behind the female, as if they were trying to protect her, and sometimes they'd all go in different directions, but we stayed behind the female and the males would eventually rejoin her. One thing we'd learned the day before was that we could run much less distance than the antelopes by staying well inside their circle, and we were also starting to communicate with each other over long distances. For instance, if my brother was on top of one of the hills, and he could see where the antelope were going, he'd point, and I wouldn't have to run to the top of the hill. So we were running after these three and feeling pretty good about not letting them ditch us, and a couple times, we even got within 50 yards of them. And I'd look into their eyes, trying to see some sign of fear or fatigue, but all I kept seeing were very quiet animals that seemed to know exactly who we were, what we were proposing, and didn't seem to be in the least bit worried. Anyway, we ran after these three for about an hour, and then they found a large herd, or the herd found them. And they ran up and over a hill, and by the time we got to the top of the hill, the herd had split into three groups of about three or four antelopes each. And each of the groups seemed to have at least one female that looked exactly like the one we'd started chasing-- the magic shell game trick again. We weren't really all that physically tired, mainly mentally beaten, and we went home. I haven't gone back to Wyoming for the purpose of chasing antelope, but I drive through there sometimes on my way somewhere else. And one time last spring I was going east, and there was a train along the highway also going east at about the same speed. And suddenly there were three antelope running alongside the engine, chasing it. It was incredible. It was even more incredible to see the three of them simultaneously speed up, pull out in front of the engine, and fly across the tracks. I pulled over and waited for the train to go by, and there they were. Three young males, looking back at me with those same black eyes and hardly breathing at all. In the years since he first recorded that story, Scott has put it into a collection of his stories, a book called, simply, Running After Antelope. Well, the great Louis Prima, from The Jungle Book soundtrack. Our program was produced today by Peter Clowney and me, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors for this show, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rockland. Original music for the opening story in today's program by Jeff Muller and Jason Noble. Other musical help from Mr. John Connors and the Mysterious Rumpety Rattles. And you know, you can download today's program and our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. [FUNDING CREDITS] WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who treats his employees this way. Must bite, must bite, must-- no, no, nice, nice-- bite, must bite, must bite. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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This story is always different, but it's also always the same. The blue-blooded Yankee graduates from Yale, moves to Texas, starts talking like a good ol' boy, turns himself into an oil man, and after that, into President of the United States. The Czechoslovakian pencil-necked geek from Pittsburgh named Andy Warhol moves to New York, dresses in black, becomes a darling of the rich and glamorous. The nice Jewish boy from Minnesota affects an oaky twang, picks up a guitar, renames himself for Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and-- you know this story. One thing that makes our country different from all of the other ones is this idea that it's our birthright that we can recreate ourselves as someone who we prefer to be, sell everything off, move somewhere else, start a new life. This tendency is so deep in American culture that we have an entire industry, a self-help industry, telling us how to transform ourselves into someone new. And usually, we see this as a positive thing. But what happens if you're too good at it, at throwing everything off, starting over from scratch? Over the course of his life, Keith Aldrich was a child of the Depression in Oklahoma, then a preacher-in-training in booming California, an aspiring Hollywood actor. In the '50s, he remade himself as a self-styled Beat writer, then as a man in a gray flannel suit. In the '60s, he became part of the New York literati, then went through a hippie phase, moved to the suburbs for '70s-era partying, Ice Storm, John Updike novel kind of life. When the Moral Majority helped put Ronald Reagan into office in the '80s, he changed again, became a born-again Christian. Not only is his life a history of most of the major cultural shifts of the second half of the 20th century in this country, it's a case study in the question, what happens if you're too good at transforming yourself, at this part of our national character. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And today, we are devoting our entire program to the story of this man's life, as told by one of his nine children, Gillian Aldrich. Keith Aldrich married five times. He left one set of wife and kids after another at most of the major turning points in his life. When he died in 1993, for the first time ever, eight of the nine kids got together in the same place, at his funeral, and talked about what sort of man he was. And it was then that they realized that they all knew different versions of their father. And so a couple years after that, Gillian Aldrich, his sixth child, set out to reconcile all these different accounts. She left her home in New York City to go out and interview all of her half siblings about her father's life. Here's her story. When I started this trip, I saw my dad as the quintessential restless American, constantly on the move in his quest for his dreams. I knew there was a dark side to all this, people left behind, marriages busted. But still there was some part of his quest that seemed heroic. I'm sure he saw it that way too. I was a very good boy when I was a kid, a very good boy. This is how my father told his own story. It's a church testimony recorded 14 years before he died. And my great ambition was to be a preacher, like me Uncle Floyd. And I [? blessed ?] that to my Lord. On the other hand, not so easily seen, there was this rebellious kid inside. 1929 to 1953, age of innocence. My dad grew up in the Church of Christ during the Depression in Oklahoma. His family moved to California after Pearl Harbor, so that his father could get work welding on the ships to help the war effort. My father got a scholarship to a Christian school, Pepperdine College. He was married in the same year to his high school sweetheart. I'm Shelly. I was from the first marriage. I was born in Whittier, California. Dad was young. I started my trip at Shelly's house in Eugene, Oregon, where I see my half sisters from my dad's first marriage. There's Shelly and there's Becky, who's up from San Francisco for the weekend with her daughter. I'm surprised to be included in their family weekend. We barely know each other, and don't have much in common outside of our father. Yet we spend three days going whitewater rafting and sitting down to big family meals. Becky's 50 and Shelly's 48. They're both adamantly devoted to their families. And Shelly's a fundamentalist Christian who's home-schooled all her kids in the belief that parents can and should do better than any school. Still, we're amazingly comfortable with each other. We sit in Shelly's living room and talk into the night about who our father was. He was going to be a preacher. He was going to be a Church of Christ preacher. So he had it all planned out. In the Church of Christ community, that was kind of the highest social status was to be a preacher in the church. I know my mom said, she told me that even though he was 18 when they got married, she said he wasn't like he was 18. He kind of ran the youth group at church. He was the most influential. His father was influential. And he was always very sure of himself, very confident about who he was, where he was going. He was highly respected, even at 18. He was 18 when they got married. And she was 20 years old. And they were just starting out, of course. And they had a little apartment over somebody's garage. This is Becky. Unfortunately before their plans, they had me. I think that had a major effect on his relationship with my mother and their relationship with each other, and how he saw his life unfolding. I'm sure it really bothered him that he saw his possibilities limited by the fact that he had these three children, and he was only 23 years old. And so Dad made a choice, the same choice he would repeat over and over for the rest of his life. He simply changed his mind about who he was going to be. He began studying drama, throwing himself into school plays with the same fervor he'd had for being a preacher. It was costly to him, I think, to be involved in drama. He was good at it, but I think it got out of hand for him. As you study the history of drama, it gets out of hand for a lot of people. So that changed his focus and certainly changed my parents relationship. So how did it break up, the marriage with your mom. What happened? It seems like it could be something that you do and you stay happily married. Oh, sure. But Dad was having affairs with women. That doesn't go over well. They soon divorced. The three kids, Becky, Shelly, and Alan, didn't really see their father much for the next 15 years. And when I try to get Becky and Shelly to tell me more about the person our father was when they were children, they can't. He left too early for them to remember. This is nice. There's a little hill there. We could sit on the mound. Oh yeah. On my last day in Eugene, Becky, Shelly, and I go on a walk together in the park next to Shelly's house. Shelly tells me that Dad's abandonment is one of the reasons she's devoted herself so fully to her kids. He rejected me. As a child, he left me. He didn't care for me. He didn't send money to my mother to support me. I guess it was when I started having my own children that I started thinking, how could you? How could you have done this to me? I'm committed to my children. Why weren't you committed to me? Their feeling about that is so different from mine. I remember enough to know that as Dad did, he would be involved in our lives as it fit his-- As it fit his schedule. Yeah, as it was convenient for him. The man that we've been describing, does he sound familiar to you? And if so, in what way? Yeah. You know what, I feel like I'm trying to sort of mythologize Dad as an artist, or the creative part of Dad. I talked about Dad following his dreams, how that gave me the courage to try new things. But it wasn't the kind of argument where anyone convinces anyone else. I ask Shelly if she can see what I saw in him, outside of her experience as an abandoned daughter. No, I don't. If you're saying at the cost of your family, I think that's inexcusable. I think that's hideous. I think if you make a commitment to someone, you should keep it. No, I think that to try to say that because Dad was talented, that that gave him some kind of license to marry women and abandon them is ludicrous, of course not. Each of us has a responsibility to live a life accountable to some kind of righteousness or value, even if you don't believe in God. And certainly, that doesn't include hurting people. No, I see nothing noble in his pursuit of his dreams, if that's what you want to call it. I spit upon it. 1953 to 1963, Beat in a gray flannel suit. I got married again almost immediately, after a wild and passionate romance based on the life of D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Rita. Our gods were the same as theirs, the animal life force and art. We worshiped theater, she as an actress, me as a writer. This marriage produced another divine child and still more guilt, for she was married when I met her and left her husband for me, just like Rita did for D. H. And it produced a great deal of jealousy and turbulence. My dad met his second wife, Maggie, an actress from Germany, in a drama group. He was in the theater program at UCLA and later bragged that he was buddies with Carol Burnett and James Garner, and that Sydney Poitier babysat in exchange for Dad helping him get rid of his bohemian accent. No one in the family believes any of this. The facts are Maggie got pregnant, they got married. I'm Josie, and I'm from Keith's second marriage. And I was born in 1955. I drove 25 hours from Shelly's house in Eugene to see my half sister, Josie, in Boulder, Colorado, Josie's 45 years old and lives with her son. On our first night together, we're in a condo, looking at a photo album Dad made for her. We lived on Holly Drive in Hollywood Hills, in a little red house. There's this shot that I always remember about the three of us, my mother, the glam actress, with her hair in a bun and very red lipstick, and almost Joan Crawford eyebrows that aren't so great, and my father, who is like the all-American guy. Then I'm in this nice little dress. He writes underneath it, the family of the '50s, which that is really what this photo is. It's the family of the '50s. However, we weren't the family of the '50s. My Dad took a lot of pictures. And a lot of them have this quality. They're almost iconic, as if "family of the '50s" was this role he was trying to get the family to play. After being scouted in a theater production at UCLA, Dad was cast in a bit part in a Grace Kelly movie, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, and thought he was on his way to a career as a movie actor. Apparently, he had the chance to work at Paramount. And those were still the days when actors were hired to be contract actors for different studios. And what my mother told me was that-- his ears stick out a little bit, which we all know that they did-- and my mother told me that if he had had his ears pinned back, that they would've accepted him into the studio as one of the contract actors. And my mother just really couldn't understand why he didn't do that. It would've been so easy. And that's kind of like Dad was, you know. He could have been onto something really good, but no, he had this dream. And he had to be a playwright. And that really never went anywhere as well. So he didn't really believe in the Hollywood system. He really wanted to do theater. Yeah, he wanted to do theater. And I don't think he believed in any system. No rules. Don't fence me in. I don't know. Well, we moved to New York when I was about three. He went before us. He went to join a group of men who were playwrights. And he was encouraged by a friend of his. Oh, let's go to New York, and we can become famous playwrights. And Dad was a bit impulsive. And he didn't like the acting scene in Hollywood. So he decided, yeah, let's do it. He goes with his friend. And then about six months later, my mother and I came after him. In the classic American biographies, there are always these heroic moments, the rebel leaving behind the old life, taking risks, following his or her dream and ending up famous. But of course, most people who tear up their lives and follow their dreams never make it. My dad moved to New York, wrote nothing of value, and had to get a real job in publishing. The marriage didn't survive the move either. By the time Josie was five, Keith and Maggie were divorced. But he didn't abandon Josie, as he'd left behind the kids from his first marriage. Maybe he was more mature. Maybe he needed family more. But even after the divorce, he was often a very good dad. When he chose to be, he was really fun. He played with you. He laughed a lot. He talked to you and made you feel important. He was intense and larger than life, like he was playing the perfect dad. And with me, he would sometimes sit down. And I would dictate poems to him that I had made up. And he'd type them for me. And so that was a nice little thing that we did as father and daughter. But he was kind of giddy. He was funny. I thought he looked like Dick Van Dyke and acted like Dick Van Dyke, and wished he had been a Dick Van Dyke, this movie star. I think I always wanted him to be a movie star. But yeah, it was like his life was a movie. And at this stage, when I was seven or eight or nine, it was kind of like we were in a musical, singing in the rain and jumping around the streets of New York and making up songs. When did you feel a change come in your family that was pulling him away? Do you remember the time? Oh, yeah. Well, when he married your mother. And then he started to have a new family with her. And yeah, that was hard for me. 1963 to 1969, literati. My mother, Sally, was Dad's assistant at McGraw-Hill Publishers. She was completely taken with his charm. She told me she came home her first day from work and told her parents that she was going to marry her boss. And within a year, they were married. The next few years were the happiest I had known since I was a kid. I suppressed my deep yearning to be an artist. And my wife and I devoted ourselves more or less to the good life. We had clothes and money and went out a lot. We had no spiritual life at all, but we didn't miss it. We were sophisticates. According to my mother, Dad used to say that he married her for two reasons, her ass and her family. Dad seemed to think he was moving up in the world, marrying the daughter of a well-known New York editor, Cecil Scott, whose authors include James Michener and Barbara Tuchman. Josie felt like she was losing Dad to another world. And I saw something change in him where I thought he was extremely phony when he'd have talks and smoke cigarettes and drink his scotch with Cecil. Cecil was an editor at McMillan. And his authors, the people he was involved with were bestselling authors. And in the literary world, they were the top people. And so, I think Dad was just so impressed with that and wanted to impress Cecil and let him know-- let Cecil know-- that hey, your daughter isn't marrying a hick from Illinois or Oklahoma. I've got some worth. And I think that's really what he was trying to do was prove something about himself, or reinvent himself. He was always reinventing himself. So here he was going through a stage now where he could come up to Chappaqua and know how to dress and do what the Methodists were doing. And when we'd go up for the weekends, I thought, my god, what is-- this is so not me. This is so not my dad, this whole suburban trip. It was just so strange. I saw Dad playing a role. For the record, my mom didn't have any of these pretensions. She was used to this world. She was a painter, an artist in her own right. For the first five years of their marriage, Mom and Dad lived happily in the upper west side of New York City. That's where my older brother, Scott, was born. 1969 to 1972, the ice storm. Right before I was born, my parents decided it was time to move to the suburbs, so they could raise their kids in the stable environment of a nice small town. As it turned out, this was the place our lives fell apart, in a big old house in Katonah, an hour's commute from New York. To find out more about this period, I visited Alan, the youngest child from my father's first marriage. He lived with us in Katonah for over a year. Now he's in the woods of New Hampshire. He lives like the ex-hippie he is. He enjoys sing-alongs with his guitar, talks freely about sex, makes a living as a computer programmer. Alan was 17 during the year he lived with us. He'd moved out from San Diego to finish high school with his father. It was just great. I thought it was just the most wonderful place to live in the world, because I could smoke and drink and be adult and sophisticated and all these things. They had some really neat friends. They would have these parties. And people would sit around and talk about all kinds of [BLEEP], you know. For a couple of years in Katonah, all of my dad's kids intersected at various times. Besides Alan, Becky and Shelly, also from the first marriage, lived there briefly after high school. And Josie, from the second marriage, came up from the city to visit on weekends. But shortly after moving to Katonah, Dad went through his next transformation, a radical left turn away from the suburban stodginess he had chosen. The year was 1969. Here's how my dad described it. By this time, I was 40 pounds overweight, had regular three-martini lunches, and truth to tell, I was officious. There were riots in the streets. The kids had long hair and wore overalls. And they looked at me as if I was the enemy. When I got there, he made it very clear to me that he was not going to be my father. He was going to be my buddy. He never asked me, where are you going, or how long are you going to be, or where have you been and what were you doing and that sort of thing. If he asked me anything, and I told him, and it was anything the least bit racy or off-beat or anything like that, he would just think that was really great. And the more I did, the more great he thought it was. That was a very tumultuous time, not because Alan was there, really, but because of all the changes Dad was going through. And he was beginning to get into drugs. This is Josie. Meaning he was smoking marijuana. And I think they were both taking LSD and also mescaline. So all of this was going on where Alan was kind of involved. And I was even involved. I'd go up there on every other week and sometimes smoke with them at a very young age. And it's absolutely incredible to me now that I did this. And all these people coming in and out of that house. In an era where adults were trying to be teenagers, Dad quit his job and considered himself the guru to the resident teenagers, Alan and his girlfriend, Stephanie. Here's Alan again. I was still smoking and doing acid and whatnot, and so was he. And he was finding that he was really enjoying this kind of really liberated lifestyle. I think he felt that I was outdoing him somehow in terms of my liberatedness, and he was in competition with me to see who could be the wildest, or something. In fact, he kind of came down to my level a lot. I don't know if I ever told you this, but he came on to Stephanie one time. He offered to take her home when I was too stoned or drunk or something like that, and she needed to get home. And he drove her home. And he attacked her on the way home. He pulled over, started sticking his tongue down her throat and everything. My girlfriend, you know? A 17, 18-year-old girl. And that really pissed me off. It certainly pissed her off. And she didn't want anything to do with our family after that. And I was really love with her. I was so angry at him about that. Did you confront him? No. You didn't? No. I couldn't. I was so frightened of him. I had seen his anger against Sally. By that time, he was starting, I think, to feel like Sally was dragging him down, or something, or kind of a millstone around his neck in terms of his liberatedness, or something like that. And he would just blow off at a drop of a hat at that point. I remember distinctly sitting down in that little dining room in Katonah there one morning. And for some reason, he didn't like the way she cooked the eggs or something. And something she said set him off. And he just threw his plate against the wall. And then he threw the table against the other wall and just started ripping up the dining room, taking pictures off the walls and smashing them over chairs, and smashing chairs into splinters. And Sally was just screaming and cowering in the corner of the room. And I've never been so petrified in all my life as I was during that scene. And then an hour later, it was over. It was like we were all supposed to pretend like nothing had happened. Oh, I don't remember. Just whenever I was rebellious, or maybe I mouthed off to him, he'd slap me around and really throw me across the room. Here's Josie again. And really, that was quite a distance. I was a pretty skinny kid. But he would just unleash his wrath on me. But I do remember one time that I did prevent him from really-- I knew that I was going to be harmed terribly because I stood up for myself. And what I did was I screamed "help" for the police. And the police came. A next-door neighbor came. And then it continued. And it just continued. It didn't stop. This is my brother, Scott. He was probably four years old at this time. One of my earliest memories in Katonah is waking up and hearing screaming downstairs, and seeing Dad being manhandled by police downstairs, as I'm sitting on the staircase with Mom, and she's holding me. And he apparently had just thrown Josie against a window. And some neighbor saw it and came over and beat the [BLEEP] out of Dad. And he was bleeding, and the police were there trying to calm him down. And it seemed to me like they were nearly locking him up. During that time of this fight with the neighbor, the blood was rushing down and was staining his white suit. And that was just such an image, to see Dad. Dad was getting hit. The police were coming. And maybe I did feel a little empowered. Who knew that word and that term? And then when I walked into the bathroom, seeing him wash his white clothing to get the stain out. And he looked up at me, and he said, "I don't want to know you. And I don't want to have anything to do with you. And you're on the next train." And that was that. I think that he would get overwhelmed by his emotions, that somehow he felt that he was his emotions. And when he had an emotion, he had to feel it fully, even if it meant smashing his foot through a door or beating up someone, like his wife. And he almost felt that to censor that was to censor his own creativity. And I think that he was of a generation that might have glamorized that, to a certain extent. I think that the artists of his generation that he admired, like Henry Miller or Jackson Pollock, people that, in many ways, Dad emulated these types. And I think that these are tremendously successful individuals, but they also lived life on the edge. And I think there was sort of a cult of that, of an appeal to that, that I think Dad was susceptible to. In a sense, who else would embody so many different cultural trends over the course of 40 years, other than someone who gives in to all his emotions? That same quality that made him so charismatic and engaging, that made him such a great dad sometimes, also made him a terror. I was alive during the mayhem in Katonah, but it all happened before I was three years old. So I don't remember any of it. But to Josie, I was very much a part of the drama. Oh, I felt ashamed because there were some bad things going on. For instance, if your parents had come home from a party or something, or they were just smoking marijuana and listening to music and involved in their own lives, or whatever, their discussions. And I'd be going upstairs and I'd be checking on you. Or I'd hear you crying, and I'd hear you crying and crying and crying, and no would come to see you. And there you'd be in the crib. I guess I was ashamed because I felt like I turned my back on you guys, on you little kids. And I came less and less to Katonah. And when I had a big blow-up with Dad, I felt like I never saw you again. And I felt like I didn't want to see you again. Because it conjured up so many horrible images. This was completely new to me. When I sat down to interview Josie, we barely knew each other. I'd always heard the stories about this crazy period when my dad actually lived in the house I grew up in. But I never thought of myself as a part of it. And when Josie first mentioned it, I brushed it off. Then one afternoon, after we went for a hike in the mountains, she came into my room, visibly upset. She started to cry for me and Scott. She felt so guilty that we were so neglected, and for abandoning us. Now I heard her, but I felt like she was talking to the wrong person. I wasn't hurt by that stuff, I said. That wasn't me. It was just a baby I don't relate with. And I pointed out that she was just a kid herself. She had nothing to be guilty about. But it shook me. I guess I'd always thought that while my dad was running around being crazy, my mom was crouched in the corner with me safely tucked under her arm. It didn't occur to me that I was caught up in all of the chaos. I was starting to realize that the story I was trying to tell couldn't be the same one I had started out to do. I was feeling differently about Dad. I was beginning to have a hard time seeing anything noble about his pursuit of his dreams. 1972 to 1978, the time of Bacchus and Batman. The odd thing is, I believed at the time I was acting in the highest morality. It was basically the morality declared by Abbie Hoffman, the yippie leader, in his book, Steal This Book. The idea was, the system is corrupt beyond salvaging. Tear everything down. Rip everything off. You are a law unto yourself. To thine own self be true. After my parents' divorce, Dad was still doing a lot of drugs, incapable of holding onto a job or a girlfriend. He was working as a professional actor, which meant he was mostly broke. He was on The Guiding Light for a couple of years, playing an evil Texas lawyer named Raymond Schafer. When we were out with him, women would stop him on the street and ask him for his autograph. We thought that was pretty cool. Batman. Dick, what's wrong? Not Dick, not now. Time for Robin and Batman. No? Dad wrote and acted the part of Batman on a series of records about the Caped Crusader. This one's called If Music Be the Food of Death. To me and my brother, he was a superhero. I was seven years old. We have to pull the lever with a letter that answers the riddle. Hmm. A letter like an escape. When we saw him on the weekends, he was at his best, attentive and fun. Good, Robin, good. What's the other one? Why is a speeding train like a citizen of Moscow? Hmm, of course, of course. What is it? They're both rushin'. True to form, Dad's life was just about to turn upside down once again. Coming up, one child found, one child lost. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. In a sense, there are lots of families like the Aldriches. A parent leaves, remarries, makes a new life. And the kids in the first marriage are left to make sense of it somehow. The Aldriches are just an extreme case. Dad left five different families. Nine kids were left struggling what to make of it, and what to make of each other. Gillian's story continues. Harry was the one sibling who didn't come to Dad's funeral. Shelly was the only one of us who had ever met him. No one had any idea where he was. I finally found him on the internet. It turns out that he lives in New York, where I live. I didn't know if he'd want anything to do with the family, because my dad practically disowned him. But he was as excited to meet as I was. Harry? Yes. Hi. Hi. What's up? I'm sorry to do this. That's OK. How are you? Good. Good to meet you. We were both pretty nervous. So you're my brother. So what do you think? Do we look alike? I think it'll grow on me. But yeah. You do? Do you see anything? As far as I'm concerned, there's a huge family resemblance. He has exactly the same low hairline and stick-out ears my dad had. He looks a lot like my dad, actually. Harry's 22 years old. He's smart and funny. We were instantly comfortable with each other. Harry was born during the mid '70s, in the midst of Dad's unstable life in New York. Dad dated Harry's mom for a few months. She got pregnant. Dad rejected her. She moved to a commune in Tennessee called The Farm, where Harry grew up. Dad only saw Harry a handful of times. And Harry's few memories of Dad take place mostly 10 or 15 years after he was born. I guess I have three or four memories, I think it might have been over the course of two trips. This was when he lived in a condo in southern California. I don't think he was attached at the time. He was living such a early '90s microwave life is the only way to put it. It was one of the pop-up condominium strips in southern California, which are just like wildfire across southern California. I would go there, and we'd go to the grocery store and buy three frozen pizzas and come back and microwave them. He lived this total microwave existence. And everything about his life seemed like just pop in, pop out kind of thing. So we're at this apartment. And I guess I was vacuuming with a little hand-vac. And he was still sort of in the process of moving into his place. And I bumped a box that a lamp was on, and the lamp fell. And it didn't work. And so I just got paranoid. I was like, oh my gosh, I think I broke this lamp. And so I didn't want to not tell him. The smart thing to do maybe would have been to not tell him. But my conscience forced me to go in there. And I said, I think I broke the lamp. It's not working. And he went in there. And he tried to turn it on, and it didn't work. And he just exploded. He just freaked out. He just started tearing apart his office. He dropped the lamp on the ground, and he was just storming and standing there, screaming at me and throwing things on the ground, spilling his papers all over the place, sweeping things, just like a maniac. And he finally just calmed down. And then he took the lamp. And he went, and he checked the bulb. And the bulb had broken. And he changed the bulb, and the lamp worked. And so then we just cleaned up the room. And he was apologetic. And he's like, man, why did I do this. And I'm thinking, even if this lamp had been broken, you caused 10 times more trouble flipping out about it. Obviously, I guess he was just struggling with a lot of things. I don't think it had to do with the lamp at all. On another trip, Harry says Dad was reading the newspaper about the Pan Am flight that went down over Lockerbie, Scotland. Never one to hold anything back, Dad started crying about the victims. And I remember thinking, what a tender thing. This guy is really real. He's compassionate. He's crying for all these people. And I remember almost feeling bad, like gee, why am I not more broken up about this, and wanting to feel more upset about it. But then he went right out of being upset about that to just laying straight into me about me, about existing period. He was like, I don't want you up here. Your mom is just sticking you in my life. I didn't ask for you to come visit. And then he starts going into all these things about I've never even wanted you. You were just a manipulation that your mom used to try and get to me. And he was just railing at me. And I remember feeling so, so worthless and so insecure and so unhappy, and just scared and depressed. I remember it was around that time when I was like-- it may have been around that time. But it was experiences like that that made me think, I don't know what it would have been like to have actually ever spent any period of my life being raised by this person. I could not imagine what it would be like to have to go home from school and know that he was going to be there. And I thought, I could not have handled it. I would have broken. I would have absolutely broken. And I remember feeling so grateful, so grateful, that I had not been raised by him at all. Because I never felt let down that Keith had not raised me at all, that he had not been there for me. The honest truth of the way I felt was why is he even coming along now and making it harder. Growing up the furthest from Dad, having the least contact with him of any of us, Harry's also the least conflicted of all the siblings. Me, I'm not nearly so settled. 1979 to 1988, reborn again. Around the time that Ronald Reagan took office, and the Moral Majority began to hold sway around the country, my father became a Christian. It was beginning to appear that my life was going to amount to nothing, a big fat zero. By now, I had trampled roughshod over the feelings and hearts of scores of people who loved me-- family, friends, children, lovers, associates-- all on the altar of my artistry. My self-contempt made me meaner than ever, and I was usually stoned or a little smashed. In the late '70s, shortly after Harry was born, one of my dad's girlfriends began dragging him to meetings at an evangelical church. My mind, which had been closed for so many years, was beginning to open. The hardness of my heart began to melt. I teetered on the brink of believing. I longed so to believe. My father was saved, born again. He moved to California and briefly lived his lifelong dream of doing his own theater. He traveled around southern California, performing his Christian plays. At the end of each performance, Dad would stand up and preach, calling people up front to be saved, laying his hands on the repentant. Scott started thinking Dad was a weirdo and a fake. He could see that Dad was as aggressive and self-obsessed as he'd ever been, but now it was all in the service of Jesus. We were driving out to the desert, and Dad was speaking in tongues. And I was in the front seat. You were in the back. We were on our way to Palm Springs. And Dad was speaking in tongues. And it sounded like, "Oh shalakh halem alakh hulum alakh haleng." Those were the kind of sounds it sounded like. And you and I used to look at each other like, "what the hell is he doing?" And I remember I said, "So Dad, what is that chanting you're doing?" And I said, "Is that some ancient Hebrew? Are you praying?" And he said, "Well, it's interesting you ask that, because I don't know what it is. It could be some ancient, dead tongue. But," he said, "I received the Holy Spirit. And when you receive the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit speaks through you." And I said, "Wow, that's very interesting." And he asked if I would like to speak in tongues. And I said, "Uh, well, all right, I guess," totally worried. And then he put his hands in my head, and he started speaking in tongues. And he said, "Heavenly father, let the Holy Spirit come through Scott," and everything, and did this whole prayer. And then he said, OK. This was while he was driving too. We were on the interstate in the desert. And then he said, "OK, Scott. I want you to speak in tongues." And I was totally self-conscious. And I looked at you. You were just absolutely cracking up silently. And I kept hemming and hawing. He said, "Go ahead. Don't be afraid." And then I started to speak this language that you and I had made up when we were little kids, like "Obaca lucca shula lucca la." I just made up this language. And you were practically dying in the backseat. And he was just supporting me, like "Oh, that's good, yeah. Keep going. Keep going." And then we went to visit Grandpa Aldrich. And then he started doing it again with Grandpa Aldrich. And it wasn't any funny anymore. And then Grandpa Aldrich, after he was so afraid, he went to the bathroom in his pants. And we had to deal with it. And Dad just got furious. And I remember just thinking, oh, this poor old man. At some point, most of my brothers and sisters went through a phase of being Dad's favorite. And then they'd see through him, or he'd turn on them. There was always a confrontation. And it ended. My father's two youngest children, Sarah and Grace, never confronted him like this when he was alive. They were too little. So they're stuck trying to figure out what to make of him now, five years after his death. I just saw him as two different people. There was the guy who beat my mom, but then there's the guy who spreads the word. I don't know. It seems so typical. It just seems so-- that's all I know. That's all I've ever known, and that's all I know as a father kind of thing. Sarah's Dad's second-youngest. She just turned 18. They're from his marriage to Mary in the 1980s. They grew up mostly in Colorado. Sarah was just a baby when I lived with Dad. And just like Josie felt guilty for abandoning me as a baby, I've always had a nagging guilt for leaving Sarah and Grace behind. I remember loving Daddy a lot. And that's because I never really saw the side that everyone seems to hate about him. He always loved me a lot. And he always told me he did. I was Daddy's girl. It made so much sense for Sarah to be conflicted about that. I saw so much of me in her. I had also been Daddy's girl. And I remember the weekend I felt it transferred to her, one weekend after I'd refused to see my father for a long time, and had clearly asserted my independence from him. In that weekend Dad put all of his emotional, I'd say manipulative, energy into her. I remember being in Virginia with you and Dad. Scott and I came down to visit for a weekend and you were up visiting also. Do you remember that? Yeah, I do remember that. I remember that you were the most beautiful little girl. And you were just starting to gain a little bit of weight, not a lot, but a little. And we were going out to eat. And Dad kept giving you all this really bad food. And I remember you saying to him, "Daddy, I'm not supposed to eat that. I'm supposed to be on a diet." And he said to you, "Sarah, I love you. And anyone who tells you that you can't eat whatever you want doesn't love you. I think you should eat absolutely anything you want. In fact, tell me what you want, and I'll let you have it." Do you remember that? I don't remember that. I do remember my mom telling me I looked really heavy when I came back, though. I got the distinct feeling that he wanted you to eat as much as you could eat. Why? Just so I would love him more or respect him more? I don't know. It took me forever to lose that weight. I was a fat kid. God, middle school was a pain in the ass. I think, and I'm just conjecturing here, and I could be wrong. But I think that he also said to me on that trip, "Sarah's going to be the kid that stays with me. Everyone else has left me. But Sarah's still loyal. She's going to stay with me." And that, combined with his comment about you eating as much as you want, really made me think he was trying to get you to stay with him. While my older brothers and sisters have gone farther in working out their feelings about my father, and in the process have distanced themselves or partially rejected him, Sarah simply can't, not yet anyway. And one thing I remember about my dad is he was taking pictures of me one day. And I still have the pictures. And I look at them now. I had a bad perm, my bad glasses. And it was a time I was getting really hefty. And I was wearing sweats. But I remember specifically when he was taking these pictures. And he was like, "You're an extremely beautiful girl, Sarah." He's like, "You could grow up and take pictures like this for a living," and stuff like that. And no one else said that about me at that time. No one else said that to me. It apparently meant a lot to me, because that's one of the things I remember now. It's like Daddy knew. Daddy knew I was going to be OK. And I guess things like that have always been slightly comforting to me now. If you have a parent like my father, someone who can be so seductive when he wants to be, and so irrational and violent at other times, you spend a long time after they're gone trying to make sense of it all. Only recently has those kinds of things changed, just because I've given a lot of thought to it. And I don't even know what to tell people if they ask me about my father. I wouldn't even know where to start or what I would say. Grace, right now, she has a pretty good idea the way she feels. And she looks almost as if she's angry to a certain extent, and sad to another. I'm just so indifferent. And indifferent is the worst feeling in the world. It's almost a sin in my eyes to just not care. I mean I do care. But it's just so-- I don't. I was lucky enough that it happened early enough in my life that it's not going to make an impact. I don't have a dad. I never really did. Right now, that's the way I've conditioned myself to thinking. By the time I left Sarah, I no longer saw my dad as someone who became a different person with each new wife, in each new decade. What Sarah said was all too familiar. I'd heard and felt all of this before. Looking through the eyes of all my siblings, I saw my father as a person who put on different costumes as the cultural tide changed, who was essentially the same underneath. I think my father created a mythology rather than a real life for himself, a series of mythologies, American mythologies. The tortured artist, the rising Hollywood star, the Beat playwright, the Manhattan literary type, the acid-dropping hippie, the '70s hedonist, the conservative born-again, the wandering missionary. Every phase was a new way of mythologizing himself. For all my talk about my dad following his dreams, I think his dreams weren't even his own, but second-hand dreams borrowed from American popular culture. As it changed, so did he. It seemed that he couldn't separate the fantasy of these public myths from real life. In his most personal interactions, he would become D. H. Lawrence, Henry Fonda, Henry Miller, instead of Keith Aldrich. In most standard biographies, people change and grow. They face challenges and go through heroic changes. But what happens to the people who get stuck making the same mistakes over and over? For all the surface changes in his life, my father simply put himself in the same situation again and again. Here he is writing March 26, 1993. And it's just before your graduation from Boulder. And he says, "Dear Scott. I'm finally brought to a dead stop. Car broken down for the second time in a two-week trip we took to pick up my stuff in California." Scott read me a letter Dad wrote him during this last period in his life, just a few months before he died, right after he married his fifth wife, Shirley. "And of course, I would like for you to know Shirley. The main problem I have had with others is that invariably, after a beginning which implies they are sympathetic with my artistic goals, they expect me to give up those goals and devote myself to building some kind of material estate. But they have actively sought to sidetrack me." Can you believe this? No. "I'm aware it will seem odd to you and others who have suffered from some degree of non-support from me. But to me, the 'story of my life'," in quotes, "is one of repeatedly setting aside my work to meet the needs of wives and children." Interesting. It's amazing to me that he finds all of these ways to justify himself continually. His whole interpretation of the problems in his life is being somehow him compromising himself with his wives and children. He essentially is blaming them for his inability to be a great artist, which I think is just a bunch of crap. My father died in July of 1993. He had just started yet another theater company and married his fifth wife. His relationships with all of his children were strained and distant. I'm Keith Aldrich, the man's second child, first son. Thank you for coming. Dad and I had in common an urge to strike out and wander and do things differently, and sometimes in an unapproved way. This is my father, speaking at his father's memorial service. The way my father talks about his father I think is pretty much the way he'd want to be remembered, the way he'd want me to eulogize him, here on the radio. He was a heartbroken man. He was a loving man. In his pain, he often struck out at people around him, or was irritated. But it was only out of his pain. He was so close to the Lord, and he was so contrite over the error of his ways. And he endured so much scorn and contempt, and disapproval from people whom he loved so much. And I could share that with him. I knew what that felt like. And he endured it with love in his heart, returned love. And I'm here to honor him, commend his soul to the Lord. In the last few months, meeting with all of my father's children, I've come to know two things for sure. One is that in his own way, he did love each of us. The other is that for all that, none of his children could eulogize him the way he would want. None of us see him the way he saw himself. Gillian Aldrich lives in New York. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors for this show, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from [? Amy Takahara, ?] Jorge Just, Sylvia Lemus, Seth Lind, and Bruce Wallace. The instrumental music in our program today was composed for us by [? Willie Schwartz ?] and performed by Willie on keyboards, Larry Gray on bass, John Rice on guitar, and Douglas Brush on drums. Our website, where you can get our free weekly podcast or listen to our old shows for absolutely free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who I would describe this way. He enjoys sing-alongs with his guitar, talks freely about sex, makes a living as a computer programmer. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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When Anne met Charles, they were not supposed to fall in love. It was forbidden that they fall in love. Capulets and Montagues, Jets and Sharks, David Addison and Mattie Hayes on Moonlighting, Scully and Mulder, Anna Karenina, you know the story. The day they met, she was a nurse in the Texas prisons. He was a prisoner, support service inmate. First day on her new assignment, working in the infirmary. They're called SSIs, which is a janitor service there. And there was four new ones came in that day. And they come bebopping down through the hall and started to the back of the infirmary. And I ask them just where they thought they were going. He says, "Honey, you did take my head off a time or two that day." So that was the first time I'd ever seen him. Was this the kind of thing where the first time you looked at him, you thought, "Huh, wonder who that is." No, no. She'd see him around, mopping, clearing out trash. And then, as always happens in these kinds of stories, fate threw them together, together in a situation where it was the two of them against the world. We worked together for a couple of months and then got into a situation that involved some real sticky stuff that I'd really rather not get real specific about. But he told me some information about some stuff that had taken place while I was out of the infirmary one evening. By the time I got through facing off people, it brought a lot of heat on both of us. And did the two of you actually blow the whistle on somebody in a way that officers got disciplined and punished? We blew the whistle, yes. The officer got a promotion instead of getting disciplined. They basically totally isolated us both, because I took the word of an inmate over that of an officer. And they don't like that. And nobody talked to the two of you? And so did that mean that you ended up having a lot of time alone with each other? Well, it ended up being we were the only two to talk to. We talked to each other. And I really got to know what kind of a person that he was, and that he will stand up for truth when other people will skirt around it. But he will face what's coming down, just so that the truth comes out, at great personal risk to him. Still, his crime? He was in for murder. He killed a man that raped his niece. And he's been given 25 years for that. It's drilled in our head all the time. Anyone that works there, it's drilled in your head that these people are out to con you. They're going to pull something on you. They're going to blackmail you into doing something. This is the prison system's way of looking at things. But not everyone that's inside the prison system is that way. That was one of my major problems, is I could not understand, and I could not treat them like they were animals. I just couldn't do it. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today in our program, for Valentine's Day, stories of forbidden love. Act One, Meet the Ball and Chain. What happens when you fall in love with somebody who you're supposed to treat like an animal? Act Two, Mucho Corazon. What happens when you fall for somebody that your country, your entire country, does not want you to live with? Act Three, a story of impossible love to end all stories of impossible love, or 1,001 one of them, anyway. Stay with us. Act One, Meet the Ball and Chain. When Anne Staggs started to fall for an inmate named Charles in the Texas prison system, she was up against odds as daunting as they ever get for two people. It was against the rules, possibly dangerous. Certainly, it could put her job on the line. They were never alone. They could never say anything in front of other people. And he was, not to put too fine a point on this, a convicted murderer. You know, in any relationship, there's some moment where somebody says to the other person, "I'm having these feelings." When was that moment between the two of you, and where did it happen? In the infirmary. I had been putting my medications on the computer, charting. And he came in. We'd been talking quite a bit that day. Anyway, he came in and said something to me. And I turned around and looked at him. And I said, "I love you." And he looked me right square in the eye. And he says, "No, you don't." And I told him, I said, "Don't you ever, ever tell me I don't love you." I said, "I didn't say I was in love with you. I said I loved you." And it took him a while to accept that, because he was of the opinion at that time that he didn't think he was worthy of being loved. And about two days later, he came back and told me that he loved me, too. I was sitting in the nurse's station with my head down, charting, when he walked in there. And I looked up and said, "Hi." And he looked at me. He said, "Hello." And I went back to charting. And he said, "I love you." And I said, "Thank you." Wow. How very businesslike. Well, under the circumstances, with other people all around, it kind of had to be. How much time was it between him saying that he loved you and you actually kissing? About a month. And if you're willing, I mean, I don't mean to pry too much if you don't want to talk about this. But what were the circumstances of you actually kissing the first time? At 5 o'clock every day, we give the insulin to the diabetics. How romantic. No, that's not romantic. And someone had stuck their size 14 foot right in the middle of the sheet on the gurney. And I mean there was a big footprint right there. And I hollered at him and asked him to come change the sheet on the gurney. And while he was changing the sheet on the gurney is when I took the opportunity to kiss him. And I was the one that instigated it. Was he surprised? Yes. He seemed very surprised. So how'd it go? Wonderful. Very, very, very sweet. I would love to be able to put my arms around him right now. It progressed from there. Other than the hugs and the kisses, there was never any other sexual activity, period. There just couldn't be. That's just absolutely the way it was. It just couldn't be. It sounds like you were in a situation where there's no possibility of privacy at all. If we got a minute to talk by ourselves, that was unusual. When was the next turning point in your feelings? When did you understand that things had gone to another level? It was about the 1st of February. We were standing in the exam room, talking about something. He was cleaning and I was doing something else. And this blond guard walked in, who had never been in the infirmary unless she had to be, come in and asked for a cup of coffee. He always kept a big pot of coffee going in the back. And when he left the room with her to get her a cup of coffee, I could have just easily pulled her head off and told God she died. And that's when I realized I was in way over my head, and there was no denying the fact that I was in love with him. It had gotten to the point that I knew that we would eventually be discovered, simply because I really had a problem staying away from him. And the security staff watches you like hawks. So it was inevitable. Do you think it makes it more intense, the fact that your feelings were forbidden for each other? Oh, definitely. You can talk to any woman or any inmate that has developed a relationship under the circumstances that ours was developed. And they will tell you beyond belief that the intensity of the relationship and the intensity of the feelings is far beyond anything that we've ever experienced before. I know several of the women that are married to inmates, and they'll tell you the same thing. Now you've been married before too, yeah? Yes. I was married for 26 years. And this is more intense than-- Oh, yes. I have discovered that I never knew what being in love was. Do you worry that your feelings are still idealized because you just haven't had the time to spend with each other alone? To a point, yes. There's going to be a lot of adjustments to be done whenever we finally get to be together. And so what happened next? On February 23, a guard came in. And he and I were standing back by the refrigerator fussing. He was getting ready to go back to his cell. And it was a few minutes until I got off work. And we were talking and cutting up. And she reported that she had caught us kissing, which she did not. That don't mean I hadn't kissed him. At that point, she did not catch us kissing, OK? And a little while later, after he went to his cell, the lieutenant brought him back to the infirmary to do his PHD physical, which was a Pre-Hearing Detention physical. Which means he's in big trouble. And I asked him what they were bringing him down there for, and they said that he was under investigation. And I did his physical. And I kept telling him, I'm sorry. I knew whenever she came in and looked at us the way she did that she was going to report us. And I kept telling him I was very sorry that it was coming down, because I knew that it was really going to be bad on him. Wait a second. Let me be sure I've got this right. So he's about to get punished for kissing you and being close to you. And the first part of the punishment is that he's sent to you to be physically examined? Yes. Does this not strike you as being kind of an odd thing, that he's about to be punished essentially for the two of you touching, and the first moment of the punishment is he's sent to you alone for you to-- Oh, he wasn't alone. The lieutenant was with him and sneering the whole time. Oh, OK. Understood. I was allowed to leave the unit that night. Then I was called back onto the unit about 10 o'clock the next morning. And I spent a couple hours in interrogation with the internal affairs people. What'd they ask and what'd you tell them? There was a lot of questions. They ask about the sexual activity, which there was none. They ask if I had been bringing contraband in to him, which there was none. They wanted me to tell them every sordid detail. And I was not real cooperative in that area. Do they even ask you about your feelings for him in that situation? Yes, they did. They do. How exactly do they ask? Do they actually ask the question, "Do you love him?" Yes. And did you admit to loving him? Yes. Yes, and then they insisted that I write my resignation. Did you get a chance to say goodbye to him? No. They gave him a year on medium custody. And they put him in the fields to work. Now when they were talking to him and interrogating him, internal affairs had told him that after it was all over with, and after everything calmed down, that he would be able to put me on his visiting list and I would be able to see him. He put me on his visiting list in September. And my birthday's in October, so he wrote and told me that I could come see him the week after my birthday. When I went in to see him, they would not let me see him at all. One of the officers there recognized me and told me that I could not visit with him. They stopped him, gave him a major case. And he started his one year over again in medium custody. So he was actually on medium custody for 19 months. So you didn't even see him for a moment? No. No, they never let him out of the building to come to the visitation area. What rule was he violating at that point? You were no longer a prison employee. One of the officers lied and said that they had given him a direct order for him not to put me on his visiting list. They wrote him a major case on disobeying a direct order. And my husband had never gotten a case before, had never been in any problems, no disciplinary problems before. And it still hurts my pride. The next letter that I got from him, of course, he was really upset because they had stopped the visit. And then in the very next letter, he asked me to marry him. He said he had wanted to do that at visitation. But since they are not going to let us visit, that he wanted me to marry him right then. And were you surprised? Yes. The fact is when I was reading the letter, I went to crying. I was very, very happy at that point. And a girlfriend of mine who was already married to an inmate was there with me. And she kind of got upset, because she thought there was something else desperately wrong. Whenever I told her that he had asked me to marry him, she says, "Well, are you going on?" I said "Well, of course." How does it work? Does he basically just sign something, and you sign something, and then you're married? No. He sent me what is called a proxy paper out, saying that he intentionally asked me to marry him, that he wants to marry me. And there's some other stuff on it. And then I have to take that and his identification papers and obtain the marriage license. And you know that we got married right here on the radio station. And my deal about doing it that way is I wanted my husband present at our wedding. And that was the only way that that was going to happen. So then the marriage takes place on the Prison Show on KPFT in Houston. And the host of the show, Ray Hill, stands in as proxy for Charles, who's still in his cell somewhere. My name is [? M. O. Johnson. ?] I'm pastor at Rose of Sharon Baptist Church. And I am glad to be on this program to do this wedding. I told Sister Anne that this is the right thing to do. It was fantastic. At that point in my life, you could not have told me that this was not the most beautiful cathedral in the city of Houston. Well, now, let us start the ceremony. Brother Stagg, this is for you. Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God's holy ordinance, in the holy state of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor her, and keep her, in sickness and in health, for as long as ye both shall live? For Charles, by proxy, I do. Amen. And what did you hear from your husband? He wrote you and told you that he heard the wedding show. Oh, yes. What did he say about it? He repeated his vows right along with Ray. That's what he did when he was listening? Yes. And he was as thrilled with it as I was. Now, Sister Anne, wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband in the holy state of matrimony for as long as ye both shall live? I do. Amen. We will ask my brother to place this ring on Sister Anne's hand. And, my brother, you repeat this. As a pledge-- As a pledge-- --and in token of these vows-- --and in token of these vows-- --between us made-- --between us made-- It's such a strange thing to listen to, him taking the vow in proxy. It was. --the Holy Ghost. Amen. Amen. Amen. Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. Let us pray. It's also strange to hear a wedding ceremony where there's nobody there to kiss at the end. That part kind of got me. But I'm going to make up for it when he comes home. I promise you. I just have a message for Charles. Sweetheart, I love you very much. I can't promise you that I'll be around for the rest of your life. But I can promise you that I will love you for the rest of mine. And I just thank God that he brought us together. Thank you. Thank you, Anne. Are you worried that it's going to be different when he's out, and when you actually get a chance to be together? Sometimes, the fear of the unknown. But I know that our love will overcome all of it. It's so strange. It's a fear of the unknown with somebody who now you've been married to for quite a while. Yeah, we've been married a year now. That's right. You've had an anniversary. The 5th of December, we were married one year. And that's been one of the happiest years of my life. Even though they're married, Anne and Charles are still not allowed to see each other or speak on the telephone, because he's not been allowed to put her, still, on his official visitors list. At the time of our interview, he still had to serve between one and five years of his sentence. Coming up, other stories to hopefully break your heart for this Valentine's Day, in a minute from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle that theme. Today's program, for Valentine's Day, impossible loves. Stories of people kept apart who think that they should be together. We have arrived at act two of our program. Act Two, Mucho Corazon. In any love story, there always has to be some thing, some moment, some device to bring the two people together. And this next story begins with a man in Amsterdam, Leon Perlee, and a woman in Cuba named Milades Sosa. And what brings them together from such different worlds is an instrument, a musical instrument. That's all it takes, my friend. The instrument in this particular case is a street organ, an antique street organ, big and made of wood. It doesn't have a keyboard or anything. You crank a handle and it works like a player piano, blowing air through holes in these long cardboard sheets. Leon has a small workshop in Amsterdam where he restores these. It's how he makes a living. It has to be punched with holes in a certain pattern. When a hole in the book passes over one of the keys, the key will jump up in the hole. And the note in the organ, which is connected with this particular key, will start to sound. And then the pipes will start to speak. OK, let's start the organ. In Europe today, these hand-cranked organs are ancient history. But as it turns out, a century ago, these European machines crossed the Atlantic. And these days, in Cuba, a street organ factory is still in operation, a factory caught in a bubble in time, still turning out these instruments. Naturally, Leon had to go see it for himself three years ago. So I was standing at Guarda la Vaca beach, white sands, blue sea, blue sky, people in swimming suits and bikinis. Yeah, it's very nice. And there was a big open-air tent. And there was an organ with a battery of percussions next to it, five people playing conga, bongo, timbales. And people were so impressed by it because it was just like a real orchestra which was playing. And it was marvelous. Well, my uncle, the one who works in the organ factory, told me that there was a group from Holland that was going to be at the factory. They were interested in organs. And they were going to have a party for those persons. He invited me to go there, but I was a little afraid. I didn't dare to talk to any foreigner. And then I think he said I could help translate. And he insisted. And I didn't want to be unpolite. And I went with him to the factory. I am sitting on a table with my uncle, having fun, drinking. And then all of a sudden, I see a big man, white skin. Ah, that look in his face, like a child. I felt my heart start to beat faster. There came a man towards me. And he tried to start a conversation. But he found out that my Spanish was just as good as his English. He asked me to wait. And he came back with a young lady with sunglasses on, and it came out that she was his niece. I took my glasses off. So I'm looking into his eyes. Something was happening in him. It's the same that is happening inside me. I could see it in his eyes. From the first moment she took off her glasses, I felt like coming home. Everything fell in its place. My soul was complete. It was just love at first sight. I just knew I was in love. We were talking. It was so nice talking. It was like if I had known him my whole life. It was great. I was forced to leave there, because we had to be on time at the airport. So I tried to extend the time of leaving as long as possible, but they were calling me [INAUDIBLE]. "Come on, Perlee, we have to go. The airplane is waiting." "Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's okay. I'm coming." Five minutes later, "Perlee, come on, now. We have to go." I saw the car leaving, and he was looking back and saying, "Goodbye." I hoped she would write me. But it was still unexpected. And I was happy about it. Because I hoped it was not just something which lasted one day, at least not from my feelings. I was sure about my case, but of course, you never can look into the soul of another person. "Cuba, August 31, 1995. Dear Perlee, first of all, my most sincere greetings for you and my wishes of prosperity. Before beginning this letter, I will tell you that I have missed you as if I would have met you since my childhood. Referring to me, I am 21 years old. I study at the training teachers college. So I will be a teacher soon. I enjoy dancing, reading, having new friends, traveling here in Cuba. It will be very nice to hear about you and your country. I know that in spite of being a small country, it's nice. Besides that, there is produced a delicious butter. My friend, you are not going to believe that I keep the postcard you gave me in a place where I can take a glance at it every time. It really brings good memories. Take care of yourself and write soon. Kisses, sincerely, Milades." So I hoped for it, and well-- this is something which you can touch. You can read it again. That was one of the best moments in my life. "Dear Milades, thanks for the nice letter. I received your letter the 10th of October. There is something on its way for you. Hope you like it. Love and kisses, Leon." And when he said there is something on its way for you, he meant Mucho Corazon. This is a music book he arranged with love for me. And the first page, you can see how he dedicated, wrote for me, that is, "From Leon, with love." It was in September, '95. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] The rest is just a piece of cardboard full of holes. He can't really take it. And I didn't know what to do with it. I don't have an organ. I have to go to the factory. This is the tune. These are the words to "Mucho Corazon." "I don't need a reason to love you, because my heart is so big." "September 23, 1995. Dear Leon, it was so nice to learn that you have not forgotten me. In fact, I was afraid about it." "Amsterdam, 20 September, 1995. Dear Milades, before opening your letter, I had to calm down myself because my heart was beating like crazy. And as I read it, it gave me a very warm and good feeling inside." "To be sincere, I have read it more than six times today. And now I decided to write back to you. Believing that you think of me, too, was one of the best things that could have happened to me." "Dear, dear, Milades, would you believe me as I told you that every night before I go to sleep, and in the mornings when I arise, I kiss your name on the letter? So you have to write back very soon, because it's wearing out very rapidly." "Can you imagine how I would feel if you came here again? Please, if possible, do it as soon as you can. It'll be great. Kisses, Milades." "A thousand kisses." The second time I went to [INAUDIBLE] was December 1995. I was scared because I didn't know what to expect from a man who lives in a developed country. I didn't know what he could expect from a girl from a small city in a poor country. I was really nervous. We didn't know anything about each other. It was just some letters. It sounds stupid. But I was really nervous to meet her again. I went to the airport. I saw him. I walked towards them. And Milades, she laid her hands on the window. And I put my hands also against the window. And I was laughing, because I have quite big hands, and her hands are rather small. It looked as if there was a baby hand laying in my hand. He was taken. Oh, his body was taken. I could feel it when he took me in his arms. I tried to give her a kiss in the taxi. But even that didn't work. She was just like a shy bird. I was voiceless. I couldn't say a word. He tried, but he was also nervous. They took me to my house. And I told my mother, "Oh, mama, I'm dying. I don't know what's happening." It was something completely new. What I was feeling, since I met him, I couldn't explain it. I couldn't sleep that night. And I was afraid also, because many girls were going out with foreigners for money. That was not my case, but I was afraid he and the rest of the people could think that. At one particular night, we went out together, I think some drinks at some bars. We were going hand by hand, talking. We had had a nice night. There was a couple behind us. And it was a young man with a girl. And he said, "Tu [BLEEP] [BLEEP] conmigo? Yo compro." It's, have sex with him, and he will buy it. I got quite angry about it. And I wanted to go after them. But Milades was keeping me from doing that. It's a problem of policy in the country. Every person thinks, when they see a girl with a foreigner, that she's a prostitute. The effect of the United States embargo in Cuba on people's daily life, it's hard at the moment. It's very hard. Of course, income is very low. And sometimes, people don't have to eat for one or more days. Girls, young girls, there are many who already have kids. And they don't have anything to give them for dinner. They use their body to earn money. At the university, when I started my relation with Leon, everybody knew about it. My classmates were saying that I shouldn't keep that relation, because people were saying that I was a prostitute, just because I had a relation with a foreigner. And then they changed towards me. It was like if I became someone else. It was like if I was betraying my country. I stayed there 'til the 29th of December. I was there two weeks. I still have the flight ticket. And as the plane left, I had problems to keep my eyes dry. These are words to the song, "Don't Leave Me Alone Again." "If you knew how I suffer when you go away from me, if you knew how I only live thinking of you, you'd come back to me, my dear love, mi amor querida." At that time, there was no light. It was a very dark period of my life. And I couldn't stand to my promises that I would be there in February. Then I extended the promise to, I think, May. And every time, yeah, I will be there. But every time, I had to excuse again because income was not that way that I could leave just like that. Most tourists who will go to Cuba are quite well-to-do, or have steady jobs with a steady income. And it's hard to explain that you can have many troubles. You have to take care about your company to save it from going under. Incomes were quite low. But I didn't know how to explain it to her. And I felt actually ashamed about it. I thought many things. I thought maybe he was just a tourist who came here to have fun. I regret what I thought, but I thought that. I didn't have any idea about his life or anything. What I had in mind was a European saying that he couldn't come. For me, they didn't have that kind of problems. For me, it was like another world. And I thought, perhaps I am not what he needs. But at a certain moment, I felt so miserable. And I didn't know what to write down anymore in my letters excusing myself about not being able to come over to Cuba and to be with her. I was so depressed and so-- I don't know if it's self-pitying or whatever. But I wasn't able to cope completely with the situation. And I didn't want to tell her about that, because I didn't want to make a bad impression. And I felt so miserable that, stupidly enough, I didn't write to her for about three months. I said in my house, I don't want to listen to his name again. I don't want anything that has to do with him. I'm too young to suffer this way. I want to forget him. "December 19, 1996. Dear Leon, hearing from you was a big surprise for me. To tell you the truth, I thought you would never write again. Indeed, there have been no change in my feelings, although I had decided not to write to you again and to forget about our relation, because I have already cried too much because you do not write. "I, too, have tried not to think too much of you. But I fail because my heart was stronger and would ride over my soul." "Do you think you are the only one who have problems? I have people saying whatever they want about me. I have even to stand them saying that I am a stupid bitch because I still think of you." "I have not been able to sleep yet because of a painful, guilty conscience. What a terrible time you have had because of me." "Remember that love is like a plant that needs to be watered every day. Lots of luck and happiness, and I suggest you to cheer up. This is not the end of life. Milades. If you think of coming before April, let me know it beforehand." "My dearest, dearest [UNINTELLIGIBLE]." He's so sweet. "I miss so much your mouth, your words, your kisses, your big hands. And in effect, I miss you all." It's crazy. He even wrote from the plane. "Honey, you can tell to your mother that I'm loving you more than before." "I'll kiss you in [UNINTELLIGIBLE] hours. I'll love you forever." I already decided to ask Milades to become my wife the first time I saw her. But I didn't do so until I thought time was right for it. We were walking around the city. It was afternoon. We decided to sit down in Parque San Jose. We were drinking Bavaria, a Dutch beer. And we were just talking. At a certain moment, I said to her, "What would you think about the idea to be my wife?" And she said-- Of course. I want to marry you. And I asked him, "Can you say it again? Can you ask again?" And so I repeated my question. I said, "Do you want to become my wife and live with me?" After she got back her breath, she said yes and started crying. So I had to wait again for the rest of the answer. But I can tell that it was very encouraging what happened. And we kissed. I was living in a cloud. We were both, together, living in a cloud. That is impossible. Holland is not an immigration country. I invited her to come here in March last year. That is impossible. 70%-- If you don't have enough income-- The request was denied by the authorities. With the Cuban government, it's no problem. She has the permissions which she needs to leave the country. But here in Holland-- in fact, in Europe-- it's getting harder and harder every day to have permits for strangers who want to come in to the fortress of Europe. My name is [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I am second secretary in the Netherlands embassy here in Havana, Cuba. I am [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And I am working at the Dutch Immigration Board. Well, in the Netherlands we have a restrictive admittance policy because we are just a small country. We don't have a lot of space and not enough jobs. And that's why we are carrying out a restrictive policy. So we just look at the rules, and whether they are in love is not really a criterion. Anyway, you can invite a Cuban person to the Netherlands if you comply with the requirements of the Dutch authorities. It only costs you a lot of money. The problem which I have to ask the authorities is that I can't show them on paper that I have a basic income. When you are in love, you don't think about politics. You think just like humans, without any borders, without authorities, because actually, every political system means a prison for people. And for Milades in Cuba, she had a lot of problems because she couldn't get any job. And, well, she has been feeling quite miserable. Here, there are rules. To work in certain places, you cannot have any kind of relation with foreigners. I would like to work at the airport, for example, guide in foreigners. And that's something I applied to do. And I could do it. I have many classmates who have gone to the airport to work. And they are there. But if they find out I am with a foreigner, I cannot be there. It as if we become something dangerous. This was a present from him. He brought it in December, when he came. It's a music box with the shape of an organ. It's a nice present. I keep it with love. And the tune, it's "Tulips from Amsterdam." I love him. He is everything to me. And I know he loves me. I miss him a lot, every day, every minute, every second. And I will be patient now. We will wait. And we will be together. I hope it's soon. Act Three, Who Deserves What. The story of The Arabian Nights is actually 350 or 400 stories, depending on how you count them. Many of the stories are stories of impossible love, including the very last story in the whole epic tale, the story of Jasmine and Almond. Mary Zimmerman is the Chicago director who adapted The Arabian Nights for the stage. There are two lovers who meet in a dream, actually. The girl has a dream of someone. And at the same time, a prince in a faraway place-- he gives some milk to a dervish who asks him for some milk from a cow he's tending. And in gratitude for this, he describes this beautiful woman who's perfect for him, who happens to be the woman who had a dream of him. So he goes to the other kingdom. He wanders around. He's sort of in disguise. He sort of looks like a shepherd, because he's actually out of his mind with grief, because he can't find her. He's afraid he won't find her. She similarly has fallen ill. And all the doctors in the kingdom are coming in, trying to cure her. But nothing will help, and she won't say what the matter is. And then one day, her maid comes to her and says, "There's a shepherd outside at our gates, and he looks like--" and he proceeds to describe him, which is exactly as how he appeared in her dream. And so she runs to her father, who she's never asked anything from before, and begs him to hire this particular shepherd. And he does. And so things come about, they go about. Now so far, it seems like we're heading on our way to a very happy story. Yeah, but things get in the way. For one thing, he's disguised as a shepherd. And she's a princess. So there's a conflict already there. She's supposed to stay behind the curtain of the harem, which she doesn't do. And so one day, she decides to take lunch to him. She pretends she's just taking lunch to all the shepherds, but she serves it on silver dishes. And her uncle sees this, her calamitous uncle, who's so full of hatred of the world that all he wants to do is ruin everyone's happiness. And he always stops musicians from playing and stops people from being together, whatever else he can do, because he's so miserable himself. So he runs straight away to his brother, the father, and tells him about this. And the girl gets into a world of trouble. And she's sent behind the curtain of the harem again. And so they're going to actually marry her off to the son of the calamitous uncle, actually. So I will read it. "The desolate Almond, who had been clothed against her will in splendid robes and the gold ornaments of marriage, sat on an elegant couch of gold brocade, a flower upon a bed of flowers, silent as a lily, motionless as an idol. She seemed as one dead among the living. But Jasmine, who had come with the other servants to the bridal of his mistress, gave her hope to drink from a single glance of his eyes. Surely the looks of lovers can say 20 things. When night came, and the princess had been led to the marriage chamber, destiny turned a fortunate face to the lovers. Taking advantage of the little moment before her bridegroom should come to her, Almond glided from the chamber in her gold robes and fled to Jasmine. These two delightful children took hands and vanished, more lightly than the dew-wet breeze of morning. Nothing has since been heard of them or their abiding place. There are few upon this earth worthy of happiness, worthy to take the road which leads to happiness, worthy to draw near the house of happiness. Mary, what do you make of the fact that there's this long, long plot that goes for pages and pages and pages, and then suddenly, they get to this moment. And rather than invent something to happen, the narrator just has them vanish, just suddenly, poof, you know? I guess it maybe demonstrates a kind of faith in the possibility of miracle, or the possibility that there is, in fact, destiny in who you love. And that that place that we're always torn between-- is this a random event that I've met this person? Or this is actually the person where it's written somewhere or told somewhere, in this case, is the other part of myself? The ending of this story really manifests that longing that it is divine and that there is destiny. Mary Zimmerman teaches at Northwestern University. And let's close out this program with a moment from another story in The Arabian Nights, Aziz and Aziza, another story of impossible love. He stands her up on their wedding day. After that, in her love for him, she helps him scheme to get another woman. And then she dies for her love, dying with a poem. She says things like, "Your careless head upon my heart lay nesting and dreamed another woman while I wept. So dig my grave deep, and put these words above-- she fears not death, for she has known love." Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel, Julie Snyder, Nancy Updike, and me. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Sylvia Lemus, and Todd Bachmann. Our story, Mucho Corazon, was produced by Chris Brookes and Michelle Ernsting for the World Views series of first-person narratives from Homeland Productions. The editor was Sandy Tolan. It was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Radio Netherlands. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who describes managing our show this way. The intensity of the relationship and the intensity of the feelings is far beyond anything that we've ever experienced before. I'm Ira Glass. They never let him out of the building to come to the visitation area. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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We're supposed to smell the roses, notice the sunsets, live life to the fullest. But this is not always possible. In fact, it's not always advisable. Robert says that he began the part of his life when he felt the most alive a few years ago, when he was on a trip to Ireland. He attended a horse jumping competition in a big stadium. It was a great international competition. And they had Ireland, of course, was there. And Britain and France and Italy and Germany, and Australia, I think, was there. Well, I was watching that. And I was thinking, "Well, God, what do you want me to do with my life?" And so I was at the International Jumping Derby, and I noticed that the United States wasn't there. And so I took this as a message from above that I should do something to improve the riding program in the United States. I felt that I was struck by a bolt of lightning of sorts, a kind of a psychic bolt of lightning. I said, "This is what God wants me to do." And so that was my mission, was to improve the riding program of the United States. At that time, Robert had already suffered from a few bouts of psychosis and delusion. One time, he thought a light bulb in his closet was giving him special messages from God. Another time, he believed he was an angel with special powers, sent to help mankind. But saving the US equestrian team, there was something so earthly about that, so modest. Robert loved horses, loved to ride. And one thing led to another. And before long, he was the nation's number one salesman of US equestrian team t-shirts and caps and paraphernalia. He would get the stuff from a wholesaler, go to horse shows, sell it to horsey enthusiasts, trying to drum up support for the cause, all without any official sanction or authorization of the US equestrian team. It was exciting. He traveled all over the country, met people, talked about his mission. At one point, he became convinced that the way to save the US equestrian team would be to involve the US military. Because this is who rode-- when I went to the jumping festival in Ireland, the military, or a military program, represented Ireland, and they won. And so I thought the United States should do the same thing, that we should have military riders and military equestrians represent the United States. So I decided that I would write a letter to Senator Sam Nunn, who was very familiar with defense activity. And I wrote him a letter saying as politely as I could, do you think that the US Army could come up with an equestrian team. And actually, he went off, and his staff researched it for me. And they came back. And I got a letter from somebody in the Pentagon. And they said, "No, I'm sorry. We can't include equestrian in our sports program. We don't have the resources." After a few years, Robert's mission started to fall apart. He was losing money. The people running the US equestrian team let him know they didn't actually want him to save them. So he stopped. And when he looks back on those times these days, he said it was like he was too alive back then, too alive. He says back then, he had a sickness that made him believe every idea with complete conviction, that made him act on every inspired notion that entered his head. Now, he works a normal job, sleeps normal hours, commutes a normal commute, takes medications which protect him from fits of mania. I think I was a lot more creative when I was slightly manic. In a way, I was certainly a little bit wilder and maybe a little bit more fun. In fact, when he and acquaintances who suffered through similar kinds of mental illness get together, sometimes they'll all reminisce about the old days, before they were medicated. Oh, yeah. We all talk about how many times we've been arrested or something like that. That's conversation. We talk about the goofy things we did. "I got arrested. I remember that. The police was very nice. But I broke a vase, and he took me to the hospital." And we talk about our hospitalizations. And I do reminisce a little bit about it. It was fun. We had a lot of fun and went all over the country and had friends. And it was kind of exciting, sure. But now I'm socked in a schedule of being responsible and going to work every day. And these things are not fun compared to running around the country and going to horse shows. Those were more fun. But this is what I've chosen to do. It doesn't just happen among people who are medicated, the desire to avoid the highs and lows of a frantic life. Many people choose a steadier life, a duller life, because it's also a saner life, or because it's all they can manage. Today on our program, Avoiding the High Cost of Living, people stepping back from one big life experience or another, and why that may be the only possible choice sometimes. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our program today. How to Avoid the Everyday Irritations of Everyday Life. Jack Hitt talks to a woman who stumbled onto one way, accidentally and against her will. Act Two, How to Avoid the Difficulty of Living With Someone, in which we hear a philosophical defense of baby talk among adults, that's right, baby talk among adults. We hear the grisly details. And do not pretend that you have not been there, my friend. Act Three, How to Avoid Everything. Writer Dani Shapiro explains how a 22-year-old can avoid facing all the important facts about his or her own life. Stay with us. Act One, How to Avoid the Everyday Irritations of Everyday Life. No one is in a better position to talk about deadening yourself to life than someone who was forced to do it by nearly dying. Jack Hitt tells the story. Back in the 1980s, when Charlene Riling was just out of college, her life was consumed with being a jock. She played basketball until midnight and could always be counted on for a pickup game of baseball or softball. She especially loved her beautiful yellow and purple Bottechia racing bike. It would be nothing to be riding on the Blue Ridge Parkway down in North Carolina and Tennessee, going down on your racing bike, 50, 55 miles an hour. I don't know that I would do that today. So, yes, I felt very invincible and, in that sense, very confident, really that fearless mentality. Which right now, I have to say, subsequent to everything that happened, I've really lost that. In 1981, Charlene's father died. She'd always thought of him as her best friend, and it almost seemed destined to be that way. He was Charles. She was Charlene. They had the same birthday. She was devastated. Then her girlfriend left her. She started to drink a good bit more and lose herself in the bar scene. A couple of times, she and some friends shot up cocaine for a nice, potent, '80s-style high. Then she cleaned up, went to AA. Years later, in the summer of 1988, the invincible Charlene came down with a weird flu she just couldn't shake. It went on for weeks, then months. She had her suspicions, which flared into a private panic when she found out that a guy she'd shared needles with was positive for HIV. She screwed up the courage to go to the county health department to get an anonymous test, and returned on a cold, gloomy day to receive the results. I remember sitting out in this big, open waiting room. And there wasn't really anybody in there. And I don't remember how many minutes, but it wasn't that long after sitting down that I was told that I was positive at that time. The counselor then proceeded to go on to her own little religious agenda, going on to say that Jesus Christ heals all those who repent their sins, referring to my lesbianism as being a sin, and that people are cured of AIDS. And AIDS is a sinful disease, and that's how people get it. But you can be cured of it if you repent your sins. And it felt like the longest period of my life, being in there, just feeling like you're in one of those little snowy glasses filled with water, and somebody just shook it up. And your head's spinning. And everything's going on. And you want to get out of there, but you can't. And I just felt very trapped. And then she started talking about this church called Hope Ministries. And Hope Ministries is a place that will convert people from being gay to being straight. And she tried pretty hard to get me to Hope Ministries. And I just took the piece of paper and just left. Never saw the counselor again, never went to Hope Ministries. And that was it. I remember the doctor starting the AZT, started on 500 milligrams. And all this bloodwork was being done. And so my whole life, socially, changed. My social, economical class changed. And did you stop working during this time? Yeah, I actually stopped working just shortly afterwards. So you're 30 years old, and you're forced to retire? Right. And work was the most-- to me, my job was the biggest part of-- it was really my identity, the computer person or computer geek. I loved computers before I ever saw what a computer looked like. I just loved it. It was exciting. And it was about to come out from underneath me very quickly, what my whole life was built on. So you end up with migraines. AZT is known to cause migraines, debilitating migraines. Just bury your head under a pillow, no light. You can't move for days. And they were just awful. My muscles had reached a point where they had atrophied. My hands had closed into a fist. My hand was closed, like clenched, like a fist. I could use my finger and my thumb to barely write with. And it looked probably like cat scratch. It wasn't even legible. And I was also having real chronic and debilitating diarrhea, couldn't even make it to the bathroom. And at some point, Prednisone was introduced, which causes muscle wasting and a host of other side effects. And then the combination of all the other medications, in July of 1991, I was admitted to the hospital for changes in mental status. I was diagnosed as having AIDS dementia, AIDS-related dementia. Everything, on one hand, seemed hurried. Death seemed much more inevitable than it just does in daily living. We don't really think about it. We don't plan for our death. But I had gotten a dog during that time. He's a beagle. His name is Sam. He's nine years old now. And it's like Sam knew. Because Sam was around me the most, because he was home, and I was home. And it's like I can remember being in bed and crying, just being so afraid of dying. And I couldn't talk about it with my mother. And I really wanted to. But I knew how my mother felt about death. And I didn't want her to know that I was afraid. And my biggest fear was what was going to happen with Sam. I used to think about-- Sam used to get so excited when I'd walk in the house. You'd think I was gone for months. I would be gone for a half a day. And it would be like he'd go nuts. And when I came home from the hospital one time, the July '91 hospitalization, and a couple of friends dropped me off. And Sam went nuts all over me. And I kept thinking to myself, when I'm gone, I'm not going to walk back in that door again. And Sam's going to just be waiting for me to come in. And I'm not going to come back in. And I know people might say, "Oh, it's just a dog," but-- Charlene prepared to die. The doctors doubled her AZT and told her she had six months to a year to live. She wrote a will at age 31, appointed an executor to her estate, made arrangements with a hospice to care for her. She said goodbye to all her friends, gave away all her most valued possessions. I remember when you walked into my little beach cottage, on the right hand wall, I had all my bicycle racing numbers. And this whole wall was just all bicycle memorabilia kind of thing, and pictures of me from when I used to ride and race. And I had kept that up. But I remember one day when I knew that I was never going to be riding again and never be racing again, and just let that anger set in. And I remember just taking all that stuff down, and probably not very gently either, and just feeling like, "That's all gone. It's all gone, and it's never going to happen again." And I just couldn't look at it anymore. It was too painful. In her final days, in a lot of pain, Charlene sought out a renegade physician named Gary Blick in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was known for helping AIDS patients get access to often unorthodox therapies. Her regular doctor suggested she avoid him, called him a quack. But she was desperate. So she got her friend, Jamie, to drive her down there. And Dr. Blick, as with each new patient, gave her a full workup, including basic blood tests. And I remember sitting there, next to Jamie. And we're both sitting in Gary's office. And you sit out, and you look out. And you see the trees out in the back. And I remember it was a sunny day. It was in spring and everything. There was life outside. And sitting there with Jamie, and Dr. Blick sitting there and telling me, "I have good news for you." And he sat there and told me this good news, that I didn't have HIV, and I didn't have AIDS. And I just sat there like, "This can't be." I've been told this. My whole life's been planned about this. You know what I'm saying. Did you just assume that he was wrong? Or did you immediately believe him? No, I don't know. I don't think that I immediately-- I just couldn't. How do you take one day and compare it to three years? One of the classic stages of dying is denial, refusing to accept that you actually have AIDS, fervently believing that the doctor will step out of the lab and say, "Oh, sorry. It's all been a big mistake. You don't have AIDS." And that is precisely what happened to Charlene, after living as an HIV-positive woman for three years. It turned out that back when she first got tested for HIV, the woman at the county health department had deliberately lied to her, told Charlene she was HIV-positive when in fact, the test was negative. She was hoping that Charlene would come to the little ministry church in town and be healed of both her lesbianism and her AIDS. Then, of course, she'd be a documented, verifiable miracle for Jesus. I just broke down and just cried and cried and cried, and just couldn't believe it that I had been betrayed. And I really had been lied to, and that this whole illusion was created for religion, to prove a point, to get me to go to Hope Ministries, to convert from being a lesbian to being straight, and then probably to be set up to be retested again and be told I was negative. It was more than just losing three years of my life. There was a whole identity and a whole life built around a person with AIDS. I have lived as a person with AIDS. It's the medications that were prescribed, the diagnosis, all the events that took place, AIDS Buddy, AIDS Interfaith, living positively. My whole life was lived as a person with AIDS. The AIDS drugs were so powerful, they'd given her the symptoms of a person with AIDS. In addition to AZT, Charlene was fed very powerful steroids, which can bring on dementia-like states. But now she had to be weaned off her complicated drug regimen. Cold turkey would definitely kill her. So she spent a year tapering off her prescription drugs until she could once again enter normal life. But how does one do that? When Charlene found out she was destined to die, she discovered huge institutions ready to help her, the church, the hospices, the AIDS buddy groups. But now she was told to make a U-turn, to go back to the living, to abandon all her moribund friends, to forget the big philosophical questions and return to a life where she could buy a car and sweat out a mortgage, where she could take a lover safely and get annoyed with her, argue with her about the bills and feeding the dog and cleaning up after dinner and mowing in the back yard. Looking back on it all from a nice, cozy room in a new house in Connecticut, she said in many ways, it was easier dying. You know, you start letting go of life's little things that might have set you off or whatever. Those things in life seemed just so insignificant. There was something much bigger than that that was happening. The work that it took to get to the edge, and to have gotten really to the end, essentially, to get that far and then to be pulled back. There was one part of me, that wait-- there's some simplicity here. There's some peacefulness here. There's no more insanity of the world and people's politics and people's pushiness, and their beliefs. I work hard to keep my life simple today. But I wanted to keep it as simple as it was in that preparation for dying. And you can't do that and live in the real world at the same time. Jack Hitt, who put that story together, is a contributing editor to This American Life. Coming up, the social uses of baby talk. That's baby talk among adults. Brace yourself, because it's just one minute away, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and reporters to tackle that theme. Today's program, Avoiding the High Cost of Living. These are stories-- I realize, actually, I've avoided saying this because when you say it out loud, it sounds so depressing. These are stories about people who choose not to live every moment to the fullest, who choose to withdraw from life in some way, to make themselves numb, and stories about why that's sometimes the only choice possible. We've arrived at Act Two of our program, Act Two, How to Avoid the Difficulty of Living With Someone. "Cuteness," a friend with small children once said to me, "is what nature gives to our offspring so we don't kill them." Without cuteness, our species dies off. But then what is the function of cuteness among adults? Consider, please, the role of baby talk among adults. This is speech designed specifically and entirely for cuteness, shared in private. And as I've said, our program today is about all the things that we do to actually avoid experiencing our own lives. I would argue that baby talk, cute speech, is one way that we do that. People seldom discuss this in public. Our own producer, Nancy Updike, and her boyfriend, Chicago journalist Adam Davidson, agreed to step forward and speak the truth about the issue. You want a shortcut to the intimacy that used to come from just spending hours and hours talking to one another about our lives. Because when you're first falling in love, that's the only thing that you do, and the only thing that you want to do. And you make as much time as possible for just talking to each other. And then as the relationship progresses and other things reassert themselves, work or friends or whatever it is, then you have less time together. And you want to get that intimacy. And you don't have as much time. So you're trying to sort of make a shortcut to it. It happened so fast. In Adam and Nancy's case, they'd be going out only three months when, like twins, or people in captivity, or deserted tribes on remote desert islands, they began developing their own private language. At some point, they found that they were whispering to each other a lot. Well, I feel like that came about a lot on the phone, because Adam works at home. So he calls me a lot during the day, and I call him, too. And then we say, "Hi, how are you doing." And I'll say, "I got to go." And Adam will say, "No, don't go." And I'll say, "I have to go." "No, don't go." "But I have to go." "No." And the key is the whispering. The whispering, yeah. There's whispering. But it's also like baby talk, like, "No, don't want you to go." "Don't go." "Must go." "Don't go." And so you're doing that. So that starts on the phone, but then you find that it starts to creep to other areas of your life as well? Right. If you wanted to record baby talk, you'd want to put a mic over our bed when we're going to sleep, because that's when we do it the most. And then it's not baby talk, but it's hitting. There's a lot of-- Oh, this is a classic. I should just say that you just sort of hit her. I don't know how to describe-- But in a very sort of kid way to hit. Not like you'd punch someone. I'd come home at the end of the day and maybe turn on the TV. We're eating dinner and watching TV. And we're kind of quiet. And then all the sudden, Adam would just reach out and hit me a little bit. He'd be like "I like you." It was like you would do in first grade. And of course, now I hit back. And I yell, "I like you." And that's another whole voice, which is different, like, "I like you." Like I'd be operating the thermostat. And Nancy would be like, "Could you turn it down?" And I'd say, "No, it's too cold." And she'd be like, "No, it's the other cold. It's too hot." And that's a whole genre. Did you mean "turn it up"? "No, I meant the other up, down!" This is definitely the most embarrassing thing that I've ever talked about in public, without any question in my mind. What's amazing is that you talk about sex in public. You talk about money in public. But this, why this? Because it's completely uncool. There's nothing cool about it. There's no way to make it cool. You can be outrageous about sex. Or you can make fun of either having a lot of money or having no money. There are ways that you can talk about those things that you can preserve some corner of dignity. But baby talk is completely without any cool or dignity or any sort of redeeming social value. It is truly a dirty little secret, much more than sex. And it happens in this protected space, namely privacy. Right, right, exactly. And it's a bit strange, because it's this very performative speech. It is a performance. It's like kabuki. You do it the same way every time. And everyone knows the next move. But it's this performance for one person. And then there was this thing where one of us was nicknamed "Schnookie." Oh my god, we cannot, we can't-- Nancy would always know which one was, and I would always forget who-- Well, there was-- OK, if we're going to do this-- One of you had a nickname. And there were only two of you in the relationship, and you couldn't remember which was which? No, no, no. One was Schnookie. And then the other one, of course, it's Schlumpy. Because one of you is Schnookie, so logically, the other one must be Schlumpy. Tears of embarrassment are springing to my eyes. But then that becomes a whole thing. Like, "No, wait, are you Schnookie? Hey, Schnook. G'night, Schnook." I remember that we were lying in bed together. And we were going back and forth. We were just talking before going to sleep. And we were going back and forth in one of the ways that we had at that time. "You're taking the covers." "No, you." "I want that blanket. No, that blanket, the other blanket, the one blanket." "Come here, Schlumpy." "Oh, Schnookie." Whatever it was. And I just felt like I was going to cry. I just felt so full of despair. And I said, "Can we stop talking this way?" And then, what did you say? Well, I remember feeling like been a tough few weeks. Each of us had had a lot of tough times in work, and didn't have a lot of time together, because we were so busy. And I remember it had been days of just me feeling like, "I don't even know her, and she doesn't know--" And when you're that close, you just feel like, "I don't know me." And I just had wanted to say something about this baby talk for so long. But first of all, I couldn't think to say anything outside of baby talk. And second of all, I thought it would really hurt her. And so when she said it, it was just, what a relief. And I remember beginning to talk like, "You're right. We should talk in a serious way." And it was like finding a new mouth and finding a new tongue and finding a new way of moving all of it and expressing myself that felt, in a way, more false than the baby talk, just because it felt unpracticed and artificial and deliberate. You know, when you're in a couple, you're both actually in a couple. And then you're pretending to be in a couple at the same time. Yeah, totally. Yeah, we've talked about this. You have? What do you say? I think it's really nice to pretend sometimes. Like sometimes, being in a mature relationship is just not what I want to do, because pretending does have its advantages sometimes. Pretending does let you avoid things for a couple days, which sometimes is what you need and is OK. I think fake intimacy that seems real is much easier, and it's much more seamless. Because there's nothing to disrupt the flow of it. You never get angry, and you never hate each other. And you're never just annoyed. And you're never bored. And you're never anything that would interrupt that readout of intimacy. Nothing like that ever happens. And then, yeah, it's easier to pretend to be a happy couple than to be a happy couple. It's easier to baby talk. Yeah. Yeah. Did you feel and do you feel that you're actually in danger, that there's something that you could lose? Yes, definitely. And what is the thing that you could lose? The actual the substance of the relationship. That sounds too cold, but I felt like I'm losing this person that I fell in love with and that I am in love with. When I'm in that kind of baby talk, pretend intimacy, it's impossible to imagine real intimacy and real connection, or just a real conversation. Even in my mind, I think of it through that baby talk. Just remembering, real conversations are suddenly baby talk conversations. "I want a good relationship." "No, I want a good relationship." Well, I remember when this happened, the first time it happened, because of course, now it happens twice a week. It happens twice a week that you actually have to say, "Oh, wait, now I will be an adult again"? I think it depends. We're pretty-- Really? Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. You mean that the pull of this sort of fakey-- No, it 's a chronic condition, definitely. It's like TB. Once you test positive, you have to always watch for it. Because it's just like a warm bath. It's the easiest thing in the world to do. It's just like falling down and just hitting the ground. It's like a vaudeville routine that the two have you been doing together for 30 years. He says his line. You say your line. The audience laughs. Everything happens the way it's supposed to. Nancy Updike and Adam Davidson. Act Three, How to Avoid Everything. It's possible to turn off your emotions and go into autopilot for brief periods with the person you love. And it's also possible to shut your feelings down completely, as in this memoir from writer Dani Shapiro. Here, in no particular order, are some things Lenny told me. That he and his wife didn't sleep in the same bed, that they hadn't had a real marriage in years. That she was undergoing electroshock treatment in a clinic outside Philadelphia. That he had cancer and had to fly to Houston three days a week for chemotherapy. That his youngest daughter, age three, had a rare form of childhood leukemia. That he could not get a divorce for all of the above reasons. That he was heartbroken that he could not leave his wife and marry me. For a long time, I believed him. With every bone in my body, I trusted that Lenny Klein was telling me the truth. When we talked about it, his jaw would tighten, and his big brown eyes would fill with tears. His voice would quaver with pent-up, complex feelings that I couldn't possibly begin to understand. Poor Lenny. I marveled that so many bad things could happen to one person. And I vowed to take care of him. Writing late at night in my extensive journals, I exhorted myself to be a real woman, one who could step up to the plate and be good to her man in his moment of crisis. Years later, I hold Lenny's lies up to the light and examine my own reasons for believing what, in retrospect, seems preposterous. I reread my old journals and notice the way my girlish handwriting deteriorated into a scrawl as I wrote, "I have to be there for Lenny. He needs me, and he's going through so much. I don't know if I can handle it, but I have to be strong." I try to remember that Lenny was a trial lawyer, that he built an international reputation based on his own pathology, that he lied with an almost evangelical conviction. He prided himself on being able to convince anyone of anything. Paris, 1985. We are walking along the Boulevard Saint-Germain on a cloudless spring day. The rooftops of the Left Bank are creamy against a rare blue sky. And the air outside Cafe Flore smells of croissants and the acrid smoke of Gitane. But I don't notice. In Paris, in 1985, I only see what is within one square foot of me, too busy feeling the complicated stew of sensations being with Lenny provokes. I am hung over, floating on a wave of last night's Puligny-Montrachet and a four star dinner that wound up in the toilet of the Hotel Ritz. Lenny's arm is around me, thick and proprietary. I have not read a newspaper or spoken to a soul other than Lenny for weeks now. I've been living the kind of unbelievable life people glide through in airport novels. We have been to London, Monte Carlo, the Cote d'Azur. I have played blackjack in private clubs with oil sheiks, who asked me to blow on their dice for good luck. I wear dark glasses and haute couture suits, a gold watch, and a long, thick strand of pearls. I have no idea who I am. Lenny steers us onto a narrow side street off the Boulevard Saint-Germain and into a children's clothing store, filled with embroidered dresses my mother used to buy me as a child. He tells me he wants to buy a dress for his youngest daughter, the one with the rare form of leukemia. I help him look through racks of tiny dresses suitable for a three-year-old until we find one he deems perfect, a pale, yellow silk smock with a Peter Pan collar. He holds it up to the sunlight, and his eyes fill with tears. "She'll never live to outgrow this dress," he whispers, "my baby girl." He has layered his lies one on top of the other until they have become opaque, an elaborate construction resembling reality. He is fond of quoting probably the only line he knows from Franz Kafka. "White is black, and black is white," he often says with a sigh. I never knew exactly what he meant by this. But it seemed to have a lot to do with my life at the time. The lies had small beginnings. Lenny called me from a business trip and told me he was at Montreal Airport, waiting to catch a flight to Calgary. I checked with the airline and found out that the flight would take approximately five hours. So when Lenny called an hour later to say he had landed in Calgary, I very calmly asked him where he really was. "Calgary," he said. "No, Lenny, really." He stuck to his story. In the time that I knew him, he never, ever changed his story midstream. I hung up on him and called his family's house in Westchester. When the maid answered the phone, I asked to speak with Mr. Klein. And when he picked up the extension, and I heard his rough, craggy "Hello," I screamed so hard into his ear that he dropped the receiver. He raced into the city. He let himself into my apartment and found me curled up in bed. He scooped me up and held me to his chest. His wife wasn't home, he told me. She was having shock treatment. And someone had to take care of his daughter. He hadn't wanted to tell me because he'd wanted to spare me, to protect me from the horror of his life. Surely I understood. "Shh, sweetheart," he murmured into the top of my head as I wept, my face beet red like a little girl's. "So many people need me," he said, "But I love you best of all." Two years have passed, and something has gone wrong, terribly wrong, with my life. I don't, in fact, think of my life as "my life," but rather as a series of random events that have no logical connection. I am no longer a student. I dropped out of Sarah Lawrence after my junior year, supposedly to pursue acting. And I'm actually doing a pretty good imitation of an actress. But I'm doing an even better imitation of a mistress. Lenny's been busy buying me things. I don't particularly want these things, but they seem to be what Lenny is offering in lieu of himself. So quite suddenly, overnight really, I find myself driving a black Mercedes convertible. And just in case I might be mistaken for anything other than a kept woman, I wear a mink coat, a Cartier watch, a Bulgari necklace with an ancient coin at its center. The Mercedes is a step down from the first car Lenny gave me when we had been going out for a month, a leased Ferrari. I don't know how to drive a stick shift, so the Ferrari was a bit of a problem. What I must have looked like, a 20-year-old blonde dressed like Ivana Trump, stalled in traffic, grinding gears, trying to find the point on the clutch to hold that ridiculous car in place. Lenny rented an apartment on a pretty little street in Greenwich Village, a furnished triplex with a garden, a fireplace, and a bedroom with a four-poster bed. He called it "our house," as if he didn't have another home with a whole family in it an hour north of the city. He kept half a dozen suits in the bedroom closet, and a brand new silk robe hung behind the bathroom door. There was an entire floor we didn't use, a large, airy children's nursery. My parents knew that something was up. They knew I was going out with somebody, but they had no idea who. I was drifting away from them. And they were letting me go. One night, I invited them over for dinner. I pushed all traces of Lenny out of sight. But of course, there were clues, a glossy brochure for Italian yachts, a humidor in the center of the coffee table, a man's Burberry overcoat on a hook near the front door. I cooked up a storm, and the place was filled with homey smells-- garlic, basil, coriander. It was winter, and the snow was piled up on the sills. Spotlights in the back yard shone on the landscaped garden, the redwood table, the Adirondack chairs, and the huge, terra cotta pots of last spring's dead geraniums. I had my father's favorite music, Dvorak's Symphony for the New World, playing on the stereo system. My parents rang the doorbell. They looked so solid standing on my front stoop, their cold, red noses poking out from above their mufflers. If nothing else, they looked like they belonged together. They were elegant and rangy, similarly proportioned, unlike Lenny and me. Lenny is thick as a linebacker, and I had become so delicate, the wind could have picked me up and blown me away. My mother strode into the brownstone as if it wasn't the weirdest thing in the world to be visiting her daughter in a lavish apartment with no name on the outside buzzer. My father trailed behind her wearily, as if setting foot on another planet. My mother entered the living room, flung her arms wide, and did an impromptu dance to Dvorak. "Tra-la-la-la," she trilled. My father and I hung back and watched, our faces crumpled into awkward smiles. We were used to it. In every family, there is room for only one Sarah Bernhardt, and my mother had assumed that role. It didn't occur to me that she was frightened, that this was a lot for her to take in, her college dropout daughter living in the lap of luxury. All I could see was her outsized self twirling around my living room in her fur coat and boots. I wanted a drink. I walked over to my mother and put a hand on her shoulder, and she spun to a halt. I took her coat and my father's and hung them above Lenny's raincoat by the front door. For the first time, I noticed there was a wreath made of twigs, a bit of Americana, on the wall near the kitchen. And I wondered if I could remove it quickly before my father saw it. Wreaths under any circumstances are as goyishe as it gets. Which would be worse for my father, imagining that I was with some powerful guy old enough to be my father, or the possibility that the guy wasn't Jewish? I wished I could reassure him, yes Daddy, he's Jewish. 23 years older than me, a pathological liar, married to a woman who knows nothing of me, and a Jew. I poured myself two glasses of chardonnay for my parents and a large vodka for myself. I figured that if the vodka was in a water glass, they wouldn't know the difference, especially if I drank it like it was water. My drinking had taken on a new urgency in the past few months. It was no longer a question of desire, but of need. I could not get through an evening like this without the armor of booze. I handed them their wine and directed them to the couch. On the coffee table, I had put out a plate of crudites and a bowl of olives. "Quite a place," my mother said brightly, her gaze darting around the room at the white brick fireplace with its wrought iron tools, the glass wall overlooking the garden, the soaring ceiling. My father stared at the fringe of the rug, glassy-eyed. He needed to be as numbed as I did to get through this night. "Thanks," I murmured, as if she was paying me a compliment. I checked on dinner, using the opportunity to gulp some wine from the open bottle in the fridge. Vodka and white wine was a combination I knew worked for me. If I stuck with the formula, things shouldn't be too bad in the morning, especially if I wasn't eating. And I couldn't see myself eating. The music had stopped by the time we all sat at the dining room table, but I didn't notice then. If I had, I would certainly have changed the tape, filled the air with something other than the tinny, lonely sound of our three forks scraping against plates. I pushed my chicken from one side of my plate to the other. My stomach clenched and growled in protest. It seems that my parents and I, after 22 years in each other's company, had run out of things to say. I already knew their views on the political situation in Israel. And we couldn't discuss my school work. I was no longer in school. My father pressed a corner of his napkin to his lips and murmured something about the food being delicious. My mother agreed. "My wonderful daughter," she said, shaking her head, "You've turned into such a little homemaker." I looked at my parents across the table. Is that what they really thought? How could they just sit there? Some small piece of me wanted my father to fling me over his shoulder and carry me, kicking and screaming, to the car he had parked outside. I secretly wished that they would drive me home, deposit me in my childhood bedroom, and feed me chicken soup and saltines. I wanted to start my life over again, but I didn't know how. In the face of the most tangible proof that Lenny had been lying to me all these years, I remained with him. "My little girl is dying," he would say whenever I noticed the discrepancies in his stories, or, "My children's mother is having electroshock therapy." When I couldn't take my own confusion anymore-- was Lenny lying to me? Was I going crazy? I decided to hire a detective to get to the bottom of it. By this time, my parents knew all about me and Lenny in theory, but it wasn't something we could talk about. When I think back to my younger self rifling through the New York City Yellow Pages in search of a private investigator, I feel like I'm watching a movie about someone else, a girl so clueless, she really didn't know that her desire to hire a detective was all the answer she needed. I chose a detective agency based on nothing more than its good address in the east 60s, a neighborhood filled with private schools and shrinks. "This isn't what you think," I told the detective. "I'm in a relationship with a married man, and I want you to find out if my boyfriend is cheating on me with his wife." At this, his eyebrows shot up. "Come again?" "He claims his wife is in a mental hospital. He told me he hasn't been with her in years." "And you think he might be lying," said the investigator. Did I see the laughter behind his eyes, or is my memory supplying it now? Because I simply cannot imagine a middle-aged man listening to an earnest, overdressed 22-year-old girl tell him that she thinks her boyfriend might still be sleeping with his wife. "Yes," I said. Days later, I got the proof about Lenny's lies. In tears, I called my mother. "Oh, darling, I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do?" "I don't think so." A pause. "Do you want me to call his wife?" My mother and Mrs. Klein had met each other at a few school functions back when none of this could have struck anyone as a remote possibility. "Yes," I said, "Call her." "I'll do it right now," my mother said. I sat by the phone and watched the minutes tick by. I pictured Lenny's wife answering the phone with a chirpy hello, and my mother's slow, steady explanation of why she was calling. I had set in motion a chain of events which was now unstoppable. More than 20 minutes passed before my mother called me back. "Well, I did it," she said. "You talked to her?" The world felt unreal, hallucinatory. "Yes. She called me a liar. She told me she has a happy marriage to a man who travels a lot, that he's on his way to California. And I said, 'No, he's on his way to see my daughter.'" My mother sounded proud of herself, immersed in the drama of the moment. "How did she seem?" I asked. "What do you mean?" "Lenny's wife, was she angry?" "No," my mother said slowly. "She just didn't believe me, Dani." I spent the rest of that day in a state of awful excitement. Something was going to happen. And when Lenny showed up that evening at the apartment we were still sharing in the West Village, I was ready. He put his bags down and gave me a hug. The phone rang. My mother had given Mrs. Klein the number at the apartment and suggested she find out for herself what her husband was up to. Lenny picked up the phone on the kitchen wall. "Hello?" I watched him. And for the first and only time in the years I knew him, he looked genuinely surprised. He didn't say a word. He just listened for a few minutes, then hung up the phone. "That was my wife," he said. I was silent. "How did she get this number?" I shrugged. "I have to go." "I'd imagine," I said faintly. My anger was giving me the fuel that I needed to stay strong, at least for the moment. When Lenny slammed out of the apartment, I was certain I would never seen him again. I knew the truth now. It was staring me in the face, in the concrete form of flight lists and photos. And he knew that I knew. And besides, the whistle was blown. What could he possibly tell his wife? This was it, I told myself, absolutely, positively, the end. It wasn't the end. Lenny still called 10, 12 times a day. He left messages on my answering machine. "Hello?" His voice filled my bedroom. "Fox, are you there?" Sometimes he didn't say a word. He would stay on the line for as long as five minutes, just breathing. Eventually, he did get to me again. And for the next year that we were together, three days here, four days there, my life became unrecognizable to me. I idly wondered what it would take to get me to leave him. I wondered about this over bottles of chilled white wine or heavy glasses half-filled with scotch. I was still wondering about it when I went to stay for a while at a health spa in California. The phone rang in my room one day. There had been a car crash on a snowy highway. My mother had 80 broken bones. My father was in a coma. They were lying in a hospital 3,000 miles away. And suddenly, in ways I could not have imagined seconds earlier, nothing else mattered. As I packed my bags, I remembered my mother twirling, dancing to Dvorak, through the doors of Lenny's brownstone, and the glassy look in my father's eyes. I prayed that my father wouldn't die disappointed in me. And I knew then what I had to do. Dani Shapiro, reading an excerpt from he memoir, Slow Motion: A True Story, published by Random House. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder, contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, and Sylvia Lemus. One of the two engineers who built this studio, I speak to you from today. [? Bill Mayers ?] is retiring this week. My voice comes to you through wires and faders and switches that he soldered into place, one by one, by hand, with his partner in crime, [? Al Mix. ?] He could not have been more generous and helpful and decent to work with. And we're sorry to see him go. If you'd like to buy cassette of this program, or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you know, you can listen to any of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who reminds you-- Jesus Christ heals all those who repent their sins. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Everybody who's taking the oath, stand up. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. And everybody speak up now, so we can hear your voice. I-- Hereby declare on oath-- Hereby declare on oath-- That I absolutely and entirely-- I absolutely and entirely-- Renounce and abjure-- Renounce and abjure-- All allegiance and fidelity-- All allegiance and fidelity-- To any foreign prince-- To any foreign prince-- Potentate-- Potentate-- State or sovereignty. State or sovereignty. That I will support and defend-- That I will support and defend-- The constitution-- Monday. US District Court in Chicago. The honorable Abraham Lincoln Marovitz presiding. 30 men women standing, taking the oath to become citizens. What would you say to somebody becoming a citizen of this country? So help me God. So help me God. Now shake hands with your neighbor on each side and congratulate yourself. Lets give a nice hand, folks. Sit down for a minute, now we can gab a little bit. There's not much a judge can do that pleases everybody, but this pleases me. And I'm particularly pleased to do this, because my pa and ma were immigrants, and my father's proudest possession was his citizenship papers. And the first few years at election time I suggest who he might vote for, he said don't tell me how to vote, I'm a citizen like you. Judge Marovitz is 93 years old. He still runs a citizenship ceremony only because he loves it. He's been part of the Chicago political scene going back to the bad old days of the original Daley machine four decades ago. His office is lined with signed photos of politicians of that era and luminaries. Jimmy Durante, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope. But there is something about welcoming people into this country that somehow conjures a picture of life here, evokes a picture of life here that is rosier than, for example, the grimy world of Chicago politics. It is as if, when welcoming people into this nation, we tell them not about the competitive, harsh realities of life here sometimes. Not the country we see around us every single day. But the country we want to believe this is. Every once in a while I'm introduced as a self-made man. And at 93, I've yet to meet one. Or a self-made lady. I've had help all my life. A little push from some, a big push from others. But a kind word from everybody. Reach out to help people. Do a little good deed every day. Regardless of their color, regardless of their religion. And don't judge anybody by the color of their skin or the church they go to. But reach out every day. Don't let a day go by. His citizenship ceremony is so moving that immigration officials, whose job is normally to enforce all the laws that make it hard for people to become Americans, immigration officials compete to be assigned to the naturalization ceremony. It's coveted. And they're only allowed to stay on the job for a limited time. A few months. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on this radio program, we choose some topic. Bring you a variety of stories on that topic. Today's program, Welcome to America. Stories of people arriving here, how they see us, how we think they should see us, and what they know about us that we don't necessarily know about ourselves. Act One, What do Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigmund Freud have in common? A true story of a group of Austrians who come to New York City to teach in the public high schools, and how their experience here is nothing like what Americans seem to think it will be. Act Two, Are Movies Stronger than Communism? A man flees Cuba, comes to America, always partly regrets it. His son embarks on a project to convince him that he did the right thing. Stay with us. Act One. What do Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigmund Freud Have In Common? Well, the New York City public schools consist of roughly 65,000 teachers, 1.1 million students. And the New York City public schools could not find enough math and science teachers for its classrooms. There's a shortage. Americans somehow do not want these jobs. Meanwhile, in the European nation of Austria, there was a surplus of math and science teachers. Somebody noticed these two facts. One thing led to another. And before long, there was a decision to import Austrian teachers to New York City. This summer, school officials began the hiring process with job interviews that they conducted by videoconferencing between City College in Harlem and Vienna. Writer David Rakoff has this account of the Austrians' welcome to America and of the platitudes about this country that people kept trying to force upon them. Any job interview is an awkward affair. Any job interview with a panel of five interviewers, even more so. How about a job interview with a panel of five interviewers, conducted in a foreign language, via transatlantic live video teleconferencing, complete with an echo and an audio delay with reporters from Nightline, the local TV news, and New York's major dailies watching? Two young men busily tape up a purple City College banner with packing tape for the news cameras' benefit. Everyone is nervous. Questions are repeated, slowed down. It all makes for very halting progress. A typical question. "Would you please tell us why you have decided to become a teacher?" Typical answer. [IN AUSTRIAN ACCENT] "Sorry. It's very hard to hear. I didn't understand you. Could you please ask again the question, please?" How much of an actual cultural gap is there between the two sides? Well, when asked what knowledge they had have of New York Schools, one woman answered that she heard, quote, "The kids were having guns and using drugs." But she doesn't seem overly concerned. It becomes clear that the Austrian teachers are hoping to come to New York out of a sense of adventure, to experience another culture firsthand, and to improve their English, although for the most part, they speak quite well. One fellow hungers for New York's multiethnic society. "I want to see the blacks. Where I am from, there is only one black people a year," is how he puts it. "Oh," one of the African-American principals whispers. "Vermont." Three of the men, when asked why they became teachers, innocently and unabashedly answered, "because I love children." I don't know that an American male would answer that question in that way, even if it were true. The final question has them all completely stymied. "Can you tell us anything else about yourself that should make us want to select you as one of our teachers?" Answering this kind of question is an acquired skill, even for Americans. You remember how it took at least three job interviews before you learned that maintaining unwavering eye contact and being hypomanically gung ho weren't just weird and arrogant. They were required. For the Austrians, trained in a kind of courtly European reserve, being asked to assert their sterling qualities in full voice seems truly baffling-- a trick question straight out of Alice in Wonderland. The best answer comes from the undisputed star of the day, Andrea Unger. With her doctorate in Genetics at age 28, perfect English, and blonde movie star beauty, she has all of us-- educators and reporters alike-- immediately am profoundly enslaved. This being a high school world that I have entered on this day, I am hyper-attuned to adolescent paradigms, and she seems to be that rarest of legendary creatures in high school pantheon-- the popular girl, beloved by students and faculty alike, who, in addition to being pretty and smart, is also nice. She's addressed as Dr. Unger. Scarcely four minutes into her interview, the borough superintendents are mouthing, "I want her," out of camera range. When asked her final, "Tell us why you're the best" question, she answers, "I don't know if I'm the very best, but I will do my best. And if that's not enough, I will do much better." We would follow her into the very mouth of hell, singing songs all the while. "See you in September," says one of the interviewers after she has left the room in Vienna. Let's play a word association game. One. Austrian teacher. Association-- that extraordinary opening shot. A camera impossibly placed in the Alpine ether, coming in ever closer to the mountaintop to finally focus and settle on the turning figure, her arms outstretched, face beaming, overwhelmed with joy and music, the young novitiate, Fraulein Maria. The Sound of Music. Maria von Trapp. Julie Andrews. As seen on television so many times that anyone can complete the following sentence-- "How do you solve a problem like--?" Two. New York City public schools. Association. Metal detectors, baggy jeans, box cutters, white flight. A futile, underfunded, ineffectual exercise in neglect. The last stop before entering the revolving door prison system. In part, it is these exact stereotypes, the guileless, defenseless foreigners being used for target practice by young toughs, that have so piqued the interest of the national media. And it is these very stereotypes that I will find debunked time and again over the next five months. The reporter from ABC asks all the questions that are on the minds of those of us not in public education. They are, verbatim, "New York is one of the toughest places to teach in this country. Are you up for challenge?" "New York is a very diverse city, and there are students from various different countries, and almost anywhere you teach, you'll find students of various backgrounds, various ethnicities. Is that going to be very different for you?" "You, no doubt, have heard about a string of rather unfortunate incidents we've had in the past school year. Students shooting other students in school. Are you aware of that, and did that at all affect your decision to do this?" All of this takes place at City College, where, for generations, immigrants made their start in this country. And all of this takes place in New York, a city which had not one of the much-publicized school shooting sprees of the past year. The posters in California Lounge at the Delta terminal of Kennedy airport are, paradoxically, of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Perhaps the only thing that seems authentically California to me about the California Lounge is how boring it is. I and 13 other newspeople wait for the Austrians get through customs. The teachers' union has issued this deadpan statement. Quote, "We're pleased they're here, but it's regrettable that New York doesn't pay its teachers more." Unquote. The starting salary for a teacher in New York City's $29,600, which is a living wage in this town, but not fat city, by any means. Those same two young men from City College come in with that same purple banner, and try to tape it up on the wall, to no avail. When eventually the teachers arrive, my heart races a bit, as if I were in the presence of major celebrities. This is especially true when I see Andrea. I'm also shocked by how young they all look. They're all in their twenties. This only increases by fear for them. Just listen to the poker-faced reporter. My name is Andrea Unger. How do you feel to be here? Oh, it's absolutely great. And I'm absolutely overwhelmed by the interest of the press and by the friendliness of the people. Where will you be teaching? I will be teaching in Brooklyn, at the Franklin D. Roosevelt High School. I see. This is a nice one? You know, I was just talking to Joyce Koppen about it. It's got 4,000 kids. Which is extraordinary. I think the Franklin Roosevelt High School is going to be, um, a completely interesting experience for you. Whatever it means, eh? Andrea and three other of the 26 Austrian teachers, Lutz Holzinger, Elke Rogl, and Nikolaus Ettel are all assigned to teach at FDR. I decide to follow them. Here's Nikki. My name is Nikolaus Ettel. And where will you be teaching? I will be teaching mathematics. Where? In Brooklyn, FDR High School. So you're one of the four Brooklyn-- Yeah. And do you have any thoughts about what it is you're about to embark on? I want to just look what happens. I know about the school. I've heard that it's a big school. It's huge. It's 4,000 kids. I just found that out. This is one of our customs as New Yorkers, welcoming foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them. And if oblique auguries of physical peril don't work, well then, we can always talk about rent. I want to live together with some Brooklyn teachers. Because low costs. Yeah. It's a particularly expensive time in New York City right now. Rents are kind of-- well, you never know. Luckily enough for the Austrian teachers, their introduction to life in New York City and its public school system will not be left up to the paranoid, hysterical likes of me and other members of the fourth estate. Like the news cameraman who, upon hearing that they will be teaching high school, whistles, asking no one in particular, "Anybody know karate?" They will instead sit through a series of days-long orientation sessions at the Board of Ed, where they will be turned into fully functional New Yorkers with social security numbers and bank accounts. The bank accounts courtesy of Miss Licorice, her actual name, the representative from the Chase Manhattan bank. They are taught how to write checks. Don't they have checks in Austria? Of course they do. That's different, I guess. At these sessions, they're told that the United States is a free country. They're told that they don't have to register with the police wherever they live. They're told that when they apply for a driver's license, they won't actually have to know how to fix an engine, as they do in Austria. They're told that in New York, teachers use modern teaching methods, unlike, it is implied, Austria. The New York educators warn them time and again about the dangers of the dreaded "chalk and talk," that driest, most outmoded Teutonic kind of pedagogy where one stands at the chalkboard, lectures, maybe draws some diagrams, but has no capacity to field inquiry or lead a discussion. The underlying message is, Toto, you're not in Klagenfurt anymore. You seem like a lot of that chalk and talk is what you're accustomed to. I like to talk to my people about hitting the ground running, like they do in the war. That's what you do. You're in there very quickly. If you walk the walk and talk the talk, kids will respect you. What I mean by that is, establish yourself as the leader in this situation immediately, and you will survive. One of the more useful moments in the whole orientation, and one that reminds them why they are here, comes when the Austrians meet actual New York City high school kids for the first time. This communication is very essential to the learning process between you and the students. The following, which are being passed out, a word that you will hear us use to address our peers and to address some of the teachers also. What we will be teaching you is our language. They run for their flash cards. "Bounce," "whatever's clever," "the bomb," "jiggy," "phat," "you buggin'," "you played yourself." The lesson in slang continues just a few days later in a week the class about life in the city that is being called New York 101 by the media. Although no one out of the media seems to have another name for it. They just call it "what the media are calling New York 101." The professor, a retired English scholar and native Brooklynite, spends the first 20 minutes of the first class quizzing them on their various subway routes and telling them quicker alternatives. It is one New Yorkers' favorite pastimes, telling one another the best subway routes to get someplace. As the other New Yorker in the room, I am fascinated, and cannot resist even chiming in at one point about the long underground transfer between the 4/5 and the 2/3 at Fulton Street. The Austrians stare blankly and seem exhausted. Then comes colloquialisms lessons in the form of a handout. This glossary of New York argot has words and phrases like "86," "schmear," "bimbo," "maven," "what am I, chopped liver?" and "schlepping all over town, looking for some tchochkes." All of which would be very useful, if it were 1949, if you were a hard-boiled cutie pie gun moll, or in the USO, or a been-around-the-block dishwater blonde waitress, or a private dick, anyone from a Damon Runyon story, or auditioning for Seinfeld. What becomes evident over the course of the orientation is that the Austrians are also being given an unvarnished glimpse, albeit an unwitting one, into what it is truly like to be a student in a public high school in North America. Hours spent sitting, listening to lecture after lecture, frequently droning, and frequently about things they will never need to know. The bureaucratic structure of the board of education, for example. Or how to say "86 of whiskey, down with the schmear!" The orientation does teach them how to find an apartment in New York City-- no laughing matter. Well, if it's a laughing matter, it's in that bitter, rueful kind of way. But very surprisingly, in one weekend of hitting the streets during a Wall Street boom, they all have homes. Homes they have given names to. This is Little Austria. Can't take your call now. Please leave a message after the long beep. Thank you. Hi. This is the girls' apartment. We're not hear now. Please leave a message. We will call you back. Bye bye. Elke and Andrea live in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. Lutz and Nikolaus are in Sunset Park, another part of Brooklyn. Their place is huge and sunny. Seven of the teachers occupy two apartments in the same building. They take me along with them when they go to see their school for the first time a few days before the beginning of the semester. It's two subway rides away, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. Bensonhurst was the scene of some racist violence a few years back. I am quite frankly terrified at the thought of going there. As far as I knew, if you weren't white, Italian-American and straight, you stayed out of Bensonhurst. But as it turns out, FDR's 4,000 kids are from 72 different countries, representing 32 different language groups. One third of them identified as limited English-speaking youngsters, meaning they entered the US within the last two or three years. Easily 60% of the entire student body was born outside the United States. The Austrians will be right at home. The media attention surrounding them shows no signs of abating. Their schools are Fielding inquiries from CBS, Austrian TV, and a Japanese television crew. The Austrians tell me how fed up they're getting with being portrayed as being too scared to take the subway, unfamiliar with different ethnicities, and oblivious to social problems. Lutz gently points out that the small matter of the genocidal civil war in former Yugoslavia is happening not too far from Vienna. There are refugees coming into Austria every day. Lutz and Nikki are not men who are unaware of the outside world. "We are international people," says Nikki, whose girlfriend is spending the year working in Moscow. I ask them if they have drugs and teenage pregnancy in Vienna. Lutz replies, of course, although not to the extent of New York City, obviously. But it's really an idiotic question. Where do I think they come from, Shangri-La? Franklin Delano Roosevelt High is beside a huge cemetery. Literally beside the graveyard, with headstones coming right up to the building. It almost seems like a teen exploitation film joke, a summer camp actually built across the lake from an insane asylum. Architecturally, the school is one of those early '60s Bauhaus-y structures of glass and cinder block. It's quite an attractive building, actually, and there's a friendliness, a sense of community about the place. It's in perfect repair. The floors gleam. We run into the school guidance counselors, who treat the Austrian Four like celebrities. I think I saw you on TV. You still learning how to write checks? Despite the fact that she has two days to get the school ready for 4,000, and that Andrea, Lutz, Nikki, and Elke are by no means the only four new teachers starting this year, FDR's principal, the amazing Adele Vocel, takes the time to sit down with them in the conference room. She doesn't talk to them like Austrian teachers, just teachers. And it's not for my benefit, either. I am, in a word, tolerated. As I said before, you chose a career that's probably the greatest career going. Don't be afraid of our kids. I don't know what you've heard of New York City kids. They're good kids. OK? But you've got the enthusiasm. You've got the [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. You've got the conviction, or you wouldn't be here. So let everybody know. Let the kids know that's how you feel. OK? I follow along as Lutz and Andrea are shown the newly renovated science labs, introduced to the ninth grade biology curriculum, and meet Jim and Alex, two biology teachers who sit down with them and joke around like a Vaudeville duo for about 30 minutes or so. They're friendly and contagiously funny and irreverent, and like everyone we meet at the school, they project this sense of shared purpose and excitement. They make it look like great fun. And there's no false nobility here, either. There's none of that sunwashed earnestness of films like Dead Poets' Society. All of this is a long way towards dispelling the fear of the school year that begins in two days' time. I conjecture that a lot of the feeling of goodwill and helpfulness so evident at FDR seems to emanate in large part from Adele Vocel. She speaks to the Austrians, and indeed everyone we're introduced to that day-- from the vice principals to the payroll secretaries. As colleagues, not as subordinates. It strikes me that the New York these Austrians will be working in is very different from the New York inhabited by the members of the media covering them, including myself. For starters, there's a lack of ironic posturing to the Austrians, and to almost everyone I encounter on this story. No one is making constant air quotes or dropping their voices in "what, me, serious?" disaffection. No one acts like they've seen it before. At one point during a teacher orientation, Adele Vocel read a poem called "Average" to a room full of adults. "I don't cause teachers trouble. My grades have been OK. I listen in my classes and I'm in school every day. My teachers say I'm average. My parents think so, too. I wish I didn't know that, because there's a lot I'd like to do. I'd like to build a rocket. I have a book to tell you how. And start a stamp collection. Oh, no use trying now. Because since I found on average, I'm just smart enough to see it means I'm nothing special, that I should expect to be." Later on, at a reception at the Austrian consulate, another woman in public education planted herself in the middle of the room, took out a laminated card in your pocket, and read a poem to the effect of, a hundred years from now, it will not matter how much money I made, what kind of car I drove, how big my house was, whether or not I was famous. What will matter is that I made a difference in the life of a child. Generally the words, I'm just going to redo this poem elicit feelings of mild embarrassment in people. How avid, how earnest. I'm not proud to admit that I was a little amused when I first heard these two problems. Neither of them is very good poetry, after all. But on reflection, I realize that they achieve precisely what poetry is meant to accomplish. They edify. They elevate. They speak to an underlying truth not immediately apparent. They change the way one looks at things. We in the media have all been portraying the Austrians as heading off into a blackboard jungle. All cynicism, institutional neglect, and violence. When in fact, they're entering a world none of us reporters imagined. A world where being earnest and avid and passionate is anything but embarrassing. It's been made clear to me by Adele Vocel that I am not welcome in the classrooms once the students arrive. He obligation, she tells me, is to the kids, and I would be an unnecessary distraction. I see the sense of this, but I need to see what happens with the Austrian four, so I invite them for dinner, and they accept, and seem happy to be asked. We have two dinners together, one in September and one in March. At both, they describe the work as hard and time-consuming, with evenings spent either preparing lessons, grading homework, or marking the many, many tests they seem to administer-- far more than are given at schools in Austria. And seeing New York City teaching methods up close and firsthand, the Austrians are finding some of their own preconceptions debunked. They seem surprised and more than a little bit disappointed that their training turns out to be far more unconventional and modern than that of their American counterparts. It turns out they were being warned against "chalk and talk" at their orientation because "chalk and talk" remain such a tenacious mainstay of American teaching. You know, we were trying not to chalk and talk. And we were very eager to earn the American way of teaching, to see alternative concepts, alternative approach to teaching and all this stuff. And I think a lot of us have watched other teachers teaching, and gones that lessons, and all that we see is chalk and talk. You don't see anything else. And everyone was saying-- [INAUDIBLE] doing group work or something is cool sometimes. No, we never did. I really dare to say that the Austrian teachers do more with the pupils than the American teachers. Really. And I think the American system is just [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, just blah blah blah blah blah. The kids are sitting there. They are bored. And you think, ah ha, you know that maybe. And you could ask them and you see nobody knows it. It's contrary to our beliefs, in a way. I think that everybody [UNINTELLIGIBLE] very disappointed about the American system. Very disappointed about it. Take all that with a grain of salt. That was recorded in September. At the dinner in March, they feel calmer and have a more positive and three-dimensional view of American methods and school in general, as they themselves are more realistically viewed. After sharing three bottles of wine, I am given enough courage for my next question. The question that I have been waiting to ask since the day they entered the misbegotten California Lounge of Kennedy Airport So now, have you guys ever seen The Sound of Music? No. You don't know what it is? I have seen it in America. Do you know what it is? Yeah. No Austrian knows The Sound of Music. Everybody tells me about it. They say, tell me how to sing "Edelweis." Hey! So you do know Sound of Music. We've been told about it. By everybody. "But 'Edelweis,' that's the national anthem of Austria, isn't it?" Nobody knows "Edelweis"? No. It's not an Austrian folk song. It's nothing. And we just thought, we just assumed that Maria von Trapp was a folk hero in Austria. No one knows her. You know who Julie Andrews is? Yes. Mary Poppins. And Victor and Victoria. Ever the gracious host, and ever eager for a colorful setting to exploit in the service of this radio story, I take the Austrians to see the New York panorama at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows. It's an enormous diorama of the five boroughs with scale models of every single building in the greater metropolitan area. I checked. Everything is there, right down to a half-inch replica of the four story brownstone where I live. The diorama. is really big. Certainly a healthy percentage of a football field in size. Spectators walk around its perimeter on a catwalk from above. The videotaped presentation about the display's construction that plays constantly on loop begins with an announcer exclaimed over a Gershwin score, "New York City, the Big Apple, making it big, the arts capital of the world." This bit of cheap New York, New York propagandist metaphor seems a little naive. Because what one actually sees by looking at this accurate depiction of the city in its entirety is that most of the city, the New York that is New York to most New Yorkers, is actually Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, which all contain some pretty vast areas of Urban blight and desolation. It is the perfect backdrop to ask them how they're doing. They are assimilating rapidly. The relation to the kids gets better and better. And in some classes, it's really interesting now. You know all of them. How to handle the kids. I mean, it's possible not to make it more interesting for both sides. So now do they seem different from Austrian kids? Yes. I mean, I don't think that in Austria the relationship could be that's-- how do you say?-- unformal. Informal. Informal, yes, informal. Don't think so. Because they are making jokes, and I'm laughing, I'm making jokes, and they are laughing. It's very seldom you find that. I think so. Do you feel like teachers or do you feel like foreign teachers? Now I feel like a teacher. I still don't feel like a teacher. We're standing over the Brighton Beach and Rockaway is part of the diorama, Manhattan far behind us. And while it's certainly the most crowded of the islands, its buildings are the tallest, it's also noticeably smallest. Seeing it from here, from the equivalent of a few thousand feet up, Manhattan's disproportionate influence, the power of its few over the millions in the outer boroughs, seems not just strange. It seems futile. All of us in the media have been wondering how the Austrians would deal with it all. Expecting them to crumble when actually faced with real New York. That the smug assurance that Manhattanites like myself know what real New York is. But more than almost anyone I know, these four teachers have been thrust into a uniquely diverse and mixed environment where almost everyone is from somewhere else. In my search for an authentic backdrop to this scene, I brought these teachers to a large simulacrum, when probably the most authentically New York place is the block they live on. It's time to find their houses. There's a light. A red light. Where are we? Here. OK. Now we look for [? Rockaway. OK. This Sunset Park? Which? The small green or the big green? Big green is the Queens cemetery. And small one is the Sunset Park. Sunset Park. Fifth Avenue till Seventh Avenue. Night descends upon the miniature city. Their city. The sky darkens and blacklights illuminate the buildings, whose windows seem that up in millions of pinpoints. A few moments later, it is morning again, and another day dawns on the greatest metropolis on earth. The orchestra on the video plays. It is all one can do not to stretch out one's arms and turn around like some singing nun on the mountainside for the sheer joy and beauty and hugeness of it all. Tiny planes on invisible wires come in for landings and take off from the diorama airport. And far higher than all of them, an airplane sails through the sky, tracing its path from across the Atlantic westward to somewhere else on the continent. Nikki wonders aloud how any plane passing over New York could possibly resist landing there. Indeed, how could any aircraft ignore the very center of the universe? He's become a real New Yorker at last. David Rakoff lives in Manhattan, USA. Coming up, trying to convince Dad down in Florida that it was a good idea to immigrate to America all those years ago. That's in a minute on Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's program, Welcome to America. So I'm on a plane coming home from oversees. And the plane lands and is taxiing to the gate. And the flight attendant gets on the PA and says all the usual things they say. The weather, the local time, customs information. And she ends by saying, we hope you enjoy your stay in the United States of America. We hope you enjoy your stay in the United States of America. The thought had never occurred to me before. And then I thought, yes, I do hope I enjoy my stay in the United States of America. My, you know, 50, 60, 70, whatever it is year stay. Because you know, not everybody does. Though that's usually the story we tell ourselves as Americans. The story we tell ourselves about people coming to this country is that hopeful people coming here, escaping political oppression, escaping poverty. And it's hard at first for them to adjust, but then they do, because everybody has so much more here than they did back home where they came from. That is the story we usually tell ourselves about coming to America. I don't really think I like this place. Life is a little bit harder here. Very difficult than in Africa. It's very, very difficult. Ignatius is here for school. Works in a parking garage. When he's done his studies, he wants to move back home to Cameroon, where he won't have to work from eight in the morning to one at night. In Africa, only if you work in a hospital, they should be working after six or seven PM. After five, most offices, every place is closed. In Africa, people are not fast-forward, fast lane, fast driving. It's a little bit slow. At times I used to think that time runs faster here. Some people take a long time to convince, to feel like they belong here. Alex came over when he was eight from a small town in Sicily back in 1958. I mean, we would do the pledge allegiance, you understand? And a lot of kids, I noticed, would assimilate. Like my brother, for instance, assimilated really fast. And that's the thing about the 40 years that it has taken me to really call myself an American now. What's amazing about his history is just how American anybody would think he was. He spoke English, worked among non-Sicilians, married a non-Sicilian, lived like this for decades. And still, he did not believe that he belonged here. There was always the hope of going back, and there was always the feeling that I am Sicilian. Do you think there's anything that could've changed that would make you feel more American? I mean, you had a job, you'd learnt the language, you'd married somebody. Your children were Americans, born American citizens. Yeah. By this time, for instance, my father, my mother had become citizens. I refused to become a citizen. How come? Because I didn't feel this was my country. And was there something about America that felt too different from the way you felt about yourself? Yeah. There was a lot of things I couldn't understand. Like at that point, what would those things have been? You know, I didn't feel connected to the ground I walked on. I didn't feel like I was sitting on the chair I was sitting on. When I was eating, I felt that I wasn't eating food. What changed his feeling about America? When his mother was buried here, in American soil. When he found a church and the community here. When he spent time alone in the wilderness in southern Utah. He became a citizen in 1998, after 40 years. Some people never make the transition. And that is the subject of our next act in our program today. Act Two. Are Movies Stronger than Communism? This is the story of a father and son, told by the son, Juan Zaldivar, who was born in Cuba. We never thought about leaving Cuba. At least, as a 13 year old, I never thought that I was going to leave Cuba. I knew that my uncles had left in the '60s. And I grew up in the system. I never thought that I was going to leave. My picture of the United States was, you know, this is a place full of monopolies and prostitution and drugs, and you couldn't go out in the street at night, because you'd get mugged. Everything a good young communist is supposed to believe. Yeah. I basically believed everything that I was told. When the Mariel boatlift happened in 1980, there were a few people went into the Peruvian embassy and asked for asylum. There was a big civil unrest was created by the fact that within a week, there were about 500 people crammed in the Peruvian embassy, asking for political asylum. And Fidel had a speech on national television, and claimed that anybody that wanted to leave, could, because anybody wanted to leave wasn't really wanted for the revolution, and was a parasite of the revolution. So he created demonstrations nationwide. I was actually out at those demonstrations, screaming against people that were leaving. And then within a week, my whole world turned around. Because one of my uncles who was in Miami came on a boat To pick us up. You mean the family in Miami came back to retrieve you? Yeah. Cubans who had left Cuba in the '60s who lived in Miami decided to go and get their families, because all of a sudden it was possible for them to leave the country. And so at some point about five years ago, you decide to make a movie about your family without any funding, and just shooting on your own to see what would happen. Yeah. I started by basically just asking the whole family to tell me how they remember the whole experience. My other objective when I first started shooting was to try to find out, you know, what had gone in the mind of my dad, and whether he felt OK with the decision that we had made about coming over. Because I felt that once we got here, even though our family was brought together in a sense, he also retracted from us. And I felt that he seemed more depressed and dejected, and he had a job that wasn't so great. And he was always afraid to lose it. He works a lot of hours. He doesn't get paid very well. And so he wasn't like that when I was growing up. He was building a house in Cuba. He had friends that supported-- they found ways to get food and clothing. And he was a much more outgoing than he was once we got to Miami. So I wanted to find out what had happened. And so I decided this summer to go back to Cuba and ask several questions. And one of them was, did we make the right decision? I wanted to see what my family that was left behind was like, and what their life was like. And I was hoping that in going back, I would find something that would make him feel better about the decision that we made. So I took the trip. I went back in August of last year. And last summer was the first time I had been back in 18 years. And it was a very intense trip. Day-to-day life there is very, very hard. And it became very clear to me he had indeed made the right decision. That our lives and the opportunities that we have had here, we would have never had there. Why? What did you see? What kind of situation were your family members in? I talked to a lot of young people when I was there, and I saw that a lot of them had a lot of ambitions that they felt were never going to happen. They wanted either to study things that they were not allowed to study, because everything's rationed, so there's only a certain number of positions for lawyers every year, per town. A lot of them felt also, even if they could study what they want, they could never really get the things that young people have in, say, America or other parts of the world. And then what about your family members? Did they speak directly to your dad? You know, through the video camera? Yeah. I collected a series of video letters when I was in Cuba. And I took some from family members. And then I also went and sought out friends of my father that I knew were very close to him before he left. And they wanted to see him again. They said not to be afraid to go back. That nothing was going to happen, that people go back all the time. And they said to him that if he were to come to Cuba without a shirt on his back, he would leave fully clothed and fully fed, and that they would make sure that would happen. And he was very emotional when I showed him the footage. And what did they tell them about whether or not he should have left? Did they tell him that he should have stayed? No. They told him that he shouldn't feel bad for the fact that he left. That they understand that it was probably the hardest decision he's ever made. They said, look, your family has done well. You should not feel bad about it. Here's your son, coming back to find his roots and make a connection with the people that he left behind. And they reassured him all of the things that I had been saying to him. And when you showed him the footage, what was his reaction? Was he reassured? No. He still set that that's something that he's always going to feel, no matter what I can say to him. Do you think he regrets coming here and bringing you all here? You know, I think because he was achieving things for himself right before he left, and he hasn't really been able to do that as much once he's been in the United States, part of him has to feel that his life was moving in a better direction when he was there. I guess I don't know. He hasn't said that he regrets having come to the United States. But he is disappointed in how things have gone since he's been here. I think so. I think he expected things to go better. I think he expected to achieve the American dream that everybody talks about. And he just doesn't like the way this culture works. He doesn't like that people have to have two jobs, and he doesn't like the fact that you don't get to see your relatives every day, and that people don't live close enough that you can go walk to somebody's house and borrow a cup of coffee. So he feels very alienated. He feels he has to drive everywhere. Everybody works different hours, so he can't really see his brothers as often as he would like. He never sees his nieces and nephews. It's interesting. He's disappointed in America, but it's in such a different way than the Communist government of Cuba told him what America would be. Like, if Fidel had been saying, you know, if you come to America, you'll be working two jobs, your family won't live down the block, might've had more of an effect. Yeah, perhaps. Don't give him any ideas. You guys have been here for almost two decades. Do you think at this point he feels American? You know, he just became a citizen. And I talked to him about it. I was in New York and I wasn't able to go down-- I wanted to be there when he was going in for his swearing. And what made him decide to do it right now? Why now? I think the main thing was this law that passed that said that if you weren't an American citizen and you retired, you would lose all your benefits after a while. Yeah. I don't think he would have done it otherwise. I don't think he really has any interest. He still feels like a Cuban who happens to be here. Yeah. Is he thinking about going back now? No. I asked them if he wanted to go back. I asked him right at the beginning, when I started shooting four years ago, if he wanted to go back to Cuba. And he said no. And I asked him in August, after I came back from Cuba, whether or not he still felt the same way, and he said that he still wouldn't go back. There's nothing for him there anymore. You must have been been surprised, when he saw the video that you had shot, you must've been surprised that it didn't kind of turn him around. I really was. I, now, was a little disappointed. I, however, haven't shown him an edited thing. This is the dream of any artist, however, if I could just say. Yeah. Well, because we've got all these very disembodied conversations, you know? Which I think is how he sees it. I've been thinking about this and working, it's a whole process for me. So I have all these ideas that I've been mulling and I'm able to talk to you about them because I've been thinking about them for four years. I think with him, it's more like separate conversations that he's had with me. And he hasn't really been able to sit down and evaluate the whole experience. Has your dad talk to you, has he noticed the level of energy that you're putting into healing this thing for him? Is your dad touched by what it is that you're trying to do? Does he understand--? I don't think he understands fully. No matter how many times I say it, I don't think he sees it as something that I'm doing for him. I think actually that before the trip, all this time, he thought that I was doing it because somehow I questioned whether my decision to come was right or not. And I think that his brothers thought that too, because my uncle even mentioned it at one point. I don't know that he necessarily knows that this movie, it's about me trying to make them feel better about the decision. It's just striking. I feel like what you're doing is that you're using the tools of rationality to achieve something which maybe can't be achieved, because it's just a feeling. Do you know what I mean? On his part. That feeling that he has isn't going to change through argumentation. And now I feel like you've enlisted the full power of like, motion picture narrative, do you know what I mean? I imagine, like, OK, so you've gone down, and you have this whole story going, and you've shot these people, and you have these images. And at some point, they'll be music underneath the whole thing. You'll have all of these things. And the notion of, will it change this man's point of view about himself? It's just, I wonder if it can. If all the power can. You know, you think about, like, what is the power of a movie? And does it include the power to change a person's feeling about himself? You know, sometimes, if somebody were to paint a picture of you, you may or may not think that it looks like you. But I think that if you stared at it for hours, you start seeing the way somebody else sees you. And there's no way you cannot learn something from that. Whether you think that it looks like you or not. Him and I might never see eye-to-eye. He may never see my argument. He might never feel better about being here. But there's got to be something-- he must be able to learn something, from just seeing my perception of the whole thing. And I think it will give him more insight into how I perceive him as a human being, and get to know each other as two men, and not necessarily as a father and son. So even if it doesn't give him his own life, in a certain way, it gives him you. Yeah. Juan Zaldivar's movie about his father in Cuba is called 90 Miles. 90 miles is the distance between the two countries, the US and Cuba. In the time since we first broadcast this weeks' radio show, he has finished his film. You can get more information about it at www.90miles.com. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, and Sylvia Lemus. Engineering help from Mr. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Williams. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. 312-832-3380. Again, 312-832-3380. Or visit our website. You can get cassettes there. Or even better, you can hear our programs for free right there. www.thisamericanlife.org. That easy-to-remember name. www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. This American Life comes to you proudly from the city of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, mayor. Funding for our program is provided by the listeners of WBEZ Chicago. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who says this about anybody who dared to turn away to another radio station during our program. Anybody who wanted to leave wasn't really wanted for the revolution, and was a parasite of the revolution. I'm Ira Glass. I hope you enjoy your stay in the United States of America. PRI. Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Hello, I'm Paul Lalonde. You see, the world you're sitting in right now is a completely different world than the one I'm sitting in recording this message. An event the Bible calls the Rapture has taken place, and millions or even billions of people have vanished from the face of the Earth, including myself and all of the men you're going to see on this video today. You know, while we can't begin to imagine what the world you're sitting in right now must be like, we can at least say we knew this was going to happen, and we can answer many of the questions that are so important to you right now. This is a video called Left Behind, and it exists to solve a problem. In the view of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who try to understand the prophecies in the Bible, we as a species are on the verge of some terrible events, events that will usher in the end of time and the return of Jesus to the Earth. But the very first thing that will happen at the start of these times, according to these Christians, according to the Bible, is that good Christians will be lifted away to Heaven in an instant. That's what they call the Rapture. This video and others like it are designed to explain to those left behind exactly what's occurred and what happens after the Christians are all gone. I would assume that there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of tension. I would assume that newscasters are speculating as to the disappearance of millions and millions of people on planet Earth. You are wondering what's going to take place next. I would refer you to the Bible. The Bibles are still left, all over the world-- Well, the true believers have just been taken out, as those crazy Christians used to tell you they would. And they've all been suddenly, without warning, snatched out to meet Christ in the air, and they've been changed from mortal to immortal. Much of this videotape is a warning. It says that after the Christians all vanish, there will be seven years of tribulation with a false prophet, an antichrist. The video tries to warn us against all of the lies that the antichrist will tell, but it's very tricky business because the people putting together the videotape do not know what exactly the lies will be. And as we sit and ponder that, we think about if the rapture took place in the world in which we live today, the one frame of reference that most people would have for this event came from something that's been very popular in this world for the last decade or so. It's called Star Trek. And it's called the transporter beam. "Beam me up, Scotty." So stories will begin to explode that people have been taken off this planet on UFOs, that they've been sent to other planets, to slave planets, or that they have just been brought up to a UFO for some reason or another. This is simply not true, according to the Scripture. It is a lie that we know is forthcoming. There's a kind of Left Behind industry churning out product right now. A series of novels about what will happen after the Rapture during the years of tribulation predicted by the Bible has crossed over from the Christian bestseller list to the mainstream charts. The latest book in the series is at number seven on the New York Times Bestseller list this week. It sold a half million copies in its first two weeks. The other four books in the series plus the videos plus the audio books plus the special series about the end time for young people called Left Behind For Kids together have sold about 6 million copies, according to the publisher. And if you don't think that the people in your life believe in these prophecies, just ask around. In an informal poll of the people who work at this public radio station where I speak to you from right now, WBEZ in Chicago, nine people out of the 55 that we asked said they do believe in the biblical prophecies of the Rapture and the end time. And yet, this is an area where religious people and secular people definitely do not see eye to eye. Secular people, non-Christians, usually do not take these beliefs very seriously. In this hour today, we try to demonstrate why they should. Our subject today, the end of the world. Act One, Cowboys of the Apocalypse, the true story of fundamentalist Christians uniting in a project with orthodox Jews to create a cow that could bring about the end of the world. Act Two, the Cost of Misunderstanding, an explanation of why an FBI agent might want to pack a Bible along with his gun. Act Three, Again. Writer Sarah Vowell has seen the end of the world not once, not twice, but three times. And she is back to tell the tale. Act Four, None Shall Know the Exact Hour or Time, in which we answer the question, what do the dates October 22, 1844, May 21, 1999, and September 11, 1999, what do those dates have in common? We have answers coming up. Stay with us. Act One, Cowboys of the Apocalypse. Clyde Lott was a man with two main interests, cows-- he was a cattle breeder by profession-- and the Bible. He's also an evangelical minister. And one day, he was doing something that combined his two interests. Lawrence Wright wrote about him in The New Yorker magazine. He was going through the Bible and looking for all the references about cows. The early books of the Bible are essentially about an agricultural people, so there are a lot of references about cattle. And when he came upon Numbers 19, he found this reference. When God was speaking to Moses, God commanded that Moses tell his people to bring him a red heifer without spot or blemish, and it would be sacrificed to him. And Clyde began to wonder where they might have gotten such a cow, because all of the cattle that he could find referenced in the Old Testament were spotted or striped. But what he also knew is that there's a breed of cattle call the Red Angus that's as red as an Irish Setter. And it seems to be unknown in the Middle East. So it struck him that he might be the very man who could bring the red heifer back to the land of Israel. Now, there's an important reason Clyde Lott might want to do that, and that reason involves biblical prophecy. In Clyde Lott's reading of the Bible-- and many people see it this way-- the second coming of Jesus, Armageddon, the Rapture, the thousand-year reign of Jesus on Earth, all this will occur only after three things happen. Number one, the establishment of the state of Israel. Number two, Jerusalem has to be in Jewish hands. And number three, the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem, a temple that was destroyed in 79 AD, that temple has to be rebuilt and reestablished as the center of Jewish worship. Now, numbers one and two, of course, have come to pass in the last few decades. But to reestablish the ancient Jewish temple, somebody would first have to purify the ground for the temple, and then they would have to purify the temple itself. And to do that, according to the Bible, somebody would have to sacrifice a pure Numbers 19 red heifer without spot or blemish. Where would a cow like that come from? Clyde Lott turned the question over and over in his head, until one day in the summer of 1990. Well, he was out baling hay and his baler broke. And he started to go into town to get a new part, and he found himself, he said, driving instead to Jackson, Mississippi, the capital, and walked into the Department of Agriculture. And I can remember walking into his office straight out of the hayfield-- This is Clyde Lott. --with blue jeans, Wal-Mart tennis shoes, baseball cap, dirty, smelly, hay and grass all over me, grease on me, and asking the question, or stating the fact and then asking the question, where did Israel get their red cow from? And you could imagine his response for the first few minutes. Yeah, what was his response? Was he like, well, you're the third person in here today asking me this? No. He looked at me for several minutes before he realized that I was serious. When this official realized Mr. Lott was serious, he helped him write a letter that made its way from one US government official to another until finally it was forwarded to a private organization in Israel called the Temple Institute. The Temple Institute is run by very religious Jews whose goal is, as you might expect, to reestablish the ancient temple in Jerusalem. They want to do this because it's the belief of some Jews that to be truly Jewish, you have to obey all the commandments in the Bible. And it turns out that about a third of those commandments are specifically about things that happened at that original temple. Also, many orthodox Jews believe that the Messiah, the Jewish Messiah who's been awaited for millennia, cannot arrive until the temple is rebuilt. And it turns out that the rabbis at the temple institute had been pondering the question of where they were going to find a Numbers 19 red heifer without blemish or spot. And so naturally they were very interested to talk with Mr. Lott. After some letters and phone calls, he flew to meet with them in Jerusalem. What they put into motion was a project that now involves dozens of people, volunteers, cattlemen, many Christian and Jewish donors, and very high-tech, 20th-century breeding techniques all to create a Red Angus that would conform to biblical law and also thrive in the heat of the Mideast. From the very start, Clyde Lott says, they found they had a lot to talk about. Though, coming from his part of Mississippi, he had never really talked much with many Jews. In meeting with Rabbi Ariel and meeting with Rabbi Richman, we began to talk about producing cows, red cows for Numbers 19. And Rabbi Richman was interpreting for Rabbi Ariel. And one of the things that they had asked us was, how many cows did we think it would take to produce a Numbers 19 red heifer? And we told him we thought that it would take approximately 200 head. And what was amazing there, then, was they asked us how much they thought it would cost. And we told Rabbi Richman $2,000 a head. And he turned to Rabbi Ariel and told him $20,000. There was a mistake. He told him that in Hebrew? Yes. Yes, he was speaking to Rabbi Ariel in Hebrew. And you can imagine the next few minutes got pretty excited between those two rabbis, because that was quite a sum of money when you figure 200 head at $20,000 a head. And after several minutes of listening to them talk back and forth, we interrupted Rabbi Richman, and we asked him what the problem was. And he said, well, $20,000 is a lot of money for these cows. And we made the statement and said simply this, that we're not trying to take advantage of you as you're seeking to turn back to God. And they were astonished because there was a parable in Jewish tradition about a Gentile who was a jeweler. And a jewel had fallen out of the vest of the chief rabbi. And a delegation had gone down to this jeweler who was supposed to replace this precious stone. And they asked him how much it would cost to replace. And he said it was 100 shekels, but he couldn't replace it at present because the box with the precious jewels was under the bed where his father was sleeping and he didn't want to disturb him. And they thought that was a ruse, so they raised the price and doubled it and then doubled it. And finally it got up to 1,000 shekels and he still refused. And the delegation left very angrily. And shortly thereafter, according to the story, Dama ben Natina's father awoke and retrieved the jewel and ran down the road and gave it to the priest. And they in turn gave him the 1,000 shekels. And he gave them back 900, correcting the price to 1/10, the same thing that we did. And as soon as he gave back the 900 shekels, he made the statement that I'm not trying to take advantage of you as you seek to turn to God, word for word, the same thing that we said almost 2,000-plus years later. And right there on the road, the priest of the temple prayed a blessing over this man. And the blessing was that out of his Gentile lineage one day would come the producer of the red heifer. So the rabbis of the temple saw a striking similarity between the two. And it really went a long way to establish our relationship with them. Do you believe that you are descended from that man? I have no idea. But what I believe is very simply that we have been called by God to perform a needed function in the life of Israel. So when are the first cows going to be flown to Israel? We hope possibly as early as May. If not May, we feel like that it will be October, November. And how many cows do you think are going to be in that first group? We hope to fly over approximately 300 head of heifers and 15 to 20 bulls. And then how is that done? What kind of plane does this? A 747. There are a number of planes that fly cattle, but we are working with a 747. You know, that's not the only group of cows. There's apparently some cattle that are being bred in Texas as well. So I think that the chances of a red heifer being born in Israel that meets all the requirements within the next several months is pretty strong. I can't stress too strongly what a catastrophic thing it would be from a political and diplomatic point of view. It would be catastrophic, says Lawrence Wright, because once there was a red heifer, Jews and Christians would certainly start to agitate for the rebuilding of the ancient Jewish temple, and agitate hard. A small portion of that temple still exists in Israel today, the Western Wall. You can see it if you go to Jerusalem. But to rebuild the temple in its original form on its original site, which is the only thing that would be acceptable under Jewish law, most people believe that you would have to tear down two holy Islamic sites that stand near the Western Wall, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The Dome of the Rock is the oldest building in Islam and one of its holiest sites. Muslims believe that it was from this spot that Muhammad ascended to Heaven on his winged steed. I think that it's extremely likely that one of two things will happen. Either some religious group will succeed in destroying or severely damaging one or both of the mosques on top of the temple mount. Or else the extreme religious, political wing that is so ascendant in Israel now will gain enough power to decide to remove the mosque and reestablish the temple. And I think it would be an unmitigated diplomatic catastrophe, and that it would excite a religious war such as we haven't seen since the Crusades. Really? Well, you know, it is-- I was with you up until that very last sentence. I can't underscore too strongly how tense this situation is and how jealously the Muslim authorities guard this. Just a few years ago, there's a little tunnel that runs alongside the temple mount. And as a tourist, you can go walk along. You see these immense and quite beautiful stones that were fashioned under King Herod. And the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to extend that tunnel so that people could walk all the way through without doubling back, so people could pass freely out into the street. And that itself was regarded with such suspicion that there were riots all over Jerusalem and the West Bank. 90 people died. Just to build these tunnels for tourists? Just to open the tunnel to the street. 90 people died over that? 90 people died for that. We've been accused of-- once cows getting over there-- starting World War III. And in fact, I've even been accused of being the antichrist. Wow. Do you worry that perhaps one of the things that could happen, though, once red heifers are reintroduced to Israel, that it could lead to violence of one sort or another? This is a faith walk with us. And when we commit our life to a walk of faith, we are committing our complete trust in God to do with us as he sees fit to accomplish his end. So from that standpoint, I have never been worried about the outcome because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the outcome is going to be the outcome that God wants. You're lucky to have that kind of faith. Well, we as Christians all should exercise this kind of faith. You quote this incredible statistic, poll number, in your article where you say that about half, 46% of all Americans, believe that the state of Israel in its existence and being held by Jewish hands is the fulfillment of prophecy. Right. It's not just fundamentalists. I know a lot of people who would not consider themselves to be fundamentalist who are mainstream Christians who read the Bible and see these events that are happening in the Middle East and think that it's resonating with the prophecies of the Old Testament. It's an overwhelming feature of American support for Israel. The Jewish population of the United States is not that significant. But the fundamentalist Christian and evangelical Christian population is substantial, and especially in Southern states, states where senators like Lott and Helms and so on have traditionally been great allies and friends of Israel. It's not because of their love of Jews in my opinion. And millions and millions of Christians give money to support Israeli causes, Jewish causes, because they believe that this is where the end times will unfold. And they have a genuine and heartfelt belief that this should happen and that it should be a part of American policy to speed that along. And indeed it is. Mr. Lott, let me ask you-- how old are you, may I ask? How old am I? Yes, sir. I just turned 43. Do you believe that you will see the Rapture and the end time in your lifetime? I think so. I think, as fast as events are moving. And the reason I say that is because, when we began this project 10 years ago, it seemed like we began it at a very slow walk. And then it got a little faster, and it got a little faster, and it got a little faster, to the point now where we feel like we're almost running. I know you have your Bible with you there in the studio. You're talking to me from Mississippi. I'm speaking to you from our studio in Chicago. Is there any passage of the Bible that you look to for strength as you do this work? There's a number of scriptures. One of them that comes to mind now-- I'm turning there-- is found in Ezekiel, chapter 12. It says, "therefore say unto them, thus saith the Lord God; there shall none of my words be prolonged anymore, but the word which I have spoken shall be done, saith the Lord God." And what that is speaking to me is that God is going to fulfill every word that he has said and that he's going to do it now. For years, there have been religious maniacs who have tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. And just last week, there was a Jewish extremist who was expelled from Jerusalem by Israeli authorities for fear that that's what he was trying to do. You know, when you talk about the inevitability of this conflict over what will be done with this site, the phrase self-fulfilling prophecy is the thing that keeps coming to my mind. It just seems like they have a prophecy about the end of the world and the end of time. And because they have it, they're putting all of the elements into place so they can have this huge argument over this religious site that could turn violent so simply and quickly. Well, and they welcome that because that's prophetic. That's a fulfillment of the prophecy. So it brings on the apocalypse. That's exactly what they expect. And moreover, from the Christian point of view, they're going to be raptured and out of here before that actually happens, so they've got nothing to lose. Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker and cattleman Clyde Lott. That interview was first broadcast in April of 1999. We have tried repeatedly to reach Clyde Lott and his organization to check on whether they have successfully flown cows to Israel or bred a red heifer there by now but didn't get a call back by the time of today's broadcast. Act Two, The Cost of Misunderstanding. This is a true story of a group of Christians who devoted themselves to studying the Bible's prophecies about the end of the world, and about Jesus' return, a story about people who tried to live in a way that matched what it seemed the Bible was saying, and about how US government officials did not understand what the group was doing and killed 74 of them, including 21 children, when they raided their compound, the compound of the Branch Davidians, followers of David Koresh, on April 19, 1993 in Waco, Texas. James Tabor is a religion professor at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte who not only followed the intricacies of what the group's leader David Koresh was saying about the Bible and its prophecies, in Koresh's final days, when he wanted to release a statement to the world explaining what he saw as the exciting news from his reading of scripture, Tabor was one of the two religious experts that Koresh wanted to give the manuscript to. Tabor sees the government's actions at the time as a tragedy of misunderstanding. FBI agents thought Koresh never discussed issues of substance with them because he was always talking to them about the Bible during negotiations. While from Koresh's view, talking about what the Bible required was explaining his position on all the relevant issues. By rolling in tanks and helicopters, Tabor says, the government unwittingly convinced David Koresh and his followers that perhaps the Bible wanted them to die in a bloody showdown in Waco, something they hadn't believed beforehand. I think the misunderstanding of the biblical apocalyptic language of David Koresh and his followers was at the heart, really, of the whole tragedy at Waco. In other words, I don't think it needed to have ended that way. One of the things that you write is that the government demanded that they surrender to proper authority and that when the Davidians heard that, they heard something very different than what was meant. What did the Davidians hear when they heard that? Yes. In fact, on the last day, as the tanks were inserting the tear gas all morning into the building, on a loudspeaker, there was a recording played over and over and over-- this is not an attack. We want you to come out. Come out with your hands up. Come out unarmed. Surrender to proper authority. That was the last public word spoken to the Davidians before the fire. From the Davidian point of view, it simply meant never, never could we come out under those sorts of circumstances, because obviously they believe that the only authority was God, and then David as their leader and anointed prophet. So it was just a complete crossing of wires, as we say, in terms of communication. Even one of the things that was usually cited as being one of the most inflammatory things to the public about the existence of his group, the fact that he had children from so many different women. Even that, there was a scriptural reason for. Yes. It's something a little difficult to justify, I think, in terms of our culture. But David did believe that he was the last and final and true prophet that God has sent to the world. And this final figure is obligated to have the seven wives, which he had, and to raise up 24 children. Now, as bizarre as that sounds, it's based upon text from the Psalms that speak about the anointed one coming, and that he will beget children, and it mentions his wives. By explaining it, I certainly don't intend to endorse it. But the point I would make is, if you're going to deal with the group, instead of calling him a polygamist, child-molesting, sex maniac, to understand how they would have understood all of these women and their understanding of things. James Tabor is the author with Eugene Gallagher of the book Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America. Coming up, make friends, have peace of mind, solve the problems of 20th-century Socialism, all because of the end of the world. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, the end of the world. Today's program was first broadcast in 1999. In the first half of our show, we heard about things that we should worry about when it comes to the apocalypse. In this half-- I know it sounds strange to say-- this half of the show is all about how the end of the world can be a good thing, how it can be a good thing in the lives of people who think about it all the time. We've arrived at act three of our show. Act Three, Again. We have this story from our contributing editor Sarah Vowell. Whenever I hear people talking about the end of the world, I think, the apocalypse again? I would go so far as to say that the end of the world, an event which has not happened, is the most important event of my life. I've been there not once, not twice, but three times. Here's what I can report. While the actual end of the world will, of course, involve a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, thinking about the end of the world can be kind of uplifting. Apocalypse one, 1970s. I've had this recurring dream since I was six years old. My mother's gone. She is not running errands gone, not at a friend's house gone. She's gone for good. Vanished. My sister's still here. My dad's around. In fact, all the kids and dads in town are present and accounted for, but all the mothers have vanished overnight. That's how I figure out the Rapture has happened. Only the women are worthy enough of God's grace to get whisked off to Heaven. The wicked men and wicked children are left to tough out Armageddon on our own. That means my sister and I will have to suffer through the lake of fire, the rivers of blood, and our father's cooking. And yet, I am calm. I have my loophole, my get out of tribulation free card, which I learned about in church. I go to the supermarket, Gibson's in Muskogee, and fill a cart with food. At the checkout counter, I line up vegetables by the cash register. The clerk informs me that in order to pay for the food, I must take the mark of the beast. I refuse. Soldiers with machine guns appear. They gun me down, my blood spattering all over the salad fixins. Then poof, I'm in Heaven, dead, harp in hand. I still have that dream sometimes. And thinking about it now as an atheistic adult, I realize how many things are going on in it, that it is a microcosm of my childhood world. At my church, Braggs Pentecostal Holiness in Braggs, Oklahoma, the sermons were about the Book of Revelation when I was in first grade, the year I learned to read. So it was the first book of the Bible I ever read myself, not to mention one of the first books I ever read period. The loophole about not accepting the mark of the beast comes from scripture, as does the grocery store setting. According to Revelation 13:17-- "and that no man might buy or sell save he that had the mark or the name of the beast of the number of his name." And that number, of course, revealed in verse 18 is "six hundred three score and six." 666. The other reason I refuse the mark in the grocery store is tied up in the fundamentalist uproar over bar codes in the 1970s. Bar codes were thought by many to be the mark of the beast. Armageddon is kind of a lot to lay on a kid. The Book of Revelation is verse after verse of dragons and demons and the blood of the lamb. A typical passage-- "and the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun and the power was given unto him to scorch men with fire." Mom, can I have another cookie? Frankly, I could have done with more seven dwarfs and less seven seals. But living in eastern Oklahoma, believing in the apocalypse made a lot of sense. I could buy the gaudy deaths and grisly details set forth in Revelation because Oklahoma itself was a biblical landscape. It seemed like half the year we were on tornado watch, and the place was literally crawling with snakes, snakes in my tree house, snakes on the porch, snakes in the yard. Because I was a baptized when I was eight in a water moccasin infested lake. And as if I wasn't petrified enough, fangs and drowning being two my bigger fears, Sister Minnie's drunken husband drove up in his pickup right after I came up for air, and he started scream-singing, "shall we gather at the river?" Because our cousin Gary John's wife got shot dead in the head with Gary's own gun by Gary's sister's husband who was joking around and didn't know the gun was loaded. Ha-ha. Because the leader of my Brownie troop with smashed into a million pieces trying to cross the train tracks. Because my grandfather Pa Vowell buried another wife every few years. Because my other grandfather Pa Parson was a Cherokee wart doctor who could tie a string around a wart and bury the string in the ground and that made the wart go away. Because my grandmother Ma Parson lost her mind one day and couldn't remember my name, though she could remember all the words to "Bringing in the Sheaves." And today we call this Alzheimer's, but back then we called it "God's will." Because on Wednesday nights, my mother would drive this ancient witchy widow to church, a lady who believed haircuts for women were a sin, which did stop her from trimming that mangy white rope dangling off her scalp around 1923, but did not stop her from scamming rides off my mom, a hairdresser. So in such a superstitious town among such accident-prone citizens, Revelation seemed more like gossip than a ghost story. In fact, considering all the random wrath of God around me, Armageddon appeared refreshingly well thought out. So well thought out that it included that escape clause. I was a believer. But there was something stronger than my belief in God. The thing the preacher said that I believed more than anything else I heard at church was that I was a sinner. When I sang "Amazing Grace," the key phrase wasn't the title's promise of redemption but this-- "wretch like me." Even as a six-year-old, I knew I'd never be good enough to get into Heaven. So I seized on the escape clause, the idea that I could refuse the mark of the beast at a grocery store and everything would be all right. I knew I was evil. I knew I couldn't get through a lifetime adhering to daily virtue. But I was pretty sure I had the guts to stand two or three seconds of machine gun pain when the time came. And this comforted me. It kept me from panicking about the eternal consequences of every childish trespass. And so, even though it's the scariest book, Revelation did more to ease my mind than any other book of the Bible. Apocalypse two, 1980s. I'm not exactly proud to admit this, but I owe my life to Ronald Reagan. My family moved from Oklahoma to the pleasant college town of Bozeman, Montana in 1981, the year Reagan was inaugurated. I was 11. Away from the Bible Belt, my family was forced to attend a nondenominational church about which my mother said, "too much teachin', not enough preachin'." Religion became an increasingly less urgent part of my life. This did not mean that the end of the world faded from the forefront of my psyche. I merely replaced one apocalypse for another. In the early '80s, President Reagan made so many mortifying announcements about the evil empire and his strategic defense initiative, AKA Star Wars, and "we begin bombing in five minutes," that I was utterly convinced I wasn't going to get to grow up. What with waking up every morning surprised there was still a world to wake up to, I was not a particularly fun-loving high school student. By junior year, 1986-- Chernobyl-- my free time was filled up with doing my homework and writing orchestra music derivative of my then-hero Philip Glass, repetitive music predicated on the notion that time perhaps is going nowhere. But then my twin sister Amy, who had friends and fun and, unlike me, was an actual human being, told me that some kids she knew from art class were starting an anti-nuclear group. I was immediately excited, impressed. I only knew the kids who, like me, took band. I thought the art class kids who showed up for the first meeting of what would become Youth for Global Peace were the most glamorous people I'd ever met. They played in rock and roll bands and wrote poetry and didn't eat meat. They had spiky hair and smoked cigarettes and debated whether or not William Burroughs' Junkie was better than his Naked Lunch. Yeah, yeah. We talked about nukes. We were against them. We'd meet every Saturday night at Greta Montaine's house. We handed out pie graphs of Reagan's 1986 federal budget, in which defense spending was the biggest slice of pie, at grocery store parking lots. We got up really early one morning and plastered the school walls with xeroxed posters of a mushroom cloud on which we had scribbled, "this could happen to you." My biggest moment was probably representing the group on a round table discussion on the local public television channel. The adults said a few mundane things about a saner nuclear policy before I started screaming, "you got to grow up! Do you know what it's like to think you're not going to grow up? Do you?" In retrospect, the anti-nuclear part of the anti-nuclear group was the least important thing about it. I had had friends before them, but I had never had a gang, never had a group of people I liked and admired and enjoyed. The anti-nuke group taught me a lesson which changed my life-- how to hang out. And the first time Matt Brewer, the coolest boy, invited me over to his house, and I got there, and he and Jimmy Harkin were sitting around listening to Black Sabbath and spray-painting Legos black, I sort of hugged myself, contrary to conventional leftist wisdom, with nuclear arms. I didn't know life could be that fun. Apocalypse three, 1990s. Berlin Wall falls. Cold War ends. I start believing I might live long enough to die of something other than a first-strike Soviet attack or refusing the mark of the beast. Goodbye darkness, my old friend. Ah, the good old days. When I was a kid, the end of the world really was something, nuclear holocaust, the Rapture. But they don't make apocalypses like they used to. Just look at the cheap little cataclysm they're trying to pass off to unsuspecting future-phobes lately. These kids today and their Y2K. Do they know what it's like to think they're not going to grow up? Do they? To find out, I traveled to San Francisco. I heard about a community group there which was organizing for the possible Y2K aftermath. The good people of BAY2K were not the young, Silicon Valley computer programmers I'd hoped for. Instead, the group felt very ex-hippie, very new age, very Marin. One part of the evening ended with a women reciting a Hopi prayer. They broke down into small groups to address specific problems, from pragmatic topics like community preparedness to the less tangible psychological and spiritual issues. They admit it could be that, come January 1, nothing will happen. This is how Y2K differs from previous apocalypses. The old ones, we knew exactly what would happen, we just didn't know the date. Y2K, we know the date. It's what'll happen that's up in the air. One woman says that if nothing happens on January 1, well, at least she had a good excuse to meet her neighbors and have a really good dialogue. Which in a certain sense seemed to be the point. Just like my old church and my old anti-nuke group, they're using the end of the world as a means to meet and greet, planning block parties so they can come up with Y2K contingency plans in their neighborhoods. They were also very idealistic. This is the thing you might not realize about end of the worlders. They might seem like they're all about fetishizing doom and destruction, but stick around long enough for them to finish their spiel-- few people do, I know-- and before long, they get to a straight-up Utopian vision of the world. After all, after the biblical tribulation comes the new Jerusalem and 1,000 years of peace on Earth. The BAY2K activists said they saw the possible societal shut down as an opportunity for community building. They talked about how American culture is unsustainable, out of control, optimistically opining that we brought this all on ourselves. They're looking forward to a saner, more agrarian way of life. One of the men said neighborhoods should get together and buy a tiller to start community gardens. To them, Y2K looks a lot like Y1K. I grew increasingly alarmed at the picture they were painting, a golden picture of neighbor with neighbor throwing off the shackles of Capitalism to till the soil at one with the Earth. A woman named Leslie said she'd like to help out but, "I'm physically challenged so I can't even offer my strength. I can't garden. I'd like to, but I can't." [? Nityama, ?] the man sitting next to her, tells her that she could contribute in other ways, like canning. He says, "even the know-how of doing it is just as valuable as the manpower or the strength to do it." Aw, each giving according to his abilities, each taking according to his needs. I'm not sure which thing I react to more, this brand of shiny, happy Marxism all expressed as if the history of the 20th century never happened or the talk about canning. Just picturing Mason jars full of stewed tomatoes, a bomb goes off inside me. I suddenly realize what they're proposing. Canning, gardening, spending time with your neighbors. This is Oklahoma minus God, the one thing that gave it all some dignity. They're welcome to their millennial vision, to whatever gives them hope. I too have imagined a Heaven on Earth, a new Jerusalem that comforts me in times of tribulation. Behold my Revelation, I stand at the door in the morning and lo, there is a newspaper in sight like unto an emerald. And holy, holy, holy is the coffee, which was and is and is to come. And hark, I hear the voice of an angel round about the radio saying, "since my baby left me I found a new place to dwell." After this, I beheld, and lo, a great multitude which no man could number of shoes. And after these things, I will hasten unto a taxicab and to a theater, where a ticket will be given unto me. And lo, it is a matinee and a film that doeth great wonders. And when it is finished, the heavens will open and out cometh a rain fragrant as myrrh. And yea, I have an umbrella. Sarah Vowell is the author of Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, where a version of this story now appears. Act Four, None Shall Know the Exact Day or Hour. The logical conclusion to believing that the end of the world is coming, to thinking about it, to preparing for it, is finally trying to compute when exactly it will happen in advance. We are a nation where many Christians have tried to do exactly that throughout our history. Somebody who's trying today is Bonnie Gaunt. She lives in Jackson, Michigan. Some of her calculations are based on the fact that every Hebrew letter corresponds to a number. So the Hebrew text of the Bible is filled with numbers that provide clues to the date of the Rapture and the end time. She's written nine books about this. Bonnie Gaunt also points to scripture that indicates that the millennium will come on the sixth biblical day. Each biblical day, she says, is 1,000 years. And you start counting from the creation of Adam. Counting all the events in the Bible and since, she believes that she has discovered the exact day that good Christians will be raptured directly to Heaven and that the end time will begin. I spoke with her back in April of 1999. And at that time, her calculations indicated that the exact date of the Rapture would be-- September 11, 1999. And has it affected your behavior in daily life? Yes, that's very true. Such as our house is in desperate need of siding, new siding on it. And my husband says, well, when spring comes, let's put siding on the house. And I says, well, let's wait until after September 11 to put siding on the house. If we're not raptured, then maybe the house needs siding. And there are things like when I get catalogs in the mail for clothes and shoes and this kind of stuff, and I look through the catalogs, and I toss the catalog down, I says, what am I looking in this for? What do I need new clothes for? I don't need any new clothes between now and the Rapture. I don't need any new shoes. I can wear what I've got. You know, I would think it could also go the other way. You would think, OK, well, after September, I'm going to be gone. So I can have the extra dessert. Do you know what I mean? I hadn't even thought of that. I had thought strictly in the other concept that I don't need these things because I'm going to be given something so much better. I guess what I'm attempting to do is prepare for it, but also still prepare to keep on living in case my date is wrong, in case the date that I have is not correct. I have told my sons, prepared both of my sons for the possibility that their father and mother might disappear. And what were these conversations like with your sons? I would imagine that, if they're not believers in the same way that you are, that could be kind of a hard conversation to have. Well, they were very kind and polite to me. What they were really feeling inside was not revealed on the outside. The 38-year-old, when I was telling him all this, and he just sat there with this big grin on his face and this sparkle in his eye. And I couldn't tell whether he was happy for me because I had such a beautiful hope or whether he was secretly laughing at me. I don't know. How much of your time, how much of your thinking does it consume? I can think of little else. I go out for a walk and I talk with God and I'm just so anxious to see Him and to be in His realm. It's just such a beautiful, living hope for me that that hope is with me all day long. I lie in bed at night and think about it. And it's a beautiful hope. It's difficult because people have been predicting the return of the Lord for centuries. And even the early church, the early church thought he was going to return in their day. So I have people telling me, well, why do you think your date's any different than anybody else's date? None of them have ever come true. So how do you know yours is going to come true? I don't know that it is. I'm hoping that it is. Marilyn Agee lives in California. Like Bonnie Gaunt, she studies Bible prophecy and has tried to compute the length of all the events in the Bible to figure out when the end time would begin. She's the author of three books on this subject. The latest is Heaven Found. Last year, she set a date for the Rapture, May 31, Pentecost. What did you do the day before? That must've been such a momentous day. I have a web page up called Bible Prophecy Corner. And I answered email constantly. I was answering email. And I meant to stay up all night because the Jews stay up all night. And my back hurt so bad-- I live in pain. I have lots of pain. So it hurt so bad I went to lay down just for a few minutes, just to rest my back, and was going to go back and answer email, left my computer on and everything. And I woke up in my clothes the next morning. I didn't get a chance to stay up all night. I hope I can do better this time. I want to stay up. Did anybody try to stay awake with you? No. Uh-uh. Like Jesus in the garden. Yeah, they couldn't stay awake. And I couldn't either. And I meant to. I really meant to. And when you woke up, what was that like? Well, I just knew it didn't happen. So back to the drawing board. What is there there, what clue is there there that I didn't see? You must have been so, so disappointed that morning. Oh, of course. Because I've been counting on it since 1969. But you know something? I wasn't cast down, and my faith is so strong there's no possible way that it could interfere with that. Nothing. They could kill me and I wouldn't give an inch, you know. Do you think there's anything that you'll miss about Earth? Not much. Things are getting so bad here, and I have so much pain here, and I think how nice it will be to have a day without pain. I haven't had a day without pain since I was 30 years old and I'm 70. You were saying before that you have back pain. Oh, I have muscular spasms, and they can hit anywhere. I was awake two times the night with my feet cramping just last night. I had to take quinine and Motrin. And so after the Rapture? After the Rapture, I won't have any more pain. That will be nice. Marilyn Agee has re-calculated her chronology since our interview back in 1999. She now believes that the rapture will occur on Pentecost of this year, which is May 28. Let's close our program today with this last artifact. In 1818, a farmer in New England named William Miller spent two years studying scripture, especially a passage in Daniel that Marilyn Agee, in fact, pays a lot of attention to, Daniel 8:14. And William Miller concluded from his reading that the Rapture and the end of the world would happen in the year 1843. Many people, including mainstream clerics, became convinced that his calculations were sound and a whole movement started up. And when 1843 came and went without the end of the world, he recalculated, set a date for 1844. This time, the anticipation was even more excited. Scholars who study the Millerites a century later noted dryly that, when people are committed to a set of beliefs, clear contrary evidence may simply result in them holding to their beliefs even more firmly. And that's what happened in this case. All over New England, farmers didn't plant. Others planted but did not harvest as testament to their faith that the world would in fact end. And on the appointed date, October 22, 1844, when the sun rose and set on another ordinary day in New England, a Millerite wrote, "our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted and such a weeping came over us as I have never experienced before. It seemed that the loss of all earthly friends could be no comparison. We wept and wept until the day dawned. My advent experience had been the richest and brightest of all my Christian experiences. If this had proved a failure, what was the rest of my Christian experience worth? Has the Bible proved a failure? Is there no God, no Heaven, no golden home city, no paradise? Is all this but a cunningly devised fable? Is there no reality to our fondest hope and expectation of these things? And thus, we had something to grieve and weep over if all our fond hopes were lost. And as I said, we wept till the day dawned." The world is going to end. The world is going to end. So if you're going to love me, you should hurry. Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, and Sylvia Lemus. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. To buy a cassette of any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who you can find any day of the week, wandering the hallways of WBEZ singing this song-- "Shall we gather at the river?" I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Start from the top? I needed a driver. I couldn't drive. The problem was I wanted to have my same life, my same nice little suburban, get in the car and drive everywhere life. Brigid was going blind in mid-life with a kid. She had stuff to do. So she took out an ad in the paper and hired somebody to drive her around, a guy named Harry. Nice guy. The first day, he picks her up in a van, takes her to her daughter's school at the end of the school day. They wait In line with the other parents. And Harry jumped out and started with his whisk broom. Opened up the van, opened up on both sides and whisk brooming and tidying it up. On errands, Harry would park in the handicapped space. Or if that wasn't available, he'd park on the grass to save Brigid a few steps. She asked him to take her to the grocery store. Anyway, so then we get out and always he'd be wanting to help me up by the elbows. He wanted to help. And he says to me as we went into the grocery, here, let me get the basket for you. Let me carry your-- and I said, no, no no. I'm fine. And oh, he says, please. Oh, let me. I'm here to be of service for you. And he kind of shadowed me throughout the grocery store. And it was just very, again, a lot of that roar-roar fight back. And then this awful feeling of that he's just trying to help me. What I he really wanted was to help somebody out. When you do something for somebody else, it always seems so simple. You just want to help. But in fact, you're forming a relationship with that person. And it's just as complicated as any relationship you can have. And like any other relationship, if you're not attentive to what the person actually wants, it's easy to blunder, which is why doing good for others is so difficult. In certain religions, the question of how to do good is a kind of obsession. Among my people, your Jews, it was traditionally a very big deal. In fact, one way to understand all Jewish law is as a set of instructions for doing good in the world. A set of instructions, I should say, so complicated, spanning so many centuries and thinkers, that in the 12th century, a philosopher named Maimonides actually made a crib sheet summarizing it all by listing the eight different ways that a person can do good for others. He listed in order of preference, from least desirable to the most. The lowest level of doing for others is giving grudgingly. Then there's giving less than you should but giving it cheerfully. Then giving after being asked. Then giving before being asked. And it continues on up through the most meritorious way to give, which is, tellingly, enabling the person you're helping to become self-sufficient so they don't need the help anymore. Today on our program, stories of people trying to do good and why they often fail and why they occasionally succeed. Our program today in just two acts. Act One, You Can't Go Home Again, the story of two people trying to restore a small town to its former splendor and how the biggest obstacle turned out to be the people whose lives they wanted to improve. Act Two, Humanitarians. I chat with writer Philip Gourevitch about his encounters with international do-gooders, about Rwanda and Kosovo, about genocidal murders, and about Rick in Casablanca. Stay with us. Act One. You Can't Go Home Again. You drive through cotton fields to get here, down old Highway 61 through Southeast Missouri. The nearest big town is Sikeston, population 18,000, 20 minutes away. When you drive into Canalou, Missouri, there's a sign that says, "population 319." And then just beyond it, another sign saying, "pavement ends." Then it's mostly gravel roads and trailer homes. The businesses on Main Street aren't just closed, they're gone, torn down decades ago. The movie theater, the restaurants, the grocery stores. People used to come here from all the surrounding towns. And when Kenny Wharton and his wife Jackie talk about what it was like in Canalou when they were kids, it's like they're describing a dream, a town in an old, black and white Hollywood film. This was the place on a Saturday. You had a hard time finding a place to park if you had a car. And we had everything in this little town. And people would come to town to visit. Old men would be playing Checkers up and down the streets. And the women would be visiting and kids would be playing. We played until 2:00 in the morning, we'd play. And us younger kids would be asleep in the back seat of the car because we would give out. When I pulled into Canalou to talk to the Whartons, a four year old who lives next door to them, in a muddy shirt, mud on his face, no shoes in the cold, was playing in the drainage ditch. These ditches line both sides of every street in town because there's no sewage system here. Most people live in trailers not regular houses, and some people empty their septic tanks straight into the ditches where kids play. The day I arrived, it had rained. The ground was soft, muddy everywhere. An adult who had let this four year old touch her face a few weeks back had gotten a rash on her face that even the doctors up in St. Louis couldn't identify or cure. This is the town that Kenny and Jackie couldn't wait to get back to. Anyway, this town was a good little town to grow up in. But we got married and we went away, went to the big city of St. Louis. And we've been gone, I guess we were gone about 40 years. And this has been a dream, to come back and build a home here. In St. Louis, Kenny had been a supervisor at McDonnell Douglas. The Whartons lived in a house in the suburbs, raised two kids, active with neighborhood associations and the Board of Ed. And they thought, once they moved back to Canalou, they would try to bring back some of the spirit that they remembered growing up here in the '50s and '60s. Maybe start a little league, build a public park with swings and trees, put up a gym where kids could play ball, the kinds of straightforward, innocent improvements it's hard to imagine that anybody would oppose anywhere. This is the story of why they failed, of why people did turn their backs on the Whartons, why three years of using every skill they have, devoting energy, devoting hope, only proved to them that Canalou did not want to be improved, and that something had changed in this small town that would take a lot more than two do-gooders to reverse. I don't know if we can climb over the rubble, or we should walk around. I can. I can. I know how. No, baby. You fall, see all this glass and this rock? Fall and hurt yourself. I didn't do that 'afore. I didn't do that. It's OK. Directly across the street from the Whartons is a trailer where Susan Drake lives with her five-year-old daughter Rachel, her eight-month-old son David, and her boyfriend Brad. Next to their trailer, one house down, is a lot that used to be an auto repair shop. The shop burned down 10 years ago, and nobody has cleaned up the site. It's a mess of broken glass, twisted, rusted out tin from the roof, concrete blocks from the walls, a stack of old tires. In short, an irresistible place for any small child, including Rachel and her friends. Susan and Brad and Rachel take me on a tour. You've got an open refrigerator standing here. Well, the door's standing wide open. There. Right there. You can't get in here. Well, the shelves are in there. But if you really wanted in there, you could get in there. But that's dangerous baby. When you get inside there and that door shuts, you can't open it from the inside. You're stuck in there and you could die, suffocate. Rachael considers a diplomatic response. Well, we went in the cars, though. We went in the cars. Not here. We didn't went here. We got in the cars. The cars where Rachel likes to play are just a few feet back from the building, nearly two dozen old Impalas and Malibus and Chevys sitting in a yard, no fence, lots of rust, broken glass. Brad chooses this day, the day with visitors watching, to do some child proofing-- knock the refrigerator face down so no kid can climb in, push over a dangerously crumbling wall, shove a car to the ground that looks like it's about to fall over on any kid who leans on it. Rachael, meanwhile, tells her mom about the new swing the kids are all using. It is a dead power line that hangs from the top of a telephone pole behind the abandoned school. As the kids swing, the pole quietly wobbles back and forth. We walk through the rubble. And it turns out that this lot, which will be cleaned up in most places-- not necessarily out of civic pride but at least out of fear that somebody would get hurt and sue the owner or the city-- this property belongs to Susan's cousin, little Jim. And Susan and Brad say that all the town has to do is threaten him with a ticket or a citation or a fine. He would clean it up. Right. Yeah, he would. The fact of the matter is-- But he's never been pressured. --who's going to spend money they don't have to spend? Who's going to spend money they don't have to spend? And nobody's told him to spend any money. Basically why he's not cleaned it up. Nobody's pressured him to clean it up. Sweep it up. It's just ridiculous is what it is. Laziness, yeah. Canalou's a hole in the wall. That's all it is. It's a mud hole that they ought to bulldoze. There's nothing here. There's no store. There's no bank. There's nothing for kids to do. There's one soda machine in town, and it's in a guy's driveway. When we lived here, the rules were strictly enforced. You kept your place maintained. If a car was broke down on the streets, you had 24 hours to get it fixed. It didn't sit there. That's Jackie Wharton again. She and Kenny moved back to Canalou in October of 1995. And it wasn't long before Jackie started a ladies auxiliary to begin with some little community projects. It was three ladies at first. It got to over a dozen. To raise money, they sold stuff at flea markets, delivered hearts and flowers on Valentine's Day, threw fundraiser dinners. And after a few months, they had earned $2,000 in profits, enough to start a softball league, throw a neighborhood party. And at this point, the saga of good intentions gone wrong began. We started several projects and boy, we just met opposition at every corner because they just couldn't understand why. The ladies auxiliary gave out free Christmas baskets to every home in town. We had fruit and candy and cookies, homemade cookies in them. We gave out 133 baskets. We did not get one thank you call. But we got five negative calls, and we considered it a success because that's all we got. They were angry, some people, because we left the baskets hanging on their door. And some didn't like us knocking on the doors after dark. And oh, we got one lady's dogs upset and she didn't like that because her dogs got upset. What did you say to them? I said, well, we're sorry. We apologize. What can you say? We're sorry. We're sorry it wasn't good enough. We're sorry your dogs were upset. We're sorry. No ma'am, we won't leave anything hanging on your door again. And what can you say? You handle it. Meanwhile, Kenny tried to get a grant to blacktop the streets, started things in motion to get a sewer system finally constructed. He tried to get junk cleared off yards. He talked to his neighbors about bringing a restaurant or a grocery store back to Main Street, maybe get the hat factory down in Oran to set up some of their subcontracting work out of Canalou, generate some jobs. And before long, this 65-year-old retiree, who looks a lot like a youthful Lyndon Johnson, found himself running for mayor. I just told him I was interested in cleaning up the town and making it nice. And everybody that I talked to said, well, I'm not registered to vote. But I'm sure going to vote for you. We sure need that. And I got them over to register to vote, and they voted for the other guy. Sure did. This is true. To understand why Kenny lost, I visited Charles and Kay Southard. Like Kenny, they grew up in a sharecropper's family. Charles' people were farmers and laborers. Like most of the older people in town, he picked cotton as a kid. The hand-picking stopped about 15 years ago, and they all went to machines. And that's where the world messed up, by going to the machines. Then a bunch of Mexicans came down here and took everybody's job working. Yeah, there's a bunch of them immigrants in here. What they ought to do is just pack them up and send them back to Mexico where they belong. That way, American citizens will have more jobs instead of giving it to them. The Southards run a live bait business from their house, a double-wide trailer with additions built on. In the living room is a big tank with over-sized goldfish in it, which they sell as pets and as bait. It's Charles Southard's driveway that has the town's one soda machine, but there's lots of other junk in the yard too, an old wagon, broken tables, cans, bottles, and a wide assortment of nondescript rusted out pieces of machinery. There are lots of yards like this around town. I sat in the kitchen with Charles and Kay and asked what people thought of Kenny, why he lost the election. You want the truth or you want a lie? I want the truth. Because he was going around trying to run this town, telling everybody how to do things and how it was going to be done. He was saying, you're going to keep your yard clean, you weren't going to have no toys, you weren't going to have no garbage, no trash, and no junk cars in this-- if he's going to do that, he better go back to where he come from, from down around Memphis. Because you don't come into a little town like that and try to take over and run everything. Because this town's been this way ever since it was built. And one guy ain't going to change it. That's the reason he made so many enemies and couldn't get elected. If he would have just played it smart and went along with everybody, then after he got elected tried to do his thing, he might have won it. In a sense, Kenny made exactly the kind of political error that professional politicians always try to avoid. He told voters that they were going to have to make changes themselves. They were going to have to sacrifice. They were going to have to get off their butts if change was going to come. What made this especially hard to listen to was the fact that Kenny made a lot more money, even retired, than most people in town. Many Canalou families get food stamps or SSI. Besides Kenny's retirement checks, Jackie had won $286,644.54 on a quarter slot machine back in 1984. Jackie and Kenny were the talk of the town for a while when they actually built a garage for their cars with an electric garage door opener, the first and only one in Canalou. These were the people who were going around telling people what to do? City people with their city ideas? Yankees, really? No wonder so many people did not believe that Kenny was even from Canalou. Add to that the rumors that floated through town, that Kenny was going to make it illegal to own more than two cars, that Kenny was going to force people to give up older model trailers, or trailers on Main Street, or trailers completely, that Kenny made a man get rid of a goat that he kept in his yard. Rumors that were all untrue. I know he came up here and told me my yard is junky. He said, well, you've got to clean this stuff up. Says, you don't, we're going to give you a ticket and you're going to pay a fine. Like you, if you were out here in these old tires, and I know you've seen them, that people plant flowers in. Well, he had enough galls to come up here and tell me, I've got four of them out there, that I had to get rid of them. I told him, naw, man, that's my flower pots. I don't get rid of them. Well, you got to. Says, that's pollution. Says, that's cluttering up the ground. I says, I don't care. It's my ground, my property, if I want to clutter it up, I clutter it up. You just stay outside the fence here. You need to just shut up and leave them alone. In a place like Canalou, where people have so little, they're naturally kind of protective about the little they have. In talking to Charles Southard, it's hard not to wonder if Kenny couldn't have just presented his ideas differently and won more people over. Because if you ask Charles and Kay what changes they'd like to see in Canalou, their list actually matches a lot of the things on Kenny's list. They need somebody to keep these roads in shape. They need a trash truck to pick the trash up. They need to put a grocery store in here. Put a what? A grocery store. And a game room for these kids. A typical mayoral election in Canalou, I was told, brings out 50, maybe 60 voters. This one turned into a referendum on Kenny Wharton. And people felt so strongly that nearly 200 voted. Kenny got 89 votes. His opponent, the current mayor, Charles Joyce, 98. Kenny lost by nine votes. Rick Foraker is an outsider who spent a lot of time in Canalou the last 11 years, ever since he started dating his wife, Lavanna, who grew up here, who likes it here. Rick's job is a strange one. He works for companies that do disaster relief. He's kind of a mercenary do-gooder, a professional humanitarian. Though he just calls himself a vulture. He flies to places where there have been floods or hurricanes, works five, six months, seven days a week, 12 hours a day, makes a lot of money, and comes home, spends months doing nothing. Every November and September, you can find my butt glued to the TV set, to the Weather Channel watching for the hurricanes. I didn't know that such a job existed. Very few people do. That's why it pays good. As an outsider to this town who's observed Canalou for a decade, Rick has an entire theory of how the town works and why Kenny and Jackie would do so badly here. Downtown, this town used to thrive and party more than Sikeston, up until the mid-'60s. And it's like everything else. It was a railroad town. The railroad closed down, so the cotton mills closed down. So the cotton mills closed down, no jobs. People left with the jobs. Businesses didn't have any more money. People weren't spending money in businesses so the businesses closed. And voila, you have a ghost town. It's just a typical ghost town story. And now what you've got left here are the die hards, the people that just won't move out because they're afraid to go anywhere else, they can't afford to go anywhere else. And they keep them at a poverty level. People down here, they don't make any money. That's my main bitch about being here. The jobs that they've got down here for $6 and $7 an hour are jobs I'm used to making $12, $15 at home. What kind of jobs are you talking about? Well, it's just like driving the tan dump truck. I go home, I make $14, $15, I've made as high as $17 an hour. This is back home in Springfield, Illinois. Yeah. Springfield, Illinois. Down here, it's $7 an hour, and they expect you to be on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day. They don't want to pay up any kind of an overtime situation. An when they hand you this paycheck, they've just got this attitude like they own you. They're doing you a large favor. I've personally got some really bad news for them. It's no favor. Most of these people who are in this town have been in this town. So they figure they're here, what they got's what they're going to get, they just get depressed and upset and aggravated and look around, the hell with it. And so people don't try to fix things, Rick says, or make their lives better. People have given up. And they stay because it's cheap. Rick's property taxes are $27 a year. Picture then, into this setting come Kenny and Jackie Wharton, like people from another America, an America of people on the go, of self-help seminars, of motivational speakers. Jackie used to be a motivational speaker. Jackie and Kenny arrive in Canalou and it was like a collision of two different visions of what it means to live in this country. Is Canalou a small town where people have pride and self-reliance, where neighbors band together to build civic institutions? Or is Canalou a place full of people who simply cannot get it together to improve their lives? I'd like to say, once again, the sewer system. God, it'd be so nice to be able to go out in the yards in the summertime and not smell somebody's septic tank. Or look out across somebody's yard after rain and not see black water running to the ditches. But they're so scared. Well, I guess it's because they don't have the money. They're so scared that this is going to cost them everything they've got that they don't want nothing to do with it. And so it came to pass that in this town where people do not want to clean their yards, where nobody wants to be bothered, the democratic process worked pretty much as well as you could imagine. The mayor they chose instead of Kenny is, in a certain sense, the perfect representative of people. One of the biggest and junkiest people in town is the mayor. Describe what his house is like. Well, I really can't. I could kind of show it to you. We walk to Rick's back window. Well, you can get kind of a view. The two houses right straight through, those two houses there, all that pipe and stuff sitting over there on the ground, that's his. You say pipes, each one longer than a car. Twenty foot. That's irrigation pipe. That's his yard? Yeah, that's part of it. That's one lot. He's got two big lots there. That's where he keeps all of his junk. He's got all kinds of junk farm equipment, trucks, tractor trailers, semis and stuff in the yard. I've been mayor for a long time. People pretty well know what's going to happen. Charles Joyce is such a successful politician that he does not actually remember how many times he's been reelected since the early 1980s. When I visit, it's just before dinner. He's a farmer in his 60s, sat on a couch in his smallish living room, TV playing, one of those little TV tray tables next to him with some iced tea on it. I've been warned by the gossip line in Canalou that Mr. Joyce had somehow absconded the beautiful cypress floors of the old gymnasium that was torn down and used them for his own living room. This was nowhere near true. If anything, Canalou was a town too poor even to steal from. Mr. Joyce says there's no money to pay for a full-time policeman, for a judge, for a prosecutor. In short, there is no money to enforce any ordinances of any kind that they might have. I'm telling you, property taxes is nothing. That's what I've been telling you. See, we've got lots that bring in $0.50 and stamps is $0.35, right? So you're saying, basically, your hands are tied. Well, do you know what the mayor can do in a 4 Class city? I don't. What? Well, he can't do very much. Total budget of the Canalou general fund, $10,000 to $12,000. People don't want to pay more in taxes, Mayor Joyce told me, so that limits services. I ask him about the hazardous junk that any child could get hurt on and sue the city. He said that it would take money to enforce the law or money to clean it up. That is money they do not have for a cleanup that people do not want. See, what's junk to me may be your treasure. There's a couple over here that I understood was told that they had to get rid of a bus that they had in their backyard. That's the only storage building they've got. But that bus has got a good coat of paint on it. It's jacked up. It's on blocks. And they're not really bothering me. They're on his property. See, we're not Sikeston. We ain't never been, we'll never be. And this is one of the few things, privileges we've got, that we don't have a bunch of young storm troopers running around here saying, we're going to write you a ticket. I've got a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] here. They were going to write him a ticket because his kids had broke toys. That was the only toys that they had. Broken toys just sitting out in the yard, you mean? Yeah. They were out in the yard, because that's where they played with him, was in the yard. Well, the toys were broke. But those were the best toys the kids had. If we had to get rid of them, then they would have no toys at all. I don't agree. I don't agree. And I've been elected mayor a bunch of times. A lot of people do like it here. One night I stopped by Rick's when his wife Lavanna and their 13-year-old nephew Jason were there. My producer Julie Snyder was there, and Mary Wilternburg, who knew her way around Canalou and was helping with this story. We all talked for a long time. It was fun. I might be able to call my mom and I can stay till 9:30. Can I call? Call. OK, because-- Jason did his impressions for us and then gave us permission to broadcast them, a fact which will surely horrify him three or four years from now when he's in high school. He did Ace Ventura. Hi there, nice to see you. Bumblebee Tuna. The guy from Sling Blade. Well, I was sitting out in my garage one day, mm-hmm. I heard my mama screaming, and so I walked out there and I saw that Kaiser blade. I call it a sling blade. So I picked it up, mm-hmm. Forrest Gump. I'm a little rusty on this, but I'm OK. Hi. My name's Forrest, Forrest Gump. People call me Forrest Gump. That-that-that's all I got to say about that. Rick teased Lavanna about Canalou, the town that she made him move to. People here are fighting modernization, he says. She just laughs at him. Oh, they are not. Get off of that. Then I ask her the question that Rick says he's been asking for eight years, since they got married. Why does she want to stay in Canalou? I knew you were going to ask me that. You know, honest to god, I don't know why. There's no reason to live here except for if you've got friends or relatives. Well, it's like when I lived across the street, that big porch out there. Every morning I just loved that porch. I'd go outside and drink my coffee. And I'd dream about when I grow old sitting on the porch with my buddy-- my buddy lives across the street-- just sitting on my porch just swinging and gossiping about this one and gossiping about that one. Not mean, nasty things, just boring old, oh, did you see what she did to her hair? You know, just [BLEEP] like that. I don't know, that'd probably just bore the socks off y'all. But to me, that's just one of my dreams, is just to sit and grow old with my friends. In her various projects to improve Canalou, Jackie had her successes and her failures. The big successes mostly came in this last year, her third year in town. The ladies auxiliary through a big 4th of July cookout that actually drew a crowd with booths and games, a petting zoo for the little kids, a fireworks display that everybody said was even better than Sikeston's, a Country/Western band for the adults. Some people even danced. The only problem was most of the crowd was from the surrounding towns, perhaps only a third from Canalou. That finally changed last Halloween. The ladies auxiliary held a costume contest with a weenie roast and a big bonfire. Finally, they drew 50 or 60 people from within Canalou, people of all ages. That, to me, was the most heartwarming experience I've done here. It was a whole different group of people that came out. There's something about a bonfire. After that party, Jackie finally felt comfortable enough in town to start going to church in Canalou. Every now and then, people started telling her they appreciated what the ladies auxiliary was doing in town. This is also during the period that Kenny was running for mayor, going door to door. And talking face to face, most people were encouraging. He thought he was a shoe-in. I was feeling elated. I was feeling like, oh boy, everything is going to work. We're going to be-- the community is coming together. And then what happened next? What changed? Then we started getting threatening calls, and people telling us get out or die, or leave this time, you-- awfully bad words. And we don't want you here. You're not wanted here. People threw eggs and bottles at their house. The threatening phone calls continued. Some people avoided them on the street. One day, their car windows were broken. And then on a day in December-- We were shot at, OK? The detectives out of Jeff City said it wasn't kids, that we were shot at from the top of the school with a rifle. And it came through our bedroom wall. Jackie showed me the bullet hole, big enough to put her thumb in. The timing was so strange. Jackie and Kenny are not sure why somebody would take a shot at them at that point in their time in Canalou. Maybe, Jackie thinks, somebody saw that they were finally having some success and just couldn't stand it. In any case, the bullet was the beginning of the end. There's nothing. There's just nothing left. I guess we had hopes of building it back, getting some of that back it used to have. But it's impossible because them people's gone. You just can't go back. And I guess we thought we could. And now we're ready to sell out and move on. Really? Just go on down the road. I am. I'm tired of trying to build something back, I guess. At that point in our interview, Jackie waved to me to turn off my tape recorder, tears in her eyes. She ran out of the room to get some tissues, came back, took a minute, and then let me turn the tape recorder back on. That's the first time, that's the first time I've heard him, I guess, really sound defeated. The two of you must have talked about, well, should we go, right? Oh, yes. I've said, I'm through. I can't take anymore. And then I say, oh, well, maybe this project will make a difference. And we've had three pretty rough years here, where we've been-- just people don't like us here. And that's hard to accept when you're not wanted and you're just not liked. That's really hard to give in to, you know. Kenny had never actually said to her before this moment that he was ready to move away. You ever hear this phrase, "no good deed goes unpunished?" Of what? No good deed goes unpunished, yeah. Well, probably not. But anyway, maybe we hadn't done such a good deed for these people around here. It's not what they wanted that's for sure. Maybe it's more what we wanted than what they wanted. I'd have to think about it. They get it the way they want it. They've had it this way before we come here. And it'll be this way after we leave. In order to do good of any kind, you have to have a vision of the way that you want things. There is a ruthlessness to changing the world, to imposing your will on what the world is. And the danger of having a vision, of course, is that your vision can cloud your eyes about what is really there. Often when I talked to Jackie, I was struck with her vision of Canalou, with how alive the past was to her. People who stayed in town for 40 years saw a change from what it was back then to what it is now. But without the advantage of watching the daily erosion of this town, Jackie can still see it as it was. And when she talked about it, it was always a version of the past that had the quality of a fairy tale, of something barely sounding real. One day I was walking through an old abandoned house on the town's west side, one of the buildings that the kids called their clubhouses. The roof's broken through, the floor is torn up, walls crumbling. Jason, Rick and Lavanna's nephew, took me there in the rain. There's lumber everywhere, insulation from the ceiling. And then there's a rope where that chimney used to be. And they nailed the rope up here, and we'll just every once in a while climb up it. It's not really safe, but we ain't got nothing to do. Whatever we can find around here is what we do. It's not much. The day after Jason and I stood there, I was driving by this very house with Kenny and Jackie Wharton. When Jackie looks at this house, she doesn't just see a dangerous wreck of a place that she thinks should be torn down right now in the here and now. She also sees what it was back when, the home of her school teacher, Mrs. Powell. The one thing I remember about it-- she had a lot of doilies, white, starched, crocheted doilies, like right in the middle of her coffee table. And right in the middle of that, she had a candy dish. And she would always offer you a piece of candy. And you were allowed to take it if they offered. And that was the main thing. And she had a glass slipper on her dresser that I used to just love to look at. Somehow when the light would come through the bedroom window, it would hit this glass slipper. And it would just shimmer. And I thought probably it was made of diamonds. Yeah, she was probably the richest lady in town and nobody knew. It's the clarity of Jackie's vision, her vision of the town that was-- or the town that seemed to be there anyway, when she was a kid-- combined with her sheer willfulness, her effectiveness in making things happen. This is the combination that led her and her husband down the path that they've taken for these last three years. It's only now that a rifle shot provided her with a different vision of what Canalou is, a second vision of the town to replace that first one that she started with. It's only that that made her and her husband able to move away. Coming up, do-gooders with $1 million a day in their pockets to spend and plane tickets overseas. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different stories on that theme. Today's program, Do-Gooders, why they often fail, why they sometimes succeed. We have arrived at act two of our program. Act Two. Humanitarians. In 1994, in the African country of Rwanda, the Hutu government instructed its people to go out and kill their neighbors, co-workers, friends, fellow church members who happen to be Tutsi. At least 800,000 people were murdered. And although there were several different moments when international action could have conceivably stopped or slowed the killing, the world did nothing, held back, in fact, at various points by the United States government. But after the biggest part of the genocide was over, the international community did finally intervene. Philip Gourevitch has written about all this in his book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Finally, the killing was brought to a halt by a rebel army within Rwanda. And the command that had been going out over the government radio to the Hutu majority had been previously, "kill all the Tutsis, join in the killing." Now it was, "flee, join in the exodus." And really close to a million and a half or 2 million people fled Rwanda in the largest, fastest mass exodus in modern recorded history, across the borders into Tanzania, but primarily also into what was then Zaire, the Congo, under Mobutu. And this enormous out-rush of people was perceived broadly as an exodus from the genocide. In other words, we in the world beyond had been told, my goodness, there's a lot of killing going on inside Rwanda. And then we're told there are a lot of people fleeing. And the obvious assumption was that these people must in some way be fleeing the atrocities. In fact-- Right. That these people were potential victims. In some sense that they were victims. By virtue of displacement, the image of a refugee is the image of a victim. And many of the people who were fleeing were people who were essentially civilians caught up in the turmoil and displacement of this conflict. On the other hand, a very great many of them were also people who had been active as either ordinary killers, as they're called in Rwanda, or as the organizers of the killers, the militia, the military, the civic leaders, the church leaders, the school teachers, and doctors, and so forth-- the so-called intellectuals who presided over the population when it was at home. And who essentially were leading this population into exile to create a rump genocidal state. It was then that you had this incredibly large humanitarian influx into the Congo in particular-- into Zaire, particularly into the towns of Goma and Bukavu, the border towns-- as vast airlifts and an enormous outpouring of international aid went to establish massive refugee camps and essentially cater to this huge refugee outpouring. And some of the organizations that were going at that point-- I think at one point you say it was $1 million a day that was being spent. At that point, it was much more than $1 million a day. $1 million a day was what it came to be averaged out as over a three-year period. So you can imagine that at that point, when they were bringing in transport planes around the clock, these transport planes would touch down on this runway, drop the back door, and fleets of white Land Cruisers would pour out with aid workers. They were bringing in water sanitation and vast plumbing systems. They were bringing in every known kind of sanitation engineer from all over the world. And this is the International Red Cross, some of the groups were-- Literally there were scores, perhaps more than 100, private organizations. There were many smaller Christian organizations and church-based organizations. You had Caritas from six or seven different countries. You had World Vision. They all come in with their flags. It was a traffic jam. One of the things that you write is that very quickly Hutu power, which had conducted the genocide, took over the camps and established itself. Well, that's the terrible thing. What appeared to be a humanitarian disaster was, of course, really a political disaster. It was the consequences of a government that had sought to exterminate much of its people. And that government fled and presided over the camps. The same civic structures and political structures immediately replicated themselves, and there was enormous violence in the camps very quickly. These camps were set up within a mile of the Rwandan border, so they were like terrorist bases right on the border. And in fact, the Hutu powers were staging raids from those bases. Regularly. There was killing going on wherever there were camps. There was a very, very high murder rate surrounding them, basically, murder by the same militias who'd carried out the genocide. It was really quite an extraordinarily brilliant public relations move, frankly, by which the forces that had committed genocide almost immediately that they finished killing, managed to convert themselves in the public imagination into the victims of the catastrophe by becoming refugees, by exploiting our generosity with humanitarian aid, and by basically buffaloing our imaginations to the degree that we just imagined, oh, those poor people. We're giving them help. Thank goodness we're doing something. And the terrible thing I found, Ira, was whenever I'd go to visit these camps, I'd meet people who were more like me. Which is to say college educated, Western, nice European and American and North American men and women in their 20s who came over basically with the idea, I will do something that is simple and straightforward and good. There will be suffering. I will learn how to get clean water to these people, how to dole out food to these people, how to help them dig trenches to dispose of their waste in a way that's safe for them. I will do good, it will be unambiguous, and I will get some satisfaction from that. And I will also feel like I'm not a passive witness to the horrors of the world. And in fact, what they were doing is they were catering the horrors of the world. There's a place on page 166 in your book. If I could ask you to read. "In this regime, the humanitarians were treated rather like the service staff at a seedy, mafia-occupied hotel. They were there to provide food, medicine, housewares, an aura of respectability. If at times they were pandered to, it was only because they were being set up to be cheated. If they needed to be brow-beaten, a mob quickly surrounded them. And if they were essentially the dupes of their criminal guests, there were not unwitting about it. And with time, their service effectively made them accessories to the Hutu power syndicate." And essentially they were keeping the whole thing going by providing the food and the blankets and all that for the Hutu powers. Through that entire period, it was this really self-evident thing that as long as those camps existed, there was an effort by the militias in the camps, by the Hutu power militias in the camps from Rwanda to start to ethnically cleanse regions around the camps. In case one day those camps were closed, they could create a rear base. So they started massacring people in the mountains. They started massacring the people in their host countries. It created tremendous turmoil. And there was a complete unwillingness to confront this. And sometimes they would say, well, you know, like a doctor who takes an oath to treat somebody whether he's a murderer or a good man, we, too, operate on the principle that one should give aid to people and leave the political questions to political people. But there's a very big difference between neutrality and ignorance. And it's one thing to say, well, I'm going to feed this guy even if somebody else tells me he's a criminal because my job is simply to feed people. But it's another to say, I don't want to know he's a murderer because that, in some way, taints my experience here. And I found that that was quite often what I heard. And that was very disturbing. Now, in your book, you also talk about ordinary Rwandans who try to help out and save people in ways that they can. And one of the people who you talk about is the manager of a hotel named-- I'm not sure I can pronounce his last name-- Paul Rusesabagina? Yeah. In Kigali, there's one basically world-class hotel, sort of the best hotel in town, the Hotel des Mille Collines. And it turned out that Paul, who had been put in charge of the hotel, had used all of his considerable human resources, as well as his liquor cabinet, and all of his connections to the ruling, military, and political elite, to continuously buy the security of his guests for as long as he could, until eventually they were saved by a prisoner exchange. The way you describe him, he comes off like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. He was a very reserved man. But one of the things he tells you is that one of his main weapons is that he always had alcohol. No matter how long into the crisis it was, he saw that they had alcohol in the hotel. And everybody wanted it, and he would serve the Hutu leaders, and apparently he would bribe people when he needed to. Oh, yeah. He described how he would give out these gifts of alcohol to people who would come by. And in that way, they would be almost like it was the goose with the golden egg. You didn't want to kill him because then the supply would dry up. He had set up a whole elaborate commerce. And so the leaders would come to the hotel and he'd give them a little bit to drink. And his condition was you leave my hotel alone. And he'd negotiate for the things he wanted. He also used alcohol to buy food so that his people wouldn't starve. The water had been cut to the hotel, and the guests were forced to drink the swimming pool. But he managed to keep them going. You describe a number of times when the phone rings. I'll take one in particular. A phone rings and wakes him up. And a lieutenant says to him, have everyone out of the hotel in 30 minutes. They're being rounded up. Yeah. This was about 6:30 in the morning one day. And he's being told to relinquish all of the guests in his hotel. In many ways, his principle was that of a man who believed in the ethic of hospitality. They're my guests, I must protect them. He told this lieutenant, look, give me half an hour to get up, get washed, and I'll deal with you then. And in that half hour, one thing that he had that was one of his weapons was a phone line. And he used it to call all over the world. And he immediately called to Europe, he called to the French foreign ministry. Now, France was the primary political patron of the genocidal regime at that time. He called there and he spoke to people there. He called Belgium. Within about 25 minutes, one of the top commanders of the military-- in other words, this lieutenant's superior-- and also somebody from the UN, showed up at the hotel. And they came and they assured him that his guests would be OK. No foreign lives were risked. This wasn't a massive military intervention, but lives were saved. A lot of times, the kind of measures it took were just the smallest human response. There's this story that you write about where this hotel manager, Paul, in the middle of May in sort of the worst of days, he is out running errands, I think trying to get alcohol for the hotel. And he comes back to the hotel. And he sees that the Interahamwe have broken in, the thugs have broken in. And they're looking for his family, they're going through his own personal apartment. And explain how he deters them. What happens? Well, he realized that these were some pretty uneducated militiamen. And he ran into some of them on the stairs. And he was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans or something. And he realized that they must assume that a manager would be a man in a necktie or a suit. So when they said, have you seen the manager, he said, oh, yeah, the manager. He just went that-a-way. And it was really almost like a classic Hollywood gag. He said he just went upstairs as he ran downstairs. And as he's running downstairs, he runs into another group. And he tells them the manager must have gone the other way. So he sends them all off spiraling in different directions. And that's what saves their lives. Yeah, the most basic, immediate wits. But I think the key to Paul, in some ways, was his instinct that everything is negotiable. And it struck me how in some very basic way, he had simply refused to relinquish free will and relinquish judgment, which I think is the part that ties him to these other humanitarians who think that in the name of neutrality and humanitarianism they have to relinquish judgment. He thought that it was because of judgment that he could be a decent man. It's interesting that the people who tend to come through well in the book are the people like Paul who are pragmatists, they're not idealists. Many of the do-gooders I met, or many of the people I felt who, in one way of another, conducted themselves well in these extraordinary times of extremity, were both pragmatic and shockable. They still remained sort of indignant at wrongdoing. They were not deeply cynical. And they thought that making distinctions really mattered. They were people who simply insisted on going on as if the world were upright and normal. And in that way, they helped to make sure that it would be. As you watch the United States mobilize itself in its bombings of Kosovo, what are you thinking as you see that, given the US inaction during the genocide in Rwanda? I think that sadly, the situation in Kosovo reflects the kind of institutionalization and bastardization of the concept of humanitarian action that we saw in a very different form in the response to the refugee camps after the Rwandan genocide. We're claiming that we're bombing Yugoslavia as a humanitarian action. But it's not. It's a war. We're fighting against an army. We're trying to destroy an army. If our first objective was really, as we claim in the first week of this war, to protect the people of Kosovo, it's clear that we've actually put them in greater jeopardy at first, that their protection isn't the issue. And the language of humanitarianism has increasingly become a masquerade for a variety of different forms of action or inaction in the international community to disguise political conflicts, as if our only concern were for the loss of human life. And in that way, we end up with a series of muddled discourses and muddled motives that make it sound like if we're doing it, it must be good and often make it very hard for us to keep track of what, in fact, we are doing. The other thing that one just has to look at is how completely calculating those who conduct wars these days are. Well, this is the thing I was just going to say, is one of the things that comes through in the book is that the Hutu militia in the camps were very canny about exploiting Western attitudes towards them. Absolutely. If I were right now trying to run a good insurrection somewhere in the world, the first thing I would do is I would appoint a commander or a minister or a general in charge of humanitarian manipulation. Look at how it was used in the Yugoslav conflict during the Bosnia War. You repeatedly saw safe havens being created, generals using them to corral people, and then going in and slaughtering them knowing that the UN wouldn't defend them. And then in many ways, I think this isn't always the humanitarians' fault. I think that the political decision-makers, the policymakers and leaders who conduct our foreign policy often use humanitarian aid to hide behind. They use it as a screen to mask their own indecision and their own unwillingness to act. And it's essentially a way of making the gestures of concern without really seeking to resolve in any meaningful way the catastrophe. Philip Gourevitch. His great, great book is called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With our Families: Stories from Rwanda. We spoke on the second day of the NATO bombing of Kosovo. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, Sylvia Lemus, and Mickey Greenberg. Our story about Canalou was produced by Julie Snyder with help from Mary Wiltenburg. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you know, you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website www.thisamericanlife.org. During the week that we were producing this episode of our program, a cartoonist named Jessica Abel sat with us documenting the process. She made a comic book about that. You can get it on the website, again www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who says that if you have any complaints about our Chicago-based radio program, just remember-- See, we're not Sikeston. We ain't never been, we'll never be. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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We like to believe that there are laws among thieves. We like to believe that there are rules of honor, that when Michael Corleone orders a mob hit, it's because some code has been violated, that if Tony Soprano chokes a guy to death in a parking lot, it is because that guy broke some rule, that he deserved it somehow. This is one of the most romantic ideas that we have about crime, that there could be a system, that there could be ancient, strict rules, and that there are people out there who actually try to follow those rules, you know? And at one level, of course we want to believe that. Of course we want to believe that it's all so orderly, rather than the thing that we fear about crime, which is that it's random and can strike us at any time, that it's senseless. If there's a system, if there are rules, if it's a business, it doesn't even seem like crime. Well, it turns out that there's a classic American primer about the laws of pimps and pimping written in 1968, Iceberg Slim's Pimp: The Story of My Life. In it, Iceberg Slim explains the rules of being a successful pimp. It is such a clearly-defined tradition, the way he tells it, that at one point, he visits an older pimp for advice. And the guy doesn't just give him the advice. He begins by laying out the entire history of pimping in the Americas. And then he gives him the pointers on how to pimp by the book. "By the book" is always said in this reverential way when you read Iceberg Slim. "By the book" means, when it comes to pimping, knowing that you're using people, outmaneuvering them when they try to play you, and never getting sentimental about it. It's business. Today on our program, a former pimp makes the case that in Oakland, California, in the 1970s, in the last heyday of American pimps in a stronghold of American pimping, the rules of the game that Iceberg Slim describes were not just a reassuring fiction but a way of life for hundreds of people, maybe thousands. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Most weeks on our program, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today, instead, we are devoting our entire program to just one story of a man who tried to be a pimp, found out he did not have the stomach for the violence, and how that let to his downfall in the pimping world. Today's show is the story of him and his friends and his observations about the rules of the game on the street back then. I have to say, part of what's amazing about him is the detail that he gets to in describing how that world worked. Our program today, Pimp Anthropology. Act One, Rules of the Game. Act Two, The Price of Ignoring the Rules. Stay with us. The guy who is the subject of our show today spoke with Tamar Brott, a writer in California who he's known for years. I should say before we begin that if you are listening with small children, there is no sex in today's show. None at all. No graphic descriptions, no sex acts are even named, though there is a scene or two where men hit women. Well, here's Tamar Brott. When Kevin was growing up in Oakland, he and his childhood friends Mark, Keith, and Little Ricky decided they were going to be pimps. And that's what they became. This was in the '70s, and the city was overrun with pimps. The vice cops say that Oakland had the largest prostitution trade in all of California. The infrastructure was perfect-- plenty of freeway access to cheap motels, and lots of places for the pimps to shop. They went to Hill's Shoes for their footwear, Olsen's Cadillac for their custom cars, and Wilson's House of Leather for their clothes. At the height of his glory, Kevin wore a gold lame suit with beaver fur collar and cuffs. Mark favored a long, white, leather coat. Keith was partial to jewel-encrusted dollar signs. This is their story. Where I was raised, a lot of kids, we looked at role models. Just as they do today, look at athletes today. Well, back then, one of the first images of success that you would see were Cadillacs. That was a sign of success for people in poor and blighted areas, especially in housing projects. One of my earliest memories was of a guy named Robert Charles. He was a local guy who had, at the time, what I thought was the greatest car in the world. He had a Cadillac that probably was a '60, '61 Cadillac. Brown. The car was beautiful. And he would ride through the neighborhood. And I didn't realize at the time that he was a pimp. But he'd ride through the neighborhood. He had the girls. And one of the things he'd always do was he would-- we'd have the ice cream truck that would roll through the neighborhood. He'd stop and get out, and he'd buy all the kids ice creams. So obviously, the image for us of Robert Charles was like, wow, this guy's really successful, he's got lots of money, and all of us aspired to be like Robert Charles. Right outside of Berkeley, on the Oakland border, is a hotel. It's called California Hotel. At that time, back in the '60s, it was, I'm guessing, a 600-room hotel, a really big hotel. Had a ballroom, a nightclub. At that time, Richard Pryor, who was just starting to burst on the national scene, was doing stand-up there. It reminds me of what I've read about what Harlem was like. It was an area where people who were black who were successful would go. Well, one of the things that happened was that whole California Hotel and the street San Pablo had become a red-light district. I remember the first time I rode down there, going down San Pablo and seeing all the girls-- dressed, standing on the corners, soliciting to the cars as they walked by, the short dresses, the skimpy outfits, everything. And every pimp who was ever a pimp in the whole area drove up and down this street. They drove up and down this drill. And at that point, it's really funny, because it's different now. I don't think a pimp would want to be out there now. They sort of want to stay in the background. But then, you wore it like a badge of honor. When we originally began going down there, keep in mind, we were catching the bus there. We would just go down there and get the bus. AC Transit. We would get down there, we'd get off the bus, and we would just walk around. We might tease the girls, hey, how you doing honey? What's up? Where's your man at? He'll be back in 15 minutes. Just jiving-- shuckin' and jivin', as they call it-- with the girls. You've got to keep in mind, now, we're going down there, but at the same time, we're going back to school the next day. One thing about Keith is that Keith, at some point, made a decision that that was more important to him, to be successful at that, than anything else. He made the step that none of the others were willing to make, and that was to drop out of school. His first thing was that, I've got to get me a car. I've got to get me a car. I've got to have flash. I've got to have something to show. I remember Keith, he couldn't afford a Cadillac. So what he had was a Ford. He had, I think, a Ford Falcon. It was a convertible, though. And here's what he did. He painted it red, bright red. And he had the convertible top taken off-- it was a black convertible top-- and he had a white convertible top put on it. I mean, this was a car that he probably paid $400 for, or something like that. But when he finished it, it looked shiny and new. And boy, I'll tell you, he'd be riding up and down there. We'd be in the car with him. We would be riding up and down San Pablo. And he'd be in this little, red Ford, which was unheard of. Nobody even went down there in a Ford, but he was bold and brash enough to do that and do it with confidence. It was almost like he was saying, well, look, this is just my little sporty car. I've got a new Rolls Royce at home. So the next thing that Keith needed to do was-- what every pimp needs-- is he needs a girl. You've got to have a girl. I mean, you can have the cars, you can have the clothes, but you have to have a girl. Keep in mind, too. At that point, the area that we were going was so established, you either knocked-- when they say "knocked," pulled some other man's girl-- or you turned a girl out, which would mean that you would introduce her to that whole lifestyle. For Keith and us, it was about turning a girl out. That's how Keith got started. He turned out his girlfriend, who had been his longtime girlfriend anyway. Here's how it's introduced to her. One day, Keith is at his house, and we're all laughing and joking and having a drink or whatever. And he goes into the room and he says to her, you know what, Mark's a little drunk. He wants to go to bed with you. I told him to give me $50 and I'd ask you. She's like, no, I don't want to do like this. But suddenly, he's talking her into it. Well, you know, it's only Mark. It's not a big deal. We could use the $50, you know what I mean? We could go do something, go out to dinner, go buy you a dress, or something like that. You take the money. I don't want it. You can go buy yourself something with it. So suddenly, this girl is now saying, well, OK, it's only Mark. I kind of know Mark. He's not a bad guy. OK, I'll do it. Well, you see, once you do that, once you sell yourself for money, it becomes very easy to do it again. You're there when he pulls this sting on her. Did you feel any sort of pity? Or what did you feel for her, knowing that a door had been opened for her that she would probably go into? I thought it was great. I really thought it was great watching this guy work. I didn't think it was great to the extent that some girl was getting turned out. I thought it was great to the extent that all of a sudden, everything that those images that we had sought, that we had aspired to, all of it was suddenly happening. And I was actually having the opportunity to be a part of it. It's one thing to watch Robert Charles and his girls. But it's another thing to go through the evolutionary process to see a pimp, so to speak, being born as well as a prostitute. And that was my image at that time. I was excited. It was like, wow, this man is actually getting ready to do what we've only talked about. He's actually getting ready to really do it. And not only that, he's got a girl who made the first step. So it was exciting. We were all excited. And after the fact-- and this is what really, I think, and truly makes for a great pimp-- the way that Keith made her feel afterwards. I remember very clearly that when we heard Mark and her come out of the room, we were kind of giggling, right? And I remember Keith getting very serious. He was very serious. He was like, man, cut that [BLEEP]. He didn't want her in any way to feel like she had been used. He gave her the money. He talked with her. He hugged her. He kissed her. He actually showed her a lot of love at that particular point. And I think that's one of the most significant things when you're turning a girl out. And she became quite a prostitute, as a matter of fact. I asked Kevin how Mark knew how to turn out his own girlfriend like that. Kevin just said that's how it had always been done. That's how Iceberg Slim did it, and god knows how many pimps before him. The world of pimping is filled with many of these particular customs and bylaws. There was a gentleman-like agreement, so to speak, that there was rules of the game. And this is the thing that's changed nowadays. Back then, there was a purity of it. It's almost like a love, like basketball, a love for the game itself. And as a result of these people having a love for a game, there was also rules. And there was street rules. And those rules was adhered like laws. Because there was a game and because there was rules and laws, there was things that needed to be done. And if a girl didn't understand the rules and laws, then she could be in violation, or what they call "out of pocket" or "bitch being out of pocket." Some of the rules are obvious. Every prostitute's supposed to have a pimp. Every pimp's supposed to give that prostitute a nightly quota to earn and not let her come in until she earns it. And it's all for him, 100%. A pimp is not like an agent who takes a cut. What he does do is pay all her expenses-- her food, rent, medical bills, outfits, everything. And he protects her territory. A girl didn't want to go down, say, for example, and start working somebody else's corner. When you start to do that, you start to be in violation of the game. And when you were in violation of the game-- it's really funny-- the whole small community would come down on you. So the other girls would turn against you as quick as the pimps would. And then some of the rules are arcane, even chivalrous, like how a woman gets to choose any pimp she wants. It's called choosing or re-choosing. If the woman finds a better pimp than the one she has, she presents him with a wad of cash she's managed to withhold from the first pimp, sort of like a dowry. Then the new pimp goes to the old pimp and says, sorry, she's with me now. And the old pimp is just supposed to let her go. That's the rule. What you want to do is you want to keep your manhood and your dignity intact. And that's basically what would happen, is a guy who was in the game would be man enough to say, look man, your woman chose me. And here's what's happening. I want to pick up her clothes. And it's really funny. I never really understood that part of it, but that seems to be part of the ritual, picking up of clothes as if those clothes really mattered. I think more than picking up the clothes, that was sort of this hidden way for men to say, look, we have to finalize this business that we have and move on from there. But no pimp wants it to come to that. And if he suspects that one of his prostitutes is even thinking about leaving, there's a time-honored way to deal with that too. If you ever felt your girl might be getting ready to leave you, or that you're losing, or you're getting down, or one girl's left and you've got two left or you've got one left, well, you want to get on the road. What you do is pack them all in the car and say, look, we're going to travel for a while. And you get out of town, because it's very hard for them to leave you while you're out of town. You drive across state. I mean, I had a guy driving as far as Georgia and turn around and come back, just to stop a girl from leaving him. It gives them an opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to each other, so to speak. You see? They glue them back together. So Mark was the second of Kevin's pals to turn out his girlfriend. And after that, he became a real player. He got chosen by this six-foot-tall cash cow named Sunny and hit the big time. Sunny was a very well-known prostitute in Oakland. And she was white, which was really unusual. She just liked him. And this girl made tons of money. Sunny's the kind of girl where you don't need five girls. If you've got one Sunny, you don't need five girls. And he got Sunny. And boy, that's like putting your name on the map. So Mark was the next one to go on to have some degree of success. And then Ricky-- we called him Little Ricky-- Little Rick went on to have some success. He had two, three girls. So Ricky, I remember-- I'm going to skip ahead a little bit now. But I remember he had finally got a couple girls, and he was making a little bit of money. And I remember one of the first things he did, he wanted to buy a Bentley. So he bought a Bentley. And Bentley-- those huge ones then. You know, the big-- sort of like they had in Burke's Law. Remember that show, Burke's Law with-- I forget. But that was the image. Anyway, I remember Ricky coming-- Ricky's probably like five foot one or five foot two. But I remember him coming down the street. He had just got this Bentley, and you could barely see his head over the steering wheel. It was the funniest thing I had ever seen in my life. But he drives up, and he gets out. The door is bigger than him. He gets out the door, he slams the door, and he says, man, how do you like my Bentley Rolls Royce? I just got it. Anyway, we talked. But he's-- it's hard for me to describe him-- not flamboyant as Keith but very smooth, more family oriented, believe it or not. He was always interested in how long they were going to stay. He used to always say, hos come leaving. Bitches come leaving. How long are you going to stay? That was the thing. And his whole thing was creating a family atmosphere. So he always, actually, wanted to impregnate his girls so that they would have his child so that they would stay to create that family atmosphere. And he impregnated several of his girls, and they had kids. And he's young at this point. He was relatively young. So after not too long a time, Kevin's three friends are living large. They've got the clothes, the cars, the stables. Meanwhile, Kevin still hasn't been able to turn out his childhood sweetheart. He's managing to keep up appearances by becoming a drug dealer, supplying his buddies with the vast amounts of cocaine they've begun using. But pimps looked down on drug dealers for being low rent. And privately, Kevin begins having doubts about whether or not he has what it takes to be a pimp. Part of his problem is that he doesn't know if he can hit a woman, which is a chief requirement for being in the game. At a certain point, his friend Dwayne actually show him how it's done. A little warning-- this is probably the most disturbing story Kevin will tell this hour. Dwayne, at that time, who was another friend, his whole philosophy was that, look, if a girl wasn't acting right, you beat the hell out of her. Beat the bitch's ass, and she'd straighten up. And so he told me, he said, look, I'm going to show you how to handle this. So he goes and he grabs a coat hanger, much as I have now. And I can only sort of describe to you what you do. You grab the hook, the hanger part, and you grab the middle of the lower wire and just pull it straight out. And it will form sort of a straight sort of a-- This silhouette is like a baseball bat outline. Yeah, pretty much. Well, at that point, Dwayne, he had two options, depending on how angry he was. He would beat his girls with this hanger just like this. Or if they had to go to work, what he would do is take a light towel and wrap it around the towel. That way, he could beat her, and it wouldn't necessarily leave marks. That way, she could go to work, and she didn't look all beat up. She could wear the skimpy clothes and still look pretty good if he managed to hit her on the lower thigh or something. But he'd try to hit her right on the buttocks with this thing. So one of my earliest visions was I remember Annie being in the back and me coming into Dwayne's house. And there was some commotion, and we set to talking. He told her just get out of here. And we sat down and we started talking. I think we were watching a game or something like that. And you can hear stuff being thrown and tossed in the back room. Obviously, Annie was upset about something. Anyway, at that point, Dwayne called her out of the room after going over and getting a coat hanger and straightening it out. And he says, "Annie, come here." And Annie's acting like she didn't [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And he says, "Bitch, get your ass in here right [BLEEP] now." And he's yelling at the top of his voice. "Get your [BLEEP] ass in here. At this point, he tells this bitch, "Bend over right here. Drop your [BLEEP] pants." I'm sitting there. I'm a bit stunned. I'm like, OK, we're going to roll with this. Annie comes over. At this point, when he flies into the tirade and he's yelling, "Bitch, get your ass over here," she's at attention. She comes right over, and he said, "Bitch, drop your mother [BLEEP] pants and bend over and grab your knees. And I'll never forget the look on her face. It was almost very robotic. But she walked right over at a point where she was acting wild and out of control. But there was a point that he reached when he started to talk to her that she snapped, and she just got very robotic, and he had total control over her. She walked over. And I swear, her ass couldn't have been three feet from my face. And she pulled her pants down, bent over, and grabbed her knees. And he whacked her with this clothes hanger right on her ass. And I mean, she was butt naked. No panties, no pants, no dress, no nothing. Butt naked. And he hit her with such force that the outline of that coat hanger was on her ass. And it cut her skin, and she bled. And as I was looking at her, when she pulled her pants down, it was clear that she had been beat like this before, because there were several black marks where they had healed from this coat hanger from previous beatings. At that point, he hit her again. And on the third time he went to hit her, I grabbed his hand. And I told him, I said, "Dwayne, that's enough. He said, "Man, this ho, she knows she out of line. Man, I'll beat this bitch's ass some more." And at that point, I was saying, "Man, let's take care of some business." He said, "OK." He said, "Annie, pull your pants up." Even after I stopped him and we were talking, she was still standing there, bent over with her hands on her knees. He finally told her, "Annie, pull your pants and get your [BLEEP] ass out of here." She pulled her panties up. White. It was just a really interesting image because when she pulled her panties up first, you could see the blood go right through her panties. So you could see the red soaking through her panties. She pulled her pants up, she walked in the back room, she was quiet like nothing happened. It was just incredible. And I thought to myself, the cruelty, I mean, to not have compassion for another person. You know what's really funny? I didn't openly show any remorse about these girls. I didn't openly feel sorry for them. When Annie was getting a beating, and when I grabbed Dwayne's hand, my thing was, man, let's take care of our business. I didn't say it in a way that was like, man, give her a break. I said it in a very nonchalant way like, man, this bitch, I have no time for this [BLEEP]. Get this bitch out of here, and let's do what we going to do. I didn't show concern for Annie, you see? Because these are internal conflicts that I'm having. Like all men, you don't ever want to appear less than. So though these issues are twirling around in my mind and they're starting to bother me, I'm not letting them be known. I'm happy for them still. These are just my own conflicts that I'm starting to have. So I'm still excited about the pimping. I'm still excited about the possibility that maybe, just maybe this stuff will pass for me. But deep down inside-- I think I even knew then-- deep down inside, it wouldn't, because I was a compassionate person. But I was hoping that it would. Why did he do that in front of you? I think part of it was psychologically to demonstrate his control over her. There was that aspect of it. That was for me. That was from him to me. But I think also, on the other hand, there was the breaking down of a person's constitution. When he's able to do that to her, eventually, at some point, she stops believing in herself, and she only believes in him. And so once you can get that transference, get a person so they have no self esteem left, no sense of self-worth left, then the only thing that they can do is believe in you. They start to associate their own sense of self-worth and self-esteem to the very person who took their own. And this goes directly to the attitude of why at some point, hos want to make their pimps the best pimp. They want them to have the biggest hat, the biggest Cadillac, the longest shoes, the longest coat. They want them to have this. Because in a sense, they live vicariously through that person. Their sense of self-esteem, their sense of self-worth is all incumbent upon how their man feels. This is why pimps dress like pimps. When you have a relatively small community-- and when I say a small community, I'm talking about pimps now-- a small community of men who are vying for attention of women, then it's all going to depend a lot on how much attention a guy can bring to himself. In a way, it's almost like what you could call a peacock syndrome. You know how peacocks, they have the plumage? The males have the plumage? And they can be kind of skirting around, and they're spreading their wings, and they're trying to get the attention of the female. And in a lot of ways, pimps have that same kind of mentality. It's like, who has the brightest colors, the biggest hats, the most fur, the longest leather? I don't think they think in terms of whether this is, like how I will appear to the community as a whole. But rather they're making a statement to a very specific group of people-- i.e. being the pimps and all the hos. I asked Kevin why the girls didn't just leave and strike out on their own. Why bother to have a pimp at all? He said prostitution's too territorial, and given the potential dangers of selling your body, it's good to have somebody on your side, even if it is a pimp. And in their own twisted way, they did provide some sense of family. The thing about it is, is that these were relationships. And I think that's what people forget or miss. It wasn't a business arrangement in the sense that I say to you, come work for me, and as a result, I'll give you 10%. These were relationships, much like families. People would say, come be a part of my family. You can be a part of my family. Now families, i.e., may mean stable. You can be a part of my stable of hos. But the fact of the matter is that that stable may be described as families. This is how we live. We have a house. We have a nice penthouse. We've got cars. I've got my cars, but oftentimes, the girls had cars too, to get back and forth to work. We've got all of this stuff. You don't have to worry about anything except for just working and being a part of the family. I think what confuses people is that people try and figure out how the girls have a single purpose of their own, in terms of acquiring money. But it was never like that. You moved in, you became a part of that whole exciting lifestyle that he would live in. And as a result, the money was really incidental to the lifestyle as a whole. Do you think women who go into prostitution, there's something that happens at like, what, age of 10? When does it set in that this self-esteem issue-- What I would say was that a person who has issues of self-worth and low self-esteem would probably be a better candidate to become a ho, or a prostitute, than someone who didn't. Now, that sounds fairly obvious to anybody who would hear that. They'd say, well, that's pretty obvious. But the thing about it is, is that it's not something that people necessarily wear that's so obvious to see in a person. And so I think that's what makes some good pimps is the little probing of a person to find out where they're at. I'll give you an example of a very simple probe a friend of mine used to do. He'd be in a club, and he'd meet a girl. And he would go up, and let's say he's having a cocktail. She's sitting at the counter next to him. And he would, after a bit of banter and small talk and conversation, he'd say, buy me a drink. Now obviously, some girls would automatically say, buy your own drink. Or you buy me a drink. But some women would buy him a drink. That's the little kind of probing stuff that people do. You see, because just through five minutes of little conversation, now all of a sudden, he's seeing that he can exert his will over this woman, that she, not even in a conscious way, is basically giving in to his will. And sometimes it's that simple, something as small as that. Coming up, a prostitute who likes to talk a lot, Kevin's own rise and fall as a pimp, and whatever happened to all of the '70s pimps. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Most weeks on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today, we're devoting our entire show to one story about pimps in the 1970s. After that era, this particular culture of pimping died off. But the pimps of that era-- with the flashy clothes, the big hats, the pretty shoes-- they had become American icons, like cowboys or astronauts. Kevin's story continues. My experience was that I met a girl. Her name was Lois. I remember Lois. She was tall, beautiful, brunette, about six feet tall. Just gorgeous. Just a gorgeous girl. And I remember that I was familiar with the game. I didn't want to lead on to her that I was, but nor did she want to lead on to me that she was. I had always aspired to be a pimp and was familiar with the game and knew how it went. I knew she was a ho, but I was going to never approach her like that. And I knew she was struggling to tell me, because she was trying to feel me out. So she finally got around, she says, "Well, why don't you come by my job, come down to my house?" She was staying over in Belmont at the time. "Come down for the weekend. Spend the weekend at my place." She had been to my place several times. We had dinner in the city and stuff. And so I said, "OK, I'll do that." So it was very clever how she did this. It was really funny. But she wanted to see how I played this out. So she told me to come and get her. "Come by my job and get my key, and then you can just go to the house. I've got food and everything there. You can get yourself something to eat and just wait. And I'll be there in a few hours. So I said, OK, it's on, so to speak. So I'm thinking to myself, OK, it's on. So I pull in the back of this place. And as it turns out, it's a massage parlor. So I pull up in back, and I go and I parked, and I called her. I said, "Lois, I'm here in back." So she comes out, and she's dressed normally. She's got on a nice silk dress and everything. She jumps in the car. She gives me a big kiss. "Oh, I'm so glad. This is going to be so exciting. I can't wait to get home. And here's the keys." And I say OK, give her a peck on the cheek, and I'm about to pull out. And she says, "Oh, by the way, take this home for me." And she hands me an envelope full of cash. Obviously, I don't think this was a day's wages. I think she had probably not been with somebody for a while, and she had been saving her money up. Had about $2,500 in cash in it. And to me, I mean this looked like $100,000 to me. I was like, whoa, OK. But she didn't give it to me, though. She says, "By the way, can you take this to my house for me?" So she hands me this money. I'm looking at this money, and I said, "Sure." So I close the envelope, and I go to her house. Later, she finally makes it home. She calls me. She says, "there's wine there. Have some wine." Blah, blah, blah. She's got champagne. She's got the whole-- I mean, it's obviously a setup. The flowers-- there was a place called Ah Sam's. They imported flowers from Hawaii, the most exotic flowers. And she had these exotic flowers from Ah Sam's all over the house, easily $500 worth of flowers. So what ended up happening was she ended up getting here about 6:30, 7:00. She comes in. And we sit down, and we're having wine, and we're talking and just sort of chatting. And she looks at me and she smiles, and I said to her, I said, "Oh, by the way. I put your money over on your nightstand by your bed." And she said to me, "Oh, no. You can keep it. It's for you." And I looked at her, and I kind of smiled, and I said, "What exactly is it that you do?" And she just looked at me and smiled, and she said, "You know damn well what I do." And we just started laughing at each other. And from that point on, we stayed together for, I guess, about seven years. Seven years. I remember being in the Black Knight, as a matter of fact, with a group of people. And one of the things about Lois was that she was fairly articulate for a working girl. And we would have lively conversations, me and her. That was one of the things that we enjoyed. We would have lively conversations. Well, one of the things was that, when you were sitting with a group of guys, then every ho in the place is taking second position to their man. And so they basically are at this point where they don't speak until they're spoken to. And so when I come in with Lois, she's disrupting this whole [BLEEP] thing. I mean, she's [BLEEP] all this [BLEEP] up. Because you know what? Because I'm talking [BLEEP], and then she's talking [BLEEP] too. You know what I mean? And she's not waiting for me to stop to give her the OK to talk [BLEEP]. She's talking [BLEEP] as a separate entity all unto herself. And not only is she talking [BLEEP], but she'll talk to some other man. Do you see what I'm saying? Like some other pimp sitting there. So you see, I wasn't just treating her as a ho. I was treating her, to some degree, as a partner to me. So our relationship was different, and that created a definite conflict when we're sitting around a table with a bunch of pimps and a bunch of hos who won't even say nothing unless they're spoken to. And then this bitch is running her mouth 90 miles an hour talking [BLEEP] about the same [BLEEP] that we're talking about. Every ho in the joint is looking at her saying, who the [BLEEP] is this bitch? You know I mean? This bitch is out of line. He need to slap that bitch in the mouth and make her shut up. I actually used to get a kick out of it. I thought it was funny that she was spirited, like a horse. She was spirited and strong willed. And I actually liked that. But for a ho, that wasn't a very good trait to have. And so guys, they used to give me a hard time about that. They was like, man, if you're coming, leave that bitch at home. It got to that point. You know what I mean? Look, if you're coming, man, leave that bitch at home, man. Because that bitch is just disruptive to the game. It got where they didn't want her around their ho. Believe me, over the years I heard people say, man, that nigger ain't no pimp. You know what I mean? He ain't no pimp, you know what I mean? But I even got that from my friends, my best friends. So they were critical of you and the way-- Sure. So at this point, Kevin's become like the pimp who can't shoot straight. His friends keep berating him for fraternizing with Lois, for never giving her quotas. But most appalling is that Kevin's still dating his childhood sweetheart and buying her expensive gifts, all paid for with Lois' money. This is the thing that the guys got on me the worst about. The guys said, look, what you're doing is wrong. Because what I would do-- Lois was probably making, like I said, between $400 and $600 in a day. I would shower this other girl with gifts. I mean, just spent incredible amounts of money on her. Diamond rings, gold necklaces. That was another thing the guys, as I said, used to get mad at me. Because they used to say, man, you're not being true to this ho. You know what I mean? You can't be spending this ho's money on this square girl unless this girl is paying you too, you know what I mean? [UNINTELLIGIBLE] And that was one of the rules of the game. You can't be taking money from a ho and then spend it on a square broad, because then, in a way, you're being a trick, just like the trick who's spending money with your ho. You see? And so they didn't understand. This was like a total contradiction to them. It's like, how you going to be a pimp if she's getting money from tricks and then you turn around and being a trick? We did have an occasion where Lois did something that was totally unacceptable. And at that time, she had left the house. And she had been gone for maybe a week or something like that. And this was totally unacceptable behavior in any relationship, let alone a pimp-ho relationship. So I'm at home, and I'm handling my business. And after a couple of days-- you stay up a couple of nights and you worry. But after a couple days, you get back to your routine. And you know, what the [BLEEP], it'll work itself out. But I remember her sort of waltzing in the house, and me and the boys is there just kicking it, right? And I remember her waltzing in the house like nothing happened. It was like, hey, how's it going? And she comes in, and she's heading to the kitchen. And I remember the guys was there. And so I felt like, to some extent, I had to do something. I had to act. I couldn't let her just arrogantly walk in like that with the guys sitting there. So I remember I wheeled around and I slapped her. I slapped her. And I slapper her hard. I mean, I slapped her real hard. And when I slapped her, she fell to the ground. And she just laid there knocked out. She was knocked out. And I'm thinking to myself, jeez. Did she hit her head when she was going down? What is all of this about? So she's laying there. I remember looking around, and I think it was Mark who was there. And I remember, Mark looked at me, and he had this sort of look of disgust. Like, this bitch is just playing you like a [BLEEP] yo-yo. And I'll tell you something really interesting. Almost without thought, I remember I had this pool stick in my hand. And I just whacked her across her back with this pool stick just about as hard as I could. It broke the pool stick in half. And let me tell you, I've never seen nobody jump up this quick in my life. This girl was like she was passed out. I've never seen nobody jump up so quick in my life. This girl jumped straight up off the floor and ran out the back door, through the kitchen, out the back door. I mean, she just jumped. It's almost like she had springs. And I remember Mark saying to me, "Man, that bitch is trying to play you." He said, "Man, that bitch you slapped, she was acting like she was knocked out. She was going to lay there all night if you'd have let her." He said, "Man, that bitch is playing on you." He said, "Kevin, you know what, man? You need to take care of that bitch, because that bitch is straight playing you." Would you have hit her if you were alone? Initially, yeah, I probably would have. Yeah, I probably would have, only because I would have known that it was in order. It was what was in order. Yeah. It's almost like I had to. And she knew it. What was really funny was that later, she got bored. Because I lived a fairly normal life now, she got bored. But I remember one day, this guy I heard pulling up to my door and knocking on the door. And I look out and it's Lois. And she's got this guy with her. And he's a guy who, actually, I had known, I had seen around, who I knew to be a pimp named Jared. And Jared says to me, "Look, let me talk to you for a minute." So he comes in and he says, "Look, man. Your ho, she re-chose. She's choosing me. She want to be with me now." He said, "I hope you don't have no problem with none of this, man. I just wanted to come to you man to man and let you know what time it is." Now, it's really funny. As dignified and as much a part of the game that I had been, and as much as I had seen, at that point, I said to him, fine. I said, that's fine. I was real dignified. I said, that's fine. She can go. And I remember him saying, "She want to get her clothes." I said, that bitch can't get [BLEEP] out of my mother [BLEEP] house. Period. And it's really funny because, see, in the name of the game, I shouldn't have did that. I should've said, sure, go ahead. But at that point, even after all the training, after all the schooling, after all the being around, and after understanding how the game goes, at that point, I lost it. And I was like, no. You've got her, but the bitch can't have a [BLEEP] thing from me. And it was really funny. It taught me something about the game, because when you're in violation of the game, the game will always come back and bite you. But I remember them leaving. And I remember them returning about 15 minutes later with the police. They came in, they took all her clothes, and they left. Now, you know what? They had every right to, because in the name of the game, I should've gave her stuff back anyway. But at that time, I was so angry she was reverting back. Because one of the things she had always said was that she was so glad that she didn't have a traditional pimp-ho relationship, that she didn't no longer want to be a part of that. But what she taught me was that she longed for it. She actually did miss it. So you think she just lost respect for you as a pimp since you didn't care about any of that? I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think at some point, she needed somebody who held those values that she held higher than what I held them. As I was telling you, I didn't care if she brought $100 home. And I think when she started to realize that I didn't care, that was so much a part of her self-esteem. She always prided herself in her ability to make money that way. And yeah, I think she started to say, "[BLEEP], this [BLEEP], he don't give a [BLEEP]. He don't give a [BLEEP] about me." That my not caring about the money, for me, translated into me not caring about her, to her. Were you heartbroken? At the time, yeah. It was tough. After Lois, Kevin had a few other girls. But his heart wasn't in it. He just wasn't a very good pimp, and they knew it too. And eventually, they left him. For girls would had been around and who had been with guys who were pimps, they would soon find that I didn't feel that need in them, in terms of being able to control them or even having a desire to, in terms of how a raw pimp would handle them. And so as a result, I would either get rid of them or they would get rid of me. One of the two. Finally, after few years, Kevin got out of the game. By then, it was almost the '80s and pimping was dying. The vice cops I spoke to said women's lib killed off the pimps. They couldn't stand it anymore, giving all their money to a man. Kevin said it was a combination of that and crack cocaine that did in the '70s pimp. Crack cocaine sets you down. When you smoke that stuff, you have no desire to go anywhere. It's almost like you're embalmed. It starts to also trickle down from the pimps to the girls. Because now, their guy, who they had all their self-esteem in, is looking up at all this time, is now sitting in the house. He's just not the same person that he was once before. He's not riding. He's not fun like he used to be. He's not excited anymore. He don't have this whole god complex of being I'm still great and this and that. Every one of these guys that I'm telling you about got involved with crack cocaine. Every single one of them. And eventually, they lost all control. It took out many a pimp. Many a pimp. Did any of them realize as it was happening that this was a downward spiral? No. Not a single person ever stopped to think, "Well, you know what? Maybe this game is getting old. Maybe it's getting antiquated. Maybe it's time--" they always thought they were coming back. They were coming back. They were always one ho away from coming back, from being on top of the game. I think the guys who were smart, who aspire to something better, they will always have used the game as a means to getting somewhere else. And that was very clear. But for the guys who were purely in the game for the game itself and felt from day one that the pimping was all they wanted to do, that's all they ever did. They lived it, they'll die it. Simple as that. Still, like I said, it's about the purity and the love and the truth of the game. And that's the thing that-- I always loved that. I always understood the purity by which they approached what they did and their pure love of it. I always admired that, and I still do to this day. I still love the purity of which they loved it, and they studied it. They studied it, and they elevated it to an art form. Kevin, today, makes his living in the straight world creating jewelry for rap stars. He spoke with Tamar Brott in California. Our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, and Sylvia Lemus. Musical advice from R.J. Smith. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312- 832-3380. Or visit our website where you can buy tapes, or you could also listen to our programs for free online, www.thisamericanlife.org. Special bonus tracks on the website this week. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who knew that I would be a perfect public radio employee when he sidled up to me in a bar one night, years ago, and demanded-- Buy me a drink. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Let us speak of our nation's monuments. When you're at the Statue of Liberty or standing under the Rotunda at the US Capitol, when you're at the Alamo, it is clear what they mean. But why do thousands of tourists go every day of the summer to Four Corners, that spot in the wilderness where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado-- four different states-- meet at one point. I went this summer, drawn inexorably, magnetically, without quite knowing why, just like every other wandering tourist who strays within 250 miles of the place. Chances are, you have done this yourself. You've driven three or four hours out of your way. And you show up. And there's a marker on the ground, ringed by dozens, literally dozens, of t-shirt stands. And families come. And they stand on the supposed spot where the four states meet. And what? They hold hands, they sit on the ground. And then mom or dad or sis stands on a little platform they have there, built specially for this purpose, and takes a snapshot. And then, often, there's this kind of aftermath moment where everybody sort of stands around haplessly like, what was that all about? We came for this? And then the next group comes in. The arbitrariness of it all, I think, is lost on no one. I saw one family with young kids who simply placed a teddy bear on the spot where the four states meet, and snapped a picture of that. Couldn't any four corners hold just as much meaning as this place? And my friend, the answer, of course, is yes. And today on our program, we offer our own little national monument here on the radio, our own picture of life in America, our own four corners. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Four Corners, we tell the story of life in America through portraits of life on four different corners in four different states across this great nation. Act One, History. Act Two, Love. Act Three, Neighbors. Act four, How to Become an American. Stay with us. Act One. Let us begin with the most epic of our four stories today. About a year ago, writer Sarah Vowell had a theory that she could tell the entire history of America by describing what happened on and around one single street corner. Specifically, the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive here in Chicago. She thought she could just swivel around and point at the whole dark and inspiring tale. Here then, her story. When I started I had only a few things to go on, a couple of French explorers, a plaque on the bridge said, "Passed by in 1673." An Indian massacre in 1812 right there in front of the Burger King, vague notions of Abe Lincoln's debt to the Chicago Tribune, whose quaint Gothic tower looms over the bridge's north side. I thought, that's enough American history, and I'd just make up the rest. Turns out my theory was only too right. The intersection of Michigan and Wacker, I found out, isn't just a corner, it's a vortex. The deeper I dug into the history of Chicago and its relationship to the history of the country, the more crowded the ghost traffic jam clogging up the Michigan Avenue Bridge got. OK, I'm standing here right now on the Michigan Avenue Bridge and the Chicago River is right underneath me. There are some ducks floating under there, and a boat just went by. And here's another one coming. Out there is where the river meets Lake Michigan to the east. And looking south, the place where the bridge hits land is the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive, where you can get your vision checked or buy a nice fur coat, should you desire. I'm swiveling around, and the view from the bridge is just picture postcard pretty, especially at night when the Wrigley Building is just lit up so soft it glows. Supposedly, the building so delighted Joseph Stalin that he had the University of Moscow designed in its image. And who can blame him? The American national mythology revolves around the idea that the promise of America is best seen in the West. Home, home, on the range, et cetera. Existentially, that might be true. But economically, the real place to witness the promise of America is the Midwest, where for most of this country's history, the products of the range were manipulated for fun and profit. When the cowboys sang, get along little dogie, they left out the part where the little dogie is railroaded to Chicago to be slaughtered by some underpaid, overworked immigrant en route to its manifest destiny as a New Yorker's supper. The first person to grasp the significance of this place where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan was Louis Joliet, or as he's known around here, Joliet. Back when his name was still said with a French accent, Joliet was a 27-year-old fur trader who accompanied a Jesuit missionary named Jacques Marquette on a canoe expedition from Quebec in 1673. They were to map the Mississippi in the name of France, unaware that Spain had already claimed the river some 130 years before. On the return trip, at the suggestion of their Indian guide, they traveled from the Mississippi into the Illinois River, and then the Des Plaines. They got out and carried their canoes a few dozen miles to the Chicago River, where they got back in their canoes and paddled to this very spot. Right where the river meets the Great Lakes, just below the corner at Michigan and Wacker. And Joliet then had a vision. His map of North America-- an oddly pretty, delicate ink drawing he made in 1674-- is concerned with one thing and one thing only, water. His America is all Great Lakes and Mississippi. Look close, and you can see what he saw. There's Lake Michigan and at only one spot, the future site of Chicago, does it connect to a river that connects to a couple of other rivers that could connect it to the Mississippi. This is what Joliet saw, that this place is a continental hub, the missing link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, and thus the Atlantic and the Gulf. All that was needed was a short canal spanning the miles of prairie between rivers. He wrote, "We could go with facility to Florida in a bark, and by very easy navigation." Thus, Joliet's map isn't so much a map as a prophecy. Stick your ear up against it and you can practically hear cash registers ring. Surprisingly, they only built a bridge here in 1920. Engineers also straightened out the Chicago River and put in massive landfills over there, so the lake is further from the corner than it was in Joliet's day. And I like to picture Joliet sometimes walking up or down Michigan Avenue to the bridge, a go cup in his hand from either the Starbucks over there from the north side of the river or the Starbucks over there on the south side of the river, spitting coffee-laced saliva into the Chicago River, knowing it will float with facility all the way past New Orleans and to the ocean from there. The first person to get cracking on Joliet's dream was Chicago's first permanent settler, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a trader who built a cabin here on the north side of the river in 1779, a century after Joliet paddled by. Du Sable's mother was an African slave and his father was French. He lived here on what is now the site of a 35 story office tower called the Equitable Building. With his Potawatomi wife, Catherine, Du Sable's marriage bed was itself a map of America, the mixing of European, African, and Indian blood to make a son and a daughter, true American children with three continents in their dark eyes. Chicago school teachers like to impress upon their students that Chicago's first resident, Du Sable, was a black man. And just think, it only took 204 years for the town to elect its first black mayor. In 1803, the United States established Fort Dearborn at what would become the corner of Michigan and Wacker to protect the portage of the Chicago River. During the War of 1812, hundreds of Potawatomi Indians descended upon the soldiers and their families and killed them, burning down the fort. The site of Chicago was then abandoned for four years. When soldiers arrived to rebuild the fort, they first had to bury the scalped human remains which still lay there. Today, the site of the fort is weirdly commemorated here with these little bronze markers embedded in the sidewalk at Michigan and Wacker. So the tourists can dance around its former perimeter as if learning to cha, cha, cha. And over here, there's a wildly racist relief sculpture commemorating the defense of Fort Dearborn, where a soldier from the fort is kind of battling off this savage Indian brave while a mother and child are kind of cowering behind him, basically waiting to die. And underneath that, is a plaque that says the people of the fort were brutally massacred by the Indians. They will be cherished as martyrs in our early history. What it doesn't say is that those Indians technically hadn't given over their rights to this land. But it looks like they ran out of room to put that on the plaque. Now I'm going to walk around here back onto the bridge. And I'm looking west across the Chicago River. And if you look downriver at the turn in the river, a few blocks west, you can see the site of the old Sauganash Hotel right over there. During the first half of the 19th century at the Sauganash Hotel, Chicagoans seemed to be play acting the juiciest bits of the country's spanking new Constitution every night. Historian Donald L. Miller writes, "At the Sauganash and its neighboring hotels, men and women of every color and class were welcome. And whiskey, song, and dance were the great democratizors. Visitors from more civilized parts were shocked to see Indian braves spinning the white wives of fort officers around the dance floor of the Sauganash to the frenzied fiddling and toe-tapping of hotel owner, Mark Beaubien. Or white and Indian women drinking home-distilled liquor straight from the bottle. To add an edge to the evenings, local white traders would put on feathered headdresses and spring into the crowded tavern with war whoops and raised tomahawks, scaring the wits out of tight-buttoned easterners." I can not overemphasize how much I love that story. Not just the metaphor of it, that it is the best ideal of America I can think of. The picture of liquored up ladies and dancing Indians, the strangeness of reenacting the Fort Dearborn massacre to scare the queasy easterners, turning what must have still been an open wound into a practical joke. I love that story as proof of the theorem that then, as today in Chicago, the mysterious equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness. The ladies of Chicago wouldn't be dancing with Indians much longer because there wouldn't be any Indians left to dance with. The city of Chicago was officially incorporated in 1833, the year the Potawatomi chief stood near the old Du Sable home and signed away their land in Illinois to the administration of Andrew Jackson, who found time in this busy schedule of relocating the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Seminole and Chicasaw to have the Potawatomi removed west to what US government surveyors had called, "Land too poor for snakes to live upon." Three years after the Potawatomi signed away their land and the city was incorporated, construction began on that canal that Joliet had envisioned to connect Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. The canal worked pretty much exactly as Joliet had imagined. So much trade moved past this corner that Chicago expanded from a muddy little Hamlet of a few hundred people to a city of over 100,000 in just 25 years. Cyrus McCormick built his McCormick Reaper Works right here on the river in 1847. His machine, the reaper, turned out to be one of the most significant inventions in the history of history. Before McCormick, it took 3 hours to gather a bushel of wheat. And with the reaper, it took 10 minutes. Because McCormick helped mechanize agriculture, farms could take up more space and use less labor in less time. By speeding up and emptying out the country, McCormick populated the city. Not that the march of progress is necessarily benign, especially if you're one of those urban workers. Just ask the dead of the Haymarket riot who laid down their lives just 15 blocks from here for the 8 hour workday. Or read Sinclair Lewis' The Jungle, about what the stockyard employees went through on the south side. By the Civil War, most of America's grain from the West and the vast prairie around Chicago was unloaded from trains here, traded on the commodities exchange, and then sent east on ships from Lake Michigan, all within a five minute walk of the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive. It could have been this very spot the poet Carl Sandburg was thinking of in his famous poem about Chicago, "Hog Butcher to the World." He called the city, "Tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads, and the nation's freight handler. Stormy, husky, brawling, city of the big shoulders." So over here, tool maker. That was the reaper factory on the north side of the river. And over there, stacker of wheat on the south side. That was where these giant grain silos stood, where now is standing a giant Hyatt Hotel. The player with railroad and nation's freight handler, that's over there behind the Hyatt where the train tracks were. And look right there, the guy in the leather jacket, big shoulders. It is my project to tell the whole history of America from this corner. And there's no telling of that history without the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president here in Chicago at the Republican National Convention in 1860, on the very site, by the way, of the old Sauganash Hotel, where the Indians and drunken ladies used to dance. And the Chicago Tribune, standing on North Michigan Avenue, a stone's throw from the bridge, not only campaigned for Lincoln, its editors talked him into running for president in the first place. Lincoln was considering going for vice president. Maybe. The Trib's great editor, Joseph Medill, helped found the Republican Party to advance the anti-slavery cause. Medill was such a passionate abolitionist that he wrote in a Tribune editorial in 1856, "We are not unfrequently told that we crowd the Tribune with anti-slavery matter to the exclusion of other topics. We plead guilty." Medill and company's access to the president wasn't necessarily always in their favor. At the height of the Civil War, they went to the White House and pleaded to get out of the president's new request for 6,000 more Union draftees from Cook County in Chicago. This after the area had already given up some 22,000 men. According to writer Lloyd Wendt, after Medill asked for mercy, Lincoln turned on him with that Lincolnesque biblical wrath, scolding, "It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for emancipation, and I have given it to you. Whatever you have asked for, you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men, which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded? You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you. Go home and raise your 6,000 extra men." Needless to say, Lincoln got his Chicago soldiers. And reporting the news of the president's assassination on April 15, 1865, the headline of the Chicago Tribune simply reads, "Terrible News." Not long after the Civil War, the whole city burned to the ground, and Chicago became the place where every major architect in the country-- from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright on down to Mies van der Rohe-- worked on reinventing what a city skyline is supposed to look like. Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck revolutionized consumer merchandising with mail order catalog sales. Montgomery Ward was just two blocks from Michigan and Wacker. In 1920, Al Capone came to town, the same year prohibition went into effect. One year after that, Vincent "The Schemer" Drucci, a member of the Dean O'Banion gang, chased by police, drove onto the Michigan Avenue Bridge just as it was opening to let a boat pass. He jumped the gap only to crash straight into the other side. Decades pass. Manufacturing at the corner gives way to the service economy. Now it's all banks and advertising agencies and law firms. Skyscrapers, instead of warehouses. Railroads give way to the world's busiest airport on the north side of town. If I may skip ahead in the interest of finishing this story before tomorrow morning's paper arrives-- for me, by the way, the Tribune, chock full of those anti-slavery screeds, as usual. Only an eight minute walk from the corner is the site of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, the place you could argue where modern televised democracy begins. Since that's the debate Nixon was said to lose not because of the issues, but because he looked so ghastly, sweating under the lights. And just a short walk from there is the building where Hugh Hefner ran Playboy magazine during its heyday. As long as we're on the subject of the decline of Western civilization, if you look over there to the second story of the NBC Tower, tucked between the Equitable and the Tribune, that's where they tape the Jerry Springer Show. The Jerry Springer Show. It just wouldn't be the haunted landscape around the Michigan Avenue Bridge if some symbolic television apocalypse did not happen here each day. Booking guests whose near constant profanity makes this show into an unintelligible barrage of bleeps, watching it is like listening to a constant storm warning. Which is exactly what it is. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but one way you can measure the importance of this corner to our national psyche is the number of times it shows up in motion pictures, specifically the action adventure kind. Bruce Willis, Samuel Jackson, Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Tommy Lee Jones, Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey. There's barely an actor worth the cover of Entertainment Weekly who hasn't been in a film with a scene shot right at the corner. And why? Because these films are about the motion of planes, trains, automobiles, boats, helicopters, motorcycles, every modern means of transportation. And so where better to film them than the place that three centuries ago was spotted as our country's leading transportation hub by Hollywood's favorite unintentional location scout, Louis Joliet? In one typical offering, Chain Reaction, Keanu Reeves plays a fugitive, motorcycle-riding University of Chicago machinist being framed for murder, treason, and terrorism. Being framed is usually a big part of all of these movies. Attempting to elude the police, he is chased down Michigan Avenue to the Michigan Avenue Bridge. The bridge starts opening and Keanu scurries up, a cop not far behind. He does a little better than Vincent "The Schemer" Drucci did in the '20s. But then, Keanu's a movie star, has a stunt double, and can do retakes. As the angle of the raised bridge gets steeper, the cop slides to the bottom. Keanu's at the top. What should he do? He looks up. A police helicopter. He looks down. A police boat. He crawls into the bottom of the bridge as it's lowered and ducks into a garbage truck to safety. When he meets his fellow shapely fugitive who nervously awaits him at the train station, the conductor asks, what took you so long? To which Keanu deadpans-- The bridge was up. Up, down, north, south, whatever. The point is that the bridge was right at the center of attention, in the middle of the action, at the hub. We used to ship grain from this corner. Now that entertainment is America's second biggest export, the product we ship is Keanu. I don't know what you're talking about. Jesus. Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor to our program and a columnist for Salon, the online magazine. Our program today about four different visions of America told at four different street corners across the country. We've arrived at Act Two, Love. For Scott Richer and Julie Riggs, at the corner where South Fourth Street in Louisville, Kentucky, meets the alley behind the West End Baptist Church, things between them changed forever and irrevocably. I think it built and built continually until it got to the point that brought us to the corner where everything was so outrageous, our emotions were so careening wildly out of control, that all we had to do was stand there and look at each other for it to be a monumental event in our lives. The situation was Scott and I had been madly obsessed with each other for years, but we had always just been friends. And I was in a relationship at the time. So on this summer day, in this time in our relationship and our friendship when we were just friends, I stopped by his apartment or his house over on Broadway to visit him. We had a really nice afternoon. I think we hadn't seen each other for a few weeks. But when we saw each other, we always laughed and always had fun and always made each other happy. And then Scott, was this a day for you that was of particular torture? A lot of days when she came over it was. It was fun, but it was bittersweet. She's always able to go away from it being happy. Being like, oh, that was so much fun. And meanwhile, I'm sitting there going, this is horrible. How can she be happy about what's happening here? It was almost like twisting the knife. It was like, ah. So then I got in my little red Volkswagen and left and said goodbye. I was sitting on the back porch of our house. This is a very Kentucky setting, a steamy, hot, summer afternoon. And my roommate, Jason, came out and sat down and could tell that I was affected by emotion. And he said something to the effect of, sometimes you would rather have a feast or famine. I think it was something about a drought or a flood. A drought or a flood, yes. So I decided, well, enough of this then. And I decided to take the gamble. And I got in my car and raced down Broadway in afternoon traffic, weaving in and out of cars trying to catch her. And I'm just cruising along. I had left like 15 minutes before that, I think. Yeah, I had promised myself, well, if I catch up to her before we get to Central Park, then I'll pull her over and I'm going to kiss her. And I did catch her like right at Central Park. Right at Central Park. I'm driving in my car and I look over and there he is. And he's like, pull over, pull over. I'm like, what's going on, completely confused. So I pull over into this parking lot right on the corner into this South End Baptist Church Parking lot, and we both got out of our cars. And we just kind of stood leaning against our respective cars, just kind of making not even small talk. It was just like-- Everything around us kind of stopped and nothing moved. And it was impossible to describe. Everything around you stopped and nothing moved? You know like in a movie or in a dream. If you're having a dream, and everything's spinning really quickly. And then all of a sudden, just the one spot where you're standing stays still. I have no idea what happened there. We both felt something tremendously powerful. Our hearts were racing so fast. And all the background noise just kind of drops out, and all the colors get really saturated. So then you kissed her? No, no. Nothing happened. He just stood there. Well, something must have happened, because we're here talking about it now. So what exactly did happen next? I think what-- God. I don't know. Something happened. But it just seemed to me, it seemed like being there, that was my confirmation that there was something definitely still going on inside Julie that involved me. Everything wasn't hopeless. Every time I'd drive by the parking lot-- and I actually went there at least twice that I'm sure Scott doesn't know about, just sitting in the parking lot thinking, God. So here our story ends. Julie's old boyfriend lived a block from the corner. So she passed it every time she went to see him, and thought about that moment with Scott. And finally, ditched the boyfriend. She and Scott have been together for three years. They now live together. The funny thing about the situation was it wasn't the first time that we were destined to have our first kiss and missed it. Really? Because we were in Paris together eight months earlier. And we're having a really great time and stayed up really late one night in the corridor of a youth hostel in Paris talking. And we should have kissed then, but we didn't. Because you were with the other guy? Because of the other guy. Yes, even after I broke up with the guy. It still took so long. Oh really? Yes. How come? I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted it to be something-- He wanted to wait till springtime upon a beautiful cliff somewhere. I don't know. And you know, when we were in Paris, I thought, well, there's the other guy. And we're in Paris. And you're supposed to fall in love in Paris, so we can't do it here. It's so typical to be in Paris. Oh, our first kiss was in Paris. I didn't want to be a Hallmark card. You only have one opportunity to have your first kiss with someone. And you missed so many of them. They finally had their first kiss in Scott's living room. She had to make the first move. Coming up, dogs, dead people, and a mystery. And what it takes to become an American. That's in a minute from Public Radio international. when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's program, Four Corners. We attempt to bring you a portrait of life in America by telling four different stories of four different street corners in four different parts of the country. So far on our program we've heard about the past, we've heard about matters of the heart, and now we have arrived at Act Three, Neighbors. Mike Paterniti has this story of what makes a community in a cemetery in Portland, Maine, whose entrance stands at the corner of Vaughn and Clifford. The West End Cemetery is full of old dead sea captains and soldiers from the War of 1812. Kids that died of cholera and wives who, after 6 or 8 or 10 children, just gave up. There are rich people under monuments, the Longfellow family in a vault and paupers without so much as a wooden marker. No one's been buried here since the middle of this century. And so the place has fallen into disrepair. You see a lot of the marble and shale headstones in puzzle pieces on the ground or standing at crooked attention. About 10 years ago, the cemetery was a popular hangout for prostitutes and junkies. But now it's just dogs and their owners. When I first moved to town a couple years ago with my girlfriend, Sarah, we walked our dog in the cemetery. There was this guy there named Jeff, a big, brawny American Indian, from the Duckwater tribe I think, who sort of qualified as my first friend in Portland. He told me how he grew up in Nevada and was adopted by white parents, and then raised in a little redneck town where people didn't really like Indians. He'd moved around a lot. And I pictured him as I was now, the stranger in a strange place. He walked with me in the cemetery, sometimes twice a day, whatever the weather. Or rather, we were both being walked by our dogs. His was a wolf mix named [? Keana ?], with a vacant, slightly menacing glint in her eye, who liked to rough up young puppies. And mine is a simple mutt named Trout, whose passion for chasing squirrels follows her lifelong commitment to rolling in poop. It seemed like Jeff was always at the cemetery, sometimes up to eight hours in a row. He said he worked at night, supposedly for a local scuba diving outfit, and that's why he had so much free time during the day. He told stories, endless stories about his high school football exploits and the blown-out knee that ended his college career at safety. He talked about fishing, how he gill netted in the rivers of Southeast Alaska, and then how he and his girlfriend had bought a house and now they weren't together anymore, and she had the house, and he was here, a country away, walking his dog with people like me. He didn't seem angry at all. No, in fact, he seemed happy. Like every day he was as happy as he had been the day before. And because of it, he was good at drawing people out, at connecting the various factions inside the cemetery so that everyone stood around, nodding dumbly, listening to Jeff, our oblivious mayor, holding forth on [? Keana's ?] new collar or perfect shampoo while [? Keana ?] took her pound of flesh out of some hapless pup. This was not the way things usually worked in the cemetery. The mere fact that I knew Jeff's name was unusual. Usually people didn't interact that much. Instead, we knew each other by handles. There was dalmatian man, father of three speckled dogs, one to whom he spoke in sign language. There was greyhound lady, regally walking her trio of greyhounds until the day that Lightning, her beloved, dove through a plate glass window during a thunderstorm and died. There was the man who walks and reads. And frisbee dude. And the lawn chair family, an old father and his 50 something son who daily set up their folding chairs near the cemetery gate. And the pick-up artist around whom no one was safe. And there was crazy shouting man, owner of three rag-tag mutts and an elder statesman of the cemetery who when I finally talked to him wasn't crazy shouting man at all. His name was Al. There are loads of people up there that I see all the time-- some of them I've been seeing for years-- and I don't know their names. I recognize them, they recognize me. We talk about all sorts of things. And it just never really occurs to you to ask their name because you know their dog's name. As a matter of fact, I've always had these funny occasions where you run into people that you've talked to a lot at the cemetery and you meet them somewhere. We were down at Granny Killam's when it was open one night. This woman came over and said, Al, how are you? How's the dogs? How's all this? And I was with a bunch of friends and I thought, and this is-- and I realized it wasn't that I had forgotten her name, it was that I'd never known her name. I knew her dog. I had no idea. This was not somebody that I just knew very casually. This was somebody I probably walked with three or four mornings a week. But you always find you know a lot more dogs than you know people, which I think says something about who's worth knowing anyway. Even today, what strikes me as amazing about the cemetery is that there are people here, people who show up twice a day and see other people here twice a day for years. And many of them just don't know each other's real name, let alone what the other does for a living, or dreams of at night, or loves, or hates. They just know each others' dog's name. So when they refer to one another they might say, Circe's mom said Milk Bones are full of preservatives, which is why she cooks her own. Or when they bump into each other downtown Christmas shopping they'll say, Elroy's mom. And then with nothing left to say say, how goes it? Was this intimacy or a complete lack of intimacy? Sometimes it felt like both at once. You had the warmth of intimacy and the comfort of hiding behind your dog. And yet, every day you saw people at their most naked, talking baby talk to their hounds, kneeling to pick up poop. I asked my friend Julie, Reuben's mother, about this. I think you really get sort of a window into people's-- I don't want to say-- well, into people's souls. You watch people very contentedly walking around, throwing the ball, interacting with their dogs, or totally ignoring their dogs, and going at their own pace, and every once in a while yelling for their dog. I mean, I really judge people by how they behave toward their dog. Here's Al again. I mean, when I see people hit a dog, I'm really sort of appalled and amazed that you would do that. I know who really, really likes their dogs and who doesn't. I know people who have got trophy dogs and people who have got the scruffiest, ugliest dog, but they really, really love that dog. I think it was the love part that kept me going back to the cemetery. And then it became my social hour, my escape, where more often than not I'd find Jeff and [? Keana. ?] The minute Jeff realized that I was a writer, he went to the library, and, over the course of the week, read everything I'd ever written. And then, to my horror, wanted to talk about it. And he did this kind of thing with others too. When the leaves began to change during my first October in the West End Cemetery, Jeff was already talking about a Christmas card he was planning, a photograph of [? Keana ?] and himself. He brought it up obsessively. About how [? Keana ?] was going to have a haircut and shampoo and have her nails clipped. And how he had arranged for a photographer, and how they were scouting locations. There were ups and downs in the saga as it played out over weeks. A good location that might not work out the day of the shoot if a nor'easter hit. The need to time everything just perfectly so that [? Keana ?] would leave the beauty parlor and then immediately sit for a picture before she could come back to the cemetery and get muddy. In retrospect, their were little clues even then that something strange was going on with Jeff. While he said he owned a truck, I only ever saw him at bus stops around town. And the scuba diving, later when I called various outfits in Portland, no one had ever heard of him. In the end, he had the photograph taken at Sears. He and [? Keana ?] in the stiff, unsmiling pose of a Civil War era husband and wife. He in his familiar blue sweatshirt hulking behind [? Keana, ?] who was perfectly coiffed. He was beaming when he handed the Christmas card to me. Literally beaming. After Christmas I left the country for several weeks. And when I came back sometime after a massive ice storm, he was nowhere to be found. The cemetery glittered with glazed headstones. It took days to unravel the story because people didn't seem to want to talk about it, didn't seem to want to talk about anything. Everyone just bundled into themselves. And Jeff, he was a very touchy subject, one that suddenly made us all feel defensive. What I learned was this. He'd had health problems, an infection of some kind. He went to the hospital at the same time that he was apparently forced out of his apartment. Money was tight. He'd asked someone from the cemetery to put him up. Another line crossed, but that hadn't worked out. [? Keana ?] was taken to a kennel by [? Meeghan ?], Maddie's mom. And now she was calling the kennel regularly to see if Jeff had picked her up, but he hadn't. Week after week, she called until it was clear that Jeff couldn't or wouldn't pick up [? Keana. ?] That he was gone. That's when [? Keana ?] was adopted by someone else. Here's [? Meeghan. You ?] start talking about this stuff with somebody, and then you realize, I didn't even know this person. Like with Jeff, it was like you knew everything about his life. But in the end, how much of that was actually true? And you didn't even know this person. It was like August to December and he was gone. But it seemed like forever. There were completely unsubstantiated rumors that he had robbed a bank. Someone new someone whose cousin had seen his photo on a Boston newscast, maybe. But then most people were quick to accept this as fact. In a weird way, I wonder if we felt betrayed, betrayed because Jeff had broken the simple rules of the cemetery. He had become too intimate. Now he was gone. And it was hard to say hi, let alone catch someone else's eye. During those dark winter months, the cemetery became a kind of haunted, trustless place. In one of the endless conversations we had about him later, some people worried that he knew where we lived. Someone threatened to track him down. But what for? So that he might never again bamboozle other hapless dog owners in other seaside towns into chatting about doggie shampoo? Sarah and I kept the Christmas card on our refrigerator, right up until a couple months ago, actually, when it quietly fell to a new rotation of refrigerator photos. We kept it there in hopes, I think, that he would come back and explain where he'd been. For I was pretty certain he couldn't have robbed a bank. And if he had, I told myself, maybe it was because he had to. Maybe he'd been inches from a life he'd imagine for himself, with a dog that gave unconditional love. With friends he was guaranteed to see every day. And he'd had a couple of bad breaks. Got sick, ran out of money, lost his dog, and then panicked. Now time has passed. People come and go, and every six months the galaxy inside these gates breaks apart and reconfigures. Dogs die, people leave for nursing homes, others move, more arrive. And every day, today even, people are here walking in spectral circles like they're in Mecca, circling the Kaaba. In general, I'd say things are back to the way they were. Intimate, but not intimate. We stand around in dumbfounded joy with 10, 20, 30 other gaping grown adults, reveling in the simplicity of stupidly entertaining dog play. Dalmatian man still flashes sign language at his deaf dalmatian. The pick-up artist still works his magic. The lawn chair family still sets up by the cemetery gate each day and cover their legs with wool blankets. The fact is, even without somebody like Jeff pulling people together, if you stand on a corner with a bunch of strangers for long enough, eventually something happens that brings you together, sometimes something small. The other night I went to the cemetery at sunset. There were the same broken headstones, the same sea captains and paupers. And there were all these living people too, who only know me as Trout's dad, or as the guy who stupidly named his dog Trout, or however they see me. The dogs were playing hard, racing in circles, not wanting any of it to end and a gigantic moon came up, came up tangerine. It was the kind of moon that stills everything. And we stood in a circle, watching it rise. For a minute or two, we just stood there, it glowing orange. The dogs didn't exist at all. Mike Paterniti lives in Portland, Maine. Act Four, How to Become an American. We have this story about a few of the things that are hard to understand, standing on a corner, when you come to this country. It's from Achy Obejas. It was exactly noon, and the last of the weekend breakfast crowd filtered out of the diner. From the booth-lined back wall, a young woman made her way to the front to pay her check. She was tall, with reddish brown hair to her shoulders. She had a tattoo on her left wrist, a delicately etched silver and green double-headed ax. All around her, the bus boys and waitresses kept moving, the dishes clattering on the large trays. Lupe, a voice called from behind her. She turned around, then frowned. Standing next to her was a dark, stocky young man, a few black hairs poking sharply out of his chin. He smiled sheepishly. He carried a tray of improbably balanced plates and glasses. Hello, Raul, she said, resigned to his recognition. I didn't realized you worked here. Yes, he said. His English too formal, crackling with Spanish underneath. He glanced at the ax on her wrist. Pedro got a job here, then he brought me. I've been here a few months already, so I should be a waiter soon. My English is much better now don't you think, he asked. The dishes on the tray rattled as he struggled to keep them from crashing to the floor. Yes, she said, starting out the door the diner. Raul hurried to get rid of the tray and followed her out to the corner. She pulled on her sunglasses. I haven't seen you in a long time, he said, now in Spanish. She noticed him studying her hands and made a fist, which caused the ax to expand. I haven't seen you since, well, you know. You said some very cruel things, he continued. But I always look for you anyway, out in the streets, wondering how you are. You could've called. What for? Just then a pair of young men walked around them. One carrying a sheath of flyers, the other a roll of tape and a stapler. They stopped and put up some of the papers on the telephone pole next to them. The two men, young and girlish, left after they had layered the pole with announcements about an upcoming dance contest at a local club. Lupe lowered her glasses enough to read and register the information. Raul watched her. Well, you could call sometimes just to call. Not for anything in particular, but to let me know how you are. I worry about you, he said. I'm sorry I didn't call, Lupe said. She pushed the glasses back up her nose. It's just that, Raul said pouting, I mean, we're married after all. Lupe laughed. No, Raul, you're married, she said. You knew damn well this was just a convenience for me, a business deal. I can't help it that you've spun all these stories for your family. But it's not right, Raul said. I thought we would live together. I never agreed to that. If it had been a condition, I never would have married you. She was squinting, her mouth was dry. You paid me for something. All I'm doing is keeping my end of the bargain. And that doesn't include hanging around with you, your friends, or your family. Well, I think you need me, he said, his lower lip jutting out like a fleshy ledge. I'm a good man. I can help you. You don't get it, Raul, Lupe said, shifting her weight from one hip to the other. She stood at an angle, scratched her hand. I don't know that you'll ever get it. But suffice it to say, that I don't need you. We're not family. No matter how many justices of the peace we stand in front of. But of course we are. No, Raul. You have your people and I have mine. But yours, that's not your family. You need me to help you stay in touch with your family. With your Latin self, he said angrily. He shoved one hand in his pants pocket and used the other to poke at the air. In Mexico, this wouldn't happen, and you'd have to do as I say. There are laws you know. Lupe laughed again. In Mexico, we'd never have married, Raul. In Mexico, you wouldn't need to marry a nice American girl. That you're American is an accident of geography, he said. You're running away from your Latin self he insisted. I know who you are. And I know who you think you are. I'm a man who has seen a little bit of the world. I may not have gone to college like you, but I know people and I know you. Oh, please, she said, and started to walk away from the corner. He shook his head sadly and looked down at the tips of this grime-covered shoes. Then he took off, following a few steps behind her. I didn't want to do this, he said. But you've given me no choice. Suddenly he grabbed her and threw her against the flyer-covered telephone pole. What the [BLEEP] do you think you're doing?, she demanded, kicking and scratching at him. I didn't want to hurt you, he said in a voice that cracked. I tried to carry this around with me all by myself. But now you give me no choice. He yanked her up, pressing his body to her's and forcing her face-to-face with him. She could see his pores. He held her like that for a moment. Then, seeing the men with the flyers across the street, he let go. Hit me and I'll kill you mother [BLEEP]. Lupe tried to step away, readying her hands martial arts style for him. Hey, she yelled in English to the two men across the street. This guy's trying to kill me. Can you call the cops? The two looked at each other warily, then back across the street to Lupe in her battle stance. Raul was crying. The things you accuse me of, they're all things that you do, he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his fists. Well, I finally went and did one of them. It hurt me to do it. But I'm a man. I couldn't put up with this any longer. Hey, leave her alone, one of the men yelled from across the street. But it was lackluster. The second man walked slowly back to the diner where a blue metal flag advertised a public telephone inside. Raul, I don't want you near me, do you understand, Lupe said, switching back to Spanish. I don't know what the [BLEEP] you're talking about. But I'll tell you this much. If you keep this up, I'll file a police report, and the government will figure out what we're doing. And you will be shipped back. Do you understand? He didn't react to what she said. Instead, he took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. I did it, you know, he finally said. Did what, she asked, confused. I cheated on you, he said. She stared at him, her fighting posture loosened as she struggled for comprehension. I was with another woman, he said. Since you wouldn't act like a wife, I just couldn't take it anymore. And I had an affair behind your back. Lupe wanted to laugh, but didn't. She was stunned by the hopeless sincerity of his unnecessary confession. I think that's good, Raul, she finally said. I think it's good that you get out and get involved. After all, we're not really married. We're only legally married. She smiled a little as she talked, trying desperately to be supportive. Raul closed his eyes, tears escaping from under the lids. Oh, you are a cold, cold woman, he cried, his voice cracking again as he threw his hands in the air. Why did I have to marry such a cold woman? Raul, you didn't marry a cold woman. You married a lesbian. He covered his ears with the palms of his hands. I don't want to hear that, he shouted. No, no, no. Lupe sighed and shook her head. God, this is absolutely not worth it, she said, more to herself than to him. The cops are on their way, said the man who'd gone back to the diner. He strolled back across the street to his partner, who had been serving as witness to Raul and Lupe's argument. Raul, she said, her voice softer now, if the cops get here and we're still fighting, you'll probably be in trouble. So let's just go our separate ways, OK? Don't you care, he pleaded. Yeah, I care, she said. That's why I'm telling you this. Please, go back to the restaurant. I'll just leave. And when the cops get here there won't be anybody to file charges. We're still married, he insisted. As if nothing else mattered. For just one more year, Raul. So don't blow it for yourself, she said. And please don't bother me anymore. You're trying my patience. Remember that I can put you right back on the wrong side of the river. They fell silent again. What's that, he asked, nodding at her wrist. An ax, she said. He smiled a little, but he had already given up. To cut off men's balls, I suppose. Yeah, she said. If necessary. They both laughed lightly, a little embarrassed. Raul shoved his hands in his pockets. I hear you bought a house with Kate. With my money, he said, not meeting her eyes. She nodded. It was my money. I earned it. He looked up, but she refused to make eye contact. You should get back to work, she said flatly. The cops will be here any moment, and I have to go. Will you come by, see my mother, or maybe just call sometime, he asked. You never give up, do you? No. Well you should, Lupe said, then walked away. Her sharp strides put her across the street in seconds. Raul watched as she talked to the two men. After a moment, the men turned and left. Raul turned too, then quietly wandered back to the diner. By the time the squad car arrived at the corner, nobody was there. Achy Obejas is a cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, that anti-slavery rag. This story is from her collection of short fiction, We Came All the Way from Cuba, So You Could Dress Like This? Our program produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann and Sylvia Lemus. If you would like to buy a cassette copy of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you know you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, where there are also photos of a teddy bear sitting on the four corners monument this week, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who describes our program this way, where-- Booking guests whose near constant profanity makes the show into an unintelligible barrage of bleeps. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Jamie used to ask for Adam's advice. But he didn't want Adam's advice. Back in high school, they would go on these long walks, and Jamie would tell Adam, his best friend, about his various crushes. The crushes were usually on girls who shared two particular qualities. Number one, they were usually really, really pretty. And number two, they had no interest in Jamie, whatsoever. He'd say like, God, I spent the weekend with Jung. And I kept on wanting to kiss her. But I couldn't kiss her. And every time I thought I could go and kiss her, she'd say, you know, I really think I want to go out with Hampton. And he would say, what should I do? She wants me to go this party next week. Should I go? I would have nothing to say. I wouldn't know what in the world to say. And so he would say, I don't want advice from you. I want advice from Yakov. Yakov? Yakov. Yakov was a commando in the Israeli army, which meant that for years, in his job, he was dropped from a helicopter into the Mediterranean. He would swim ashore, usually into Lebanon, break into a building, rescue hostages. That was his job. Adam got to know him one summer at Israeli summer army camp. He was the idealized vision of manhood. I mean, I remember specifically, in the Golan, which is the beautiful mountainous region in the north of Israel, we were hiking. And we were talking about different musicians in America. And my friend said, what do you think of Billy Joel? And Yakov said, he's soft. I mean, up till that second, I really liked Billy Joel. I think I owned every one of his albums. I probably knew all of his songs by heart. And literally, from that second to right now, I can't listen to Billy Joel. Every time I listen to it, I'm like, that is so soft, man. Why is he so soft? Anyway, so Jamie would ask me advice as Yakov. And it would be a switch this fast. He'd say, what should I do? I'd be like, I don't know, man. And then he'd say, well, I want to hear from Yakov. And right away, I would just say, listen, Jung wants a man, and you're playing like a child. So until you show her a man, how will she want you? He would say, listen, this party is coming on Saturday. What you are doing is telling Jung, ask her, am I going with you, or I'm just coming to the party? If she says, you're just coming to the party, you say, listen, Jung, I like you. I want to be with you. So you must be very specific, why are you there and why are you wanting to be there. And then it is very simple. It's a transaction, just a man, a woman, what you want, what she wants, end of story. And I would just become Yakov. These weren't things I could say. They weren't things I knew. I didn't know about being a man or not being a man. I didn't know about what women wanted at that point in my life. Wait. You are saying that not only would you do his voice, but he was actually giving advice that you, yourself, would be unable to give? Yeah, the kinds of things that Yakov would say, I don't think I knew. I certainly wasn't acting like I knew it. But even though Adam would give this advice, even though he would become another person, channel the voice and personality of an Israeli commando for Jamie, even though he did all of that, Jamie still would not take the advice. Which raises the question, what does it take? Who among us, my friend, has not had someone who begged them for advice. And we gave them the advice. And in fact, everyone we knew gave them the same advice, and still they did not act. Think of the advice that you have given in your life, my friend. When we give advice we witness the puniness of reason when compared with the vastness of human desire and emotion. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, most of it was recorded in front of live audiences in Seattle, Washington, and Aspen, Colorado, thanks to public radio station KUOW in Seattle and to HBO's US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. Today on our program, advice, stories of people trying to give each other advice and why advice is so rarely taken. Act One, Sleepless in Seattle. Writer Sarah Vowell breaks a number of deeply held personal beliefs, and does something she generally tries to avoid. She asks other people for advice, in this case about insomnia. Act Two, Advise and Consent. Some thoughts on why people hardly ever take each other's advice. And Seattle's own Dan Savage has advice for everyone that may save lives. We hope it does. Act Three, Guided Meditation. Cheryl Trykv helps us all unlock the sap that is contained in our inner tree. Also throughout this hour, music from the Black Cat Orchestra, who are with us on stage in Seattle. Stay with us. Act One, Sleepless in Seattle. So what happens if you actually take the advice people give you, all of it? Sarah Vowell recently conducted a personal experiment where she did exactly that. She is the author of the book Radio On and a contributing editor to our program. I'm holding a baby picture in my hand, the portrait kind from Sears. It's me and my twin sister, Amy. And we're maybe three, dressed alike. She's crying. Amy is this flashing light, blond hair, blue eyes, white tears. And I have one distinguishing characteristic that makes me different from any baby in any picture I've ever seen, dark circles under my eyes. As if I was holding down the swing shift at the tire factory in addition to my official duties as a baby. My mother says that when I was small, she'd wake up in the middle of the night and find me calmly playing with my toys. Once when I was 18 months old, she got up to check on me and panicked when she saw the front door swinging open. She found me outside, crawling around the pasture, giggling. I continued to sneak out as a sleepless teenager. Most nights I would go for a walk around 3:00 AM, which was lovely and starlit and safe in Bozeman, Montana. Now I live in Chicago, a city which proudly just edged out New York's murder rate. Don't call us the Second City. So the 3:00 AM joy walks aren't an option anymore. Not that I mind being up at all hours. It's the exhaustion that gets to me. And so recently, I decided enough. I'm not the advice seeking, therapy going, professional help getting kind, working under the theory that I know my problems and I am unwilling to change. But to overthrow insomnia, I'd break my personal declarations of independence and ask for help. I'd give it five days, I thought, a work week. I am can do when a job is involved. Day one, Mom. The last time I took advice from my mother I was in high school. She forced me to take a typing class, arguing it might come in handy in later life. And I've never quite forgiven her for being right. But she's a bit an insomniac herself. I called her up, and asked for suggestions on how to handle it. As I have gotten older, I've learned to drink my herbal tea. So far so good. Herbal tea, sensible, basic, the boiling of water, Maybe this advice thing isn't as scary as I thought. But Mom's just getting warmed up. First of all, first of all, do some real serious soul searching. Oh, god. I have a policy about that word, soul. It is strictly prohibited, except in cases of conversations having to do with okra recipes and Marvin Gaye. My mom doesn't observe these simple, common sense restrictions. You're supposed to get rid of anything that might be bothering you. I'm talking about things that you need to let go of, things that, in the past, that maybe have upset you or hurt you, that you're still hanging on to. You know what I'm saying? No, you mean in the new-agey sense, like emotional problems? No, Sarah, I don't think you have an emotional problem. Translation, yes, Sarah, I do think you have an emotional problem. Normally, any soul searching on my part is purely accidental. And it's always brought on by a liquid other than herbal tea. So I brew some chamomile, telling myself that, in the right light, it looks a lot like Scotch. I sip three cups and search my soul for deep thoughts. I got nothing. So I try something else. I put on a Billie Holiday song called "Why Was I Born?" Two minutes and 48 seconds later, I realize that perhaps I'm confusing introspection with depression. Soul searching, how do you even know if you're doing it right? I mean, how searched is searched? I try another approach. John Ehrlichman's obituary was just in the paper. And I decide to take a personal inventory by comparing my soul with his. Guess what? I come out on top. Now do the math with me. The occasional late payment on my college loans, Watergate. Periodic participation in obnoxious public radio pledge drives, secret bombing of Cambodia. I can't sleep, he can't breathe. And I fall into sleep immediately, and drift off into the sleep of the just. But the depressing thing is, I wake up four hours later and never get back to bed. So I cross soul searching and herbal tea off the list. Sorry, Mom. Day two, the doctor. I seek professional help from a doctor at the University of Chicago's sleep disorder lab, one Wallace Mendelson, professor of psychiatry and medicine. Well, there's, depending on exactly how you divide things up, 30 or 40 different basic kinds of illnesses of sleep. Among the many causes of insomnia is a condition that's sometimes called psychophysiological or conditioned insomnia. I don't know if he is a good doctor. But I can tell you this. If his patients want him to help them get to sleep, all they have to do is sit him down with a tape recorder, and ask him to say a few words about his job. Anyway, though he refuses to give me any personal advice, arguing that I'm not his patient, I do manage to squeeze a few pointers out of him for someone, maybe one of those psychophysio-whatchamacallits. For that particular subgroup of people, one of the things that can be helpful is to try to strip the bed and the bedroom of any associations, except for sleeping and loving. Loving? Somehow he makes that word sound so dirty. But that night, I take Dr. Mendelson's advice and clear everything out of my bedroom, half of which contains my bed, the other half of which just so happens to function as my office. And I'll be precise now, because this is science. I remove 78 books, stacking them in front of the closet in the other room. I transport 15 pens, a turntable, a transistor radio, a tape recorder, and 23 magazines. I take away dozens of scraps of paper, some of which were handily stored on and in the bed, itself. I unplug the computer and the fax machine, and lug them out. And clearing away all this dusty stuff takes two Kleenex filled hours. Then I get into bed-- in the nude, because the stacks of books are blocking the closet where I keep my pajamas-- and I think about what a mess the living room is, and how I'm going to have to haul all that crap back in here tomorrow. And I never get more than about 30 minutes straight of sleep, though somewhere in there I managed to have a dream in which my bedroom is empty because I got robbed. Day three, the internet. Doctors and mothers and friends, so old-fashioned, so 20th century. If I want an insomnia-free future, I must look to the future, to the World Wide Web. It promises so much. I do a search on insomnia. The first thing I find is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. It posits the three main causes of insomnia are old age, depression, and female gender. Well, no wonder I can't solve my little problem. Then I log on to something called the Virtual Hospital at www.vh.org. In the insomnia advice section, one of its suggestions is, don't engage in stimulating activity before bed. Examples include playing a competitive game of cards or watching an exciting program on television. I decide to take this advice and avoid exciting programs on television. Which means one thing, turn on the Tonight Show. Jay Leno's monologue features innovative humor about airlines and Viagra and Linda Tripp. A hilarious skit called "Presidential Jeopardy" pits Abe Lincoln and George Washington against president Clinton, who scores big in the Hooters waitresses category. Then one of those animal guys comes out with a tiger. The conversation goes like this. Jay Leno, these must be pretty endangered. Animal Guy, yeah, they are. I am asleep before the musical guest comes out. This advice is working the best so far. I stay asleep for five whole hours. Does everyone know about this, that maybe this is the reason Leno's ratings are better than Letterman's? Day four. A day without caffeine is like-- I'm sure I could come up with a good analogy, but I'm just too tired. Consensus, or should I say, conspiracy? Every last one of my sources-- my mom, my friend, the doctor, the web-- advises against caffeine, which is a problem in that I have been addicted to coffee since I was 15. I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to. But still, my motto, sine coffea nihil sum, without coffee, I'm nothing. So today I'm planning on nothing. I go cold turkey, starting with a brisk pot of peppermint tea at 8:30. By 10:15, I'm splayed on the couch with a cardigan sweater wrapped around my eyes. My head throbs. And the phone rings every 15 minutes. One of the calls is from a telemarketer, who somehow makes me cry. At 12:38, I crawl over to the cabinet where I keep the coffee can and sniff its contents. It is a very long day. And guess what? It doesn't work. Thank god. What if I had to do this again? I'm up all night watching the clock, waiting for morning, when I can make coffee. At 5:00 AM, I tell myself, close enough, and suck down six cups before 5:15. Now that reason is restored, I come to this conclusion. If there is anything worse than insomnia, it's taking advice about insomnia. Being up in the middle of the night is kind of nice, actually. It's quiet and dark, and the phone doesn't ring. You can listen to records and weirder movies are on TV. I've never known another life, and now I'm not so sure I want to. One of my earliest memories is listening to my dad in the middle of the night. He'd be opening and closing kitchen cabinets, stirring bicarbonate of soda into a glass. I was awake. He was awake. And he seeing no need to fix it. In the middle of the night, lying in bed, he invents these machines I don't pretend to understand. I'm kind of working on a spoke-duplicating lathe. It's really cool. I drew a picture this morning when I woke up. You just feel sorry for those people that slept all night and didn't accomplish anything. We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws, and there would be no one left. If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I'd probably look better. I just wouldn't look like me. Thank you. Sarah Vowell. Coming up, breezy advice pretending to be serious, serious advice pretending to be breezy. Will you be able to tell the difference? That is in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, and invite a variety of writers and performers and reporters to tackle that theme. Today's program, Advice. A show recorded in front of live audiences in Aspen and Seattle. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Advise and Consent. Let's go to the tape. There are the times that people give each other advice, and then there are the times that people actually take advice. And they are very different times. And so let us now sort out one from the other. Let us create a taxonomy. Let us name the different species of advice, so we do not confuse ourselves as we go forward from this day. For help with this, I turned to someone who is an expert on advice, someone who has devoted her entire life to solving other people's problems, my mother. That's the cheapest joke I have ever made in public. Suddenly I'm like Shecky Greene up here. My mom is actually a clinical psychologist, publishes original research, is quoted in newspapers and magazines, until recently, did the advice column for America Online. And she tells this story. Well, I had a patient that loved Susan Forward when she was big on the radio. This is a radio therapist. Right. And this patient was just making a mess out of her life, just doing everything that was not in her interest. So I said, well, let's do a role reversal. I'll be you and you be Susan Forward. And so I presented the problem from the patient's point of view. And the patient, as Susan Forward, could tell me exactly what she should be doing. And then the lights go on. And then she says, well, I know what I should do. But obviously, I'm having trouble doing it, which is at the core. People have trouble taking advice. The whole process of therapy is the long process of getting people to the point where they can actually take the advice that any reasonable person would give them. There's one thing that is very interesting about giving advice. And there's been some research to support this, that people who give advice feel terrific afterwards, and the people who receive the advice, particularly when it's unsolicited, feel terrible. So what we've learned from this research is that advice is really terrific for the advice giver. And it's not so good for the advice receiver. Either way, giving them the right advice has nothing to do with whether or not they will take the advice. This is garden variety advice. Then there's the advice provided by our nation's burgeoning advice industry, which includes therapists, self help books, advice columns in newspapers. And so in preparation for today's show, I talked to Dan Savage, who has been an advice columnist for eight years in The Stranger, here in Seattle and around the country. And he is going to be out here in person in a few minutes. But when we talked on tape a few weeks ago, he expressed this cheerful view of his chosen profession. Dan, when you write the column, do you think people take the advice? Not usually. No. But most of the time, I don't think people take advice from anybody. People seek advice to sort of suss out all the possibilities, all their possible choices, and then very often just do what they would have done to begin with, without asking anyone for advice. So no, I think most of the time people don't take my advice. They don't take anyone's advice. Well, if people don't take advice, then why put yourself in a job where you're giving advice for a living? Because it pays well. Advice columns, Dan says, are not, not, not about giving advice. And when you think about it, one person sent in a question. But the column is being read by millions of other people who didn't ask the question, who aren't in that situation, who don't have that problem. Why are those millions of other people reading? Schadenfreude or they're reading for pleasure. They're reading because other people's problems are entertaining. They are reading to be titillated. And if you write a good advice column, you do do all those things. So in one way, it's not a racket, if you focus on what an advice column actually does, which is not give advice. Dan, I have to say, was unrelenting on this point. I asked him, is he happy when he comes up with some right, good advice for somebody? No. He's happy when he thinks of something funny to say in the column. OK. Why does he quote actual experts in the column if he's not trying to give people actual advice? His answer, to give the column the appearance of an advice column. I pretend to write an advice column, is how I feel about it. And there are times when I'm pretending to write my advice column where it sounds a lot like an advice column. He also told me this one incredible thing about the advice column business, about the letters that people send in asking for advice. When you write an advice column, one of the secrets of the genre is the letter will include the advice that, ultimately, you give. The letter will say, here's my problem. And I don't know what to do. This is what I think I should do. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so you have to cut that paragraph. Otherwise, you're just going to repeat it. Because very often, the person knows exactly what they have to do. They do have to leave their husband, or they do have to turn their kid in to the cops, or they do have to get their nipples pierced, or whatever. And how often does that happen, that they actually include the answer in their letter? Like 25% of the time. But there's another category of advice to include in our little taxonomy. In the last year, on two different occasions, I've turned to my father to ask for advice. And these are two of the first times that I have actually turned to him for direct advice, really, since I was a kid. So the first of these times, I asked for advice about whether or not to buy or lease a car. And the second time, I needed advice on setting up a 401(k). And my dad is this business guy. He is an accountant. He gives people advice like this all day long. And each time, he sat at his desk in his office. And he asked me some questions. And he ran some numbers. And then he told me what to do. And I did it. And each time there was this very real intimacy to it. They were intimate conversations. There is a real intimacy to real advice, when it actually happens. There is something about putting your fate in someone else's hands, and saying, I need help. I need your help. Help me. Help me. Here I am. I need you. And you were going to him for advice about this thing that didn't have anything to do with emotional life, yours or his. Yet it affected your emotional life in a real way. Yeah. And that's what is moving about it, actually. And it's very male, I think, very hetero male, that you were able to have an emotional bond with your father, but you had to have this sort of MacGuffin to bond over that had nothing to do with feelings, just numbers. Yeah, but I think it points to the power of what advice is. I mean, it kind of doesn't matter what it is about. It could be about anything. That's true. See, but this whole idea of the intimacy of giving advice, like in a personal setting, that you would actually turn to somebody and say, I don't know what to do. Help me out. The intimacy of that is so powerful, that I feel like, in a way, the difference between that act and what happens in an advice column is the same thing as the difference between, you know, having sex with somebody in private and what happens in a porno film. I think that's absolutely true. An advice column is a public performance of a private act. And just as appearing in pornos betrays something about the person appearing in it-- if you're the kind of person who appears in pornos, it tells people things about you, good and bad. I think also being the kind of person who seeks advice out in a public format tells the listener or the reader something about you, good or bad. I certainly think when I've heard Dr. Laura's show, I think who are these idiots who would call this woman? Well, now to give advice to all of us in a public forum, whatever it is that makes us, author of the advice column "Savage Love" and the book made for those columns, please welcome Dan Savage. Usually it goes like this. You're watching some drunk in a bar scream at his date. His face is red. He's standing, she's sitting, it's ugly. And you look. You can't help it. And suddenly, he sees you seeing him. And then he asks, what are you looking at? You can be from another country. You can be a very young child. And still, the first time you're asked this question, you know it's a trick question. What are you looking at? It's a baboon thing to do, really, a way for an insecure monkey to reassure himself that he's the alpha male. He's challenging you, smaller and weaker monkey, to see if you have the guts to tell him, bigger and drunker monkey, the truth. You're looking at a jerk. Deep down, he knows he's a jerk. And now he knows you know. He was attracting attention to himself acting like a jerk. That's what you were looking at. "What are you looking at" can have an added element of terror at times for gay men, because sometimes we look at guys who aren't acting like baboons. Sometimes we just look. And sometimes a guy, who might not want to be looked at, will catch us looking. In these circumstances, what are you looking at usually equals I saw what you were looking at, faggot. Instead of him knowing you know he's a jerk. You know he knows you're a fag. And you blame yourself, of course, vestigial shame. You got sloppy checking out some straight guy's butt, and you got caught. It's not even the looking so much that gives us away, but the nervousness, this fear of getting caught, that makes our looks different and distinguishable from the looks that straight men give each other. Of course, not all straight men mind being looked at by gay men. Some find our attentions flattering, hipsters, porn stars, public radio personalities. But violence so often follows this kind of "what are you looking at" that even when it doesn't, you still get the adrenaline shock and the adrenaline hangover and the adrenaline flashbacks. It's like a conditioned response. I expect that Matthew Shepard was asked what he was looking at by the two straight guys that beat him to death. Now in some places you can safely assume all the men are gay. Health clubs, Manhattan, Ikea. You can look just as much and just as obviously as you like. But in most places, self preservation requires you to assume that all the guys are straight. High school, Wyoming, Sears. If you're going to check the guys out at Sears, you need to look straight yourself. And you need to look like you ain't looking. One of the ways gay men spot each other in straight land is by waiting for the glance, the look that looks without looking. If a straight guy at Sears wants to look at you, he'll just turn and face you. No nerves, no sidelong glances. He just looks. But a gay guy who wants to look at a guy at Sears-- who he thinks might be gay, but isn't sure about since he is at Sears-- he won't turn. He keeps his head straight as he passes. His eyeballs, however, follow you as you walk by, moving into their far corners. But he doesn't turn his head. If you're gay, you do the same. Your eyeballs follow his, but you keep looking straight ahead as you pass. Actually, this is a complicated dynamic. And I'd like to demonstrate. Can I have a volunteer from the audience? Bring up the lights for a second. This theater seats about 1,600. And according to the actuarial tables for public radio crowd this size, there should be one straight man. Did you raise your hand, sir? Now how lucky for us, he is in the front row. Why don't you come right up here? It's you, darling, sweetheart. Come on. The show's-- OK. We're going to do this look, just you and me. It's going to be very special. What's you're name? This is-- Michael. Do you pledge to public radio? I do now. You do now. Can I have your credit card? We'll just return it after-- go stand right there. Turn around. No, show them your butt, not me your butt. OK. Straight guys are always so quick to show you their ass. It's the great forbidden straight guy zone, that once the opportunity presents itself. Don't look at me. We're at Sears. We're going to walk past each other. We're both gay. Just pretend. We're walking past each other. Our eyes meet. Right? Our heads don't turn. Our eyes meet, our eyes meet, our eyes meet. When we get past each other, our eyes hurt. Eye strain, eye strain. And then we turn and look. Only after passing each other, do you turn and look. All gay men do this. We do it all the time. If the guy you're walking by doesn't lock eyes and doesn't turn once you've passed him, you know he is not gay. If the guy looks once you have passed him, it means he's gay, but it doesn't necessarily mean that he's interested. He could just be checking to see if you're checking him out. You might be doing the same, checking to see if he is checking you out, when you're not interested, which means that you could both be looking, but neither of you are actually interested. Now imagine doing this every day whenever you pass a man for the rest of your life, whether you're interested in him or not. Eye strain is basically 80% of the gay lifestyle. Now checking out a guy you're pretty sure is straight is a lot riskier. Some straight men, though, you've got to look at. They're too pretty. Asking for it. It's true. But I recently discovered something that allows me to check out straight guys without risk, without fear. And it works every time. I offer it here today as a public service. I am an advice columnist, and as my regular readers know, I'm interested in just one thing, helping others. And this is advice that could help save lives. Gay men, carry this thing wherever you go, and guys will assume you're straight always. You could be in a supermarket wearing a dress and clogs, filling your grocery cart with butter flavored Crisco. But if you've got this thing with you, you are straight. I speak, of course, of the human infant. My boyfriend, Terry, will walk out on stage now and strap a baby backpack, filled to the brim with baby, to my back. You'll scare the prop. He can't see you. Sh. My boyfriend and I adopted a baby about 11 months ago. This is not our baby. I would not exploit my baby like this. This is an actor. This baby has a SAG card and made more money this year than you did. Now after we adopted the baby, I don't remember when I realized that the baby, in addition to being the best thing that ever happened to us, the apple of our eyes, also functions as a get out of gay bashing free card. But I realized it soon after we brought him home. And I realized it at the supermarket. Picking through the produce with the baby strapped to my back, I paused to check out a guy a little ways down the aisle. He turned, caught me looking, and before I could look away, he smiled. He wasn't gay. He had a girl hanging on him. There was red meat and beer in this cart. And he didn't give me a nervous glance. He just turned and looked. I didn't know what to make of him. He kept smiling at me. Was he bisexual? Beer, red meat, well dressed, no. Not bisexual. Then it hit me. He assumed I was straight too. And he smiled to be polite. He thought we met in straight land somewhere-- at school or at work-- and he couldn't remember where he knew me from. But to be on the safe side, and so as not to offend me, he smiled and nodded. Hey, how are you doing, he said, instead of, what are you looking at? Hey, how ya' doing is never a trick question. It's straight guy-- So many people have this impulse to put their hands over my mouth. I don't understand. Small children. Hey, how ya' doing is never a trick question. It's straight guy code for you are one of us. The next time I was at the supermarket with the baby, it happened again. I looked, got caught, got smiled at. Pretty soon, I wasn't sneaking peeks anymore. I was checking out straight guys on the street, in airports, in restaurants. So long as I had the baby on my back, I could look at straight guys as boldly as any straight guy would look at a straight guy. I suffer no more eye strain. And it's all, hey, how ya' doing, and never, what are you looking at? I mean, admit it. Don't I look straight? Straighter now than when I first walked on stage? I will now put on a pink tutu. Even in a pink tutu, don't I look straight? I quickly progressed from checking out straight guys to flirting with straight guys. It became a game. They assumed I was straight because I had this baby, this monstrous, rotten, awful, stinking baby. They assumed I was straight because I had this baby with me. OK. How far could I take this? How gay could I act and still be thought straight? Could I ask him what gymnasium he attended? Yes. Could I compliment his shirt? Yes. Could I work the original cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music into conversation and still be thought straight? Yes. Ironically, when I'm with the baby, the only people I get what are you looking at attitude from are other gay men. Sometimes I'll see a cute little fag boy, forget the baby is on my back, give him the walk past, turn, look, look. Like the straight guys at the supermarket, the gay men on the street assume I'm straight. And if they catch me looking, they assume I'm a closet case, and the most contemptible kind, married, kids, out cruising for sex with the baby. But take my advice, guys. You want to pass, get a baby. It works everywhere. We live near a park-- me and my boyfriend, and our useful baby-- and a couple of high school soccer teams practice and play games at the park near our house. But before the baby came, I wouldn't stop and stare. But now, I sit in the stands, baby on my back, and I watch them play. The baby babbles, the sun sets-- the other dads, some of them not too hard on the eyes, themselves-- turn to me. They smile, they nod. I'm one of them. I smile back. Hey, I say, how you doing? Thank you. Dan Savage. The Black Cat Orchestra. Act Three, Guided Meditation. To send us all out of here with a moment of reflection, a time for us to pause and look inside, and think about some of what we've learned, please welcome writer and performer Cheryl Trykv. We all here tonight live on planet Earth. Now that's a fact. And when we move the letter H off the end of that planet Earth, and put it back at the top where it belongs, what have we got? Heart. Now let me ask you this, on the solar map, who are Earth's immediate neighbors? Mars and Venus. What does that tell us? That we've got war on one side, and on the other side love. So you see, we actually want to move away from Mars, not toward it. NASA doesn't seem to see it that way. NASA thinks Mars is the next big thing. But why should it be? Let me tell you something. NASA is run by a bunch of meat-eaters. Tonight, I'd like you to join me in an exercise designed to help us release these terror-torial hostilities created by the meat eaters, and rather embody the virtues of Venus. Blabbidy, blabbidy, blah, blah, blah. So let's take a deep breath. Fill your lungs. Hold it. And release all the day's negativity. Maybe you couldn't be comped to be here tonight and had to pay full ticket price. Release that resentment. Take another deep breath. Hold it. And release. Maybe you parked illegally outside, and yours is [UNINTELLIGIBLE] they will tow. Don't worry. They will. Release that canker worm of care. Take a final deep breath. Hold it. Maybe you had to share the dressing room with a sex pervert. Mirror hog. And release. Now, I'm going to count from one to 8,000. And by the time I reach 7,011, you're going to find yourself in a very deep sleep. Are you ready? One, you are relaxing. Two, becoming more and more relaxed. Three, terribly, terribly relaxed. Four, so relaxed it's uncanny. Five, [MUTTERS] 7,998, terribly, terribly relaxed. 7,999, barely a pulse. 8,000. Good. Now let's navigate the psychic arena that templates every day reality. So let's find ourselves at the sideshow carnival. Conjure the image. That's right. And as we fight our way through the crowd of teen runaways and raving drag queens whacked out on fen-phen, perhaps you'll notice that all the players in the scene are facets of ourselves. And perhaps you'd like to ask yourself, where is that screaming coming from? For an answer, let's move over to the pig man's tent. Conjure the image. See the mystic horror as the pig man wipes his odd little tail with the sleeve of his Burberry shirt. See the pig man's fat little hands, his scrambly fingers. Perhaps his feet are a little like your own. Don't look away. Meet your inner guide. Now ask the pig man whatever you'd like, but be prepared, he may reveal something you don't want to hear. Listen carefully. Beneath the squealing gibberish-- that's right-- is a message just for you. [PIG SQUEALING] Eat more fish. More fish, eat it. As we exit the tent and make our way back to the midway, please stay with the group. Now is not the time to wander off by yourselves. Perhaps you're looking for a private retreat to visit, so you can contemplate the possible, if any, meaning of your personal journey. Fine. We'll all go. Find inside a beautiful, secret garden. Take a moment to conjure the image. Secret garden, that's right. Lush. Feel free to be as detailed as possible. [LAUGHS] Oh, those hydrangea make me laugh. Who put those there? Oh, look. A babbling brook. Why, it won't shut up. Our talkative little friend needs to be dammed. See yourself consulting with your own engineers, drawing up plans for your own inner barrier, your own private Hoover Dam. See your own workers walking the scaffold high above voluminous vats of wet concrete. Perhaps you'd like to ask yourself, are my workers union? Now let's just sit for a moment and enjoy all we've created. Gradually, we begin to discover, perhaps to our surprise, what a glorious, all-purpose secret garden this is. But let's just sit, contemplate, give thanks. All right. Let's go. Keep it moving. Now, I'm going to count backwards from 8,000 to one. And when you hear the number one, you will awake. And intuitively, you will want to eat more fish. And our numbers will grow and form a huge block of voting power. Are you ready? 8,000, coming up slowly. 7,999, slowly now. Don't hurt yourselves. 7,998, slowly, I'm not joking. [MUTTERS] Three, two, and one. Thank you. Ms. Cheryl Trykv. Well our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel, Julie Snyder, and myself with Nancy Updike. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, and [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Our stage crew includes [? David Saxton, ?] [? Emmett Kaiser ?], [? Amy McGill, ?] [? Jonathan Saltz, ?] and Steve [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Our signers, [? Ann Delvecchio ?] and [? Molly McQuire. ?] The Black Cat Orchestra, Don Crevie, Lori Goldston, Scott Granlund, Kyle Hanson, Russell Meltzer, Matthew Sperry, [? Joseph Saenz ?]. To buy a cassette of this program or any of our shows, call us back home at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who asks-- Admit it. Even in a pink tutu, don't I look straight? I'm Ira Glass, back next week, with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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This is Ira Glass, host of Your Radio Playhouse, and starting this week, WBEZ is moving the program that usually begins right at this time, Selected Shorts, to Friday nights at 8 o'clock. So if you want hear Selected Shorts tune in on Fridays at 8:00. And WBEZ is rebroadcasting my Friday night program, Your Radio Playhouse, right here, right now after Prairie Home Companion. And there's a little radio programming experiment. The idea is that since my program is radio storytelling plus music, it has some things in common with Prairie Home Companion, and might be the kind of thing that Garrison Keillor fans would enjoy. WBEZ is going to try this out for a few months and WBEZ management welcomes your thoughts and reactions to this programming idea. Your Radio Playhouse has been on the radio on Friday nights now for several months, and if you haven't heard it, the stories are told in a wide variety of styles by a wide variety of writers and performers. And some of the program just happens right here in the radio studio. For example, this week's program is about love. It's for the week of Valentine's Day. And we begin with this cassette-- I have it here-- that a friend sent me for the Valentine's Day holiday. This is "A Guided Meditation For Singles" presented by Frayda Kafka. And normally, if you're going to make something like this up, you actually would give the person-- you'd make up a name like Frayda Kafka. But I'm afraid this all too real. Frayda Kafka, produced by something called Conscious Singles Connection Incorporated, copyright 1994. And this cassette has lots of ideas for things that singles-- conscious singles, presumably-- can do so they don't feel bad on holidays like Valentine's Day. You know, you can give yourself a very special day alone if that's what you're going to do with your holiday. You can prepare for it, actually prepare in advance. You can buy flowers for yourself. You can light candles. You can plan a special ritual, a special meal just for you. You can even write yourself letters about it, poems. You can listen to very wonderful music on that day. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's Your Radio Playhouse. I'm Ira Glass. And you know, you didn't have to prepare in advance for this hour. We have prepared the whole thing for you. We have set the table. We've lit the candles. It's all set. Oh, conscious singles. And couples, you couples who are sensitive to your consciously single friends. A very special hour for you, so stay with us. What's amazing about this tape to me is its utter lack of modesty about what it promises. It doesn't just promise to make you feel a little better about being single, it is categorical. It promises complete spiritual and emotional peace. When you're done listening to this cassette it says, "You will be at peace with being single. You will feel happy. You will feel fulfilled." And you know you can do it by simply relaxing. You know what could be easier? What could be easier? All you need to do is pay attention to your breath. This isn't-- I don't know, it's not working for me. Are you breathing there at home? Are you? If you're in your car, are you breathing right now? And is it happening, are you finding peace? She also says this sentence, which I love. And the rest is up to me. That is a sentence you never hear in the English language. Usually when people get into the construction and the rest is up to-- that's a pretty common construction in school, in sales situations, over the TV. You hear that a lot and people never go into the construction, and the rest is up to-- and end up with me. No, it's always you. And the rest is up to me. She also says this other thing that I find mesmerizing, but incomprehensible. And it's this-- You don't even need to listen. What is that about? You know, she's in the tape business. It's not like a video thing, it's a cassette with sound. You don't even need to listen. If at the beginning of our radio show we would say to you, hi, we've been working really hard to prepare a really good show for you. And there's one other thing you've got to know-- You don't even need to listen. Unless it was some sort of reverse psychology thing. You know what I mean? We've used all the promotional tactics we could think of and now we're doing reverse psychology. We're doing reverse psychology and what we're saying is-- You don't even need to listen. Yeah, that will be the day. So side one of the tape is a kind of warm-up to the actual meditation, and side two is the guided meditation itself. And she has us relax, breathe deeply, which we have all been practicing earlier in the show. And then she says, pretend you're having a dream. And the dream she has us pretend is astonishingly banal. You pretend we're floating among clouds. And you can let that cloud carry you, spiraling up over the roof. Floating over the trees. Way up over the mountains. If you had to pay for dreams, this is one you wouldn't even rent. You wouldn't even rent this one at the video store. So you float in the dream, and of course because all the elements have to be involved, there's air and there's clouds, and you float passed the mountain. And then you come, of course, to a river. And this is where she gets to the heart of the matter. Remember the promise of the tape is that she is going to make you feel good about your singlehood, and at peace with it. And how does she do it? It's really fascinating. She does it by having you imagine the person who you're meant to be with. This person understands you and loves you and knows exactly what to say to you. In other words, the whole way that you're going to come to peace with your singlehood is you just envision the day when you're not single. That seems like kind of a cheat to me. That isn't being at peace with singlehood. That's simply believing that your singlehood is a temporarily delayed state that will lead to couplehood. This person can be male or female. It may not even really be a person. What is that about? What is the bet that she's hedging there? Like, you know, who is she trying not to offend? Like, OK, we've got the people who are involved with the males. We've got the people involved with the females. And then, we just want to be sure like we get everybody in, the people who are involved with-- what, a horse? And this person will come as close to you as you wish. And touch you in any way that feels good for you. Take your time now and let yourself feel the way you'd like to be touched. You might like just a touch on the shoulder, or an arm around you. You might like a hand on your forehead. Or maybe you'd like to be held or rocked. You can have whatever you want from this person. At this point in the tape, I have to say-- for me, anyway-- it kind of starts to work on me. I start to think, like yes, I do want this person who's going to hold me and be the person who totally understands me. This person is here for you from your future. And one of the things that's interesting to me about this is not just that it's so effective, but that it's such a lie. I mean, if you've ever been in an actual relationship, no human being who you're going to be with is going to be there to touch you the way you want to be touched every time, and talk to you the way you want to be talked to every time. And the fact that this could be a comfort to someone, I think it's just a sign of how much we want this. You know, that we want this person. In the New Yorker magazine this week, John Updike writes about Lana Turner's seven husbands. He says, there's something ridiculous about a woman who take seven husbands. As if she had rummaged through the drawers of masculinity and come up with seven dwarfs. And I think that actually, what's ridiculous about it isn't that there was anything wrong with those seven guys that they were dwarfs. What's ridiculous is the notion that she could be married to seven different people and be happy with none of them. That she, herself, would not be able to find happiness with any of those guys. And the reason why she didn't find happiness with those guys was cause she was waiting for another guy. She was waiting for the guy on this cassette who doesn't exist. You know, what do we do with that dream? The dream that love is going to knock at the door. Like in some melodrama. Like a TV soap opera. What do we do about it when we've heard love call before and watched ourselves mess it up? What do we do? In this hour, that dream and the difficulty of that dream. Well, our special pre-Valentine's Day love program in three acts. Act one, Yearning, with setbacks. Act two, Sex and Sex and Sex. Act three, A Wedding. Act one, Yearning. We begin with this image, a woman in a crushed red velvet dress, lying on her stomach on the ground. The dress has a train that's 60 feet long trailing behind her. Her face looks like the face of someone who's been making out in the backseat of a car for hours. Her mouth is swollen and puffy from kissing. Lipstick is smeared everywhere, on her mouth and chin. A dab is on her nose. She's kissing the ground, methodically, with purpose. She kisses the ground, applies a fresh coat of lipstick, kisses again. Applies another color, kisses again. She's gone through 11 tubes of lipstick in 25 hours. There's that sweet lipsticky perfume in the air. She's spelling out words on the floor in lipstick. Each letter is two feet high. The word's say, there was a time when I worshipped the ground you walked on. I'm making a monument to my ex-boyfriend. The woman's named Julie Laffin, and the ex-boyfriend she says, was everything she wanted to be-- creative, together. She said she did worship the ground he walked on. She said she was the kind of person who was always in love with the fantasy of being in love. And I've worked really hard to maintain that fantasy in the face of all information about reality, the reality of the situation. When she first started kissing the ground, in public, as performance art, a part of her wished that the ex-boyfriend would find out. Maybe he would see that she had put him behind her. Maybe he'd have regrets. Maybe he'd get in touch with her. Who among us has not known this particular mix of conflicting feelings towards an ex? Julie Laffin moved onto other kissing projects. I kissed all the names of my ex-lovers onto public property. I kissed the names on parking meters and benches and sidewalks and glass windows. And when I kiss their names, I actually would flash to that person and really dwell on them. And it was this very kind of releasing activity. When I got to the last person's name, I kissed it onto this big, concrete wall. And I thought, this is the last person in my life. This is the last relationship that I've had. This is actually the last relationship I will ever have. And I sort of saw myself as now I was going to take this role of the eternal spinster. When she does these performance art pieces, kissing the ground, she says that sometimes she feels like this nonentity. People stand near her, talk about what she's doing as if she's not there. And when she leaves, they walk on the words she's made with her mouth, turn them into a big red blur on the ground. And Julie Laffin says there's something about kissing, compulsively for hours, that's partly like being out of control and partly very peaceful. Meditative. She slides along the ground, kissing out the pattern of each letter. The other day, this guy came in selling peanuts for the homeless. And he walked in and he said, is this what I think it is? And I said, I don't know. What do you think it is? And he said, are these all lip marks? And I said, yes. And he said, I wish I were the guy that these were meant for. There's a yearning for love that we feel when we've actually loved someone and been loved. And then there's the yearning for love that you feel if you have it. Mark O'Brien is a writer in California, but because of a childhood case of polio, he lives most of each day in an iron lung on his back. He's the subject of this amazing little film, new film, called Breathing Lessons. And the film is remarkable because it's about a guy in an iron lung, but it is completely unsentimental. And in certain moments, it's also pretty funny. The film is by Jessica Yu, and it was just at the Sundance Film Festival. And Jessica Yu gave us permission to excerpt a memorable little scene from the film here on our radio show. Because he's in the iron lung, Mark O'Brien has attendants cook and help him out during the day. And during the film he explains that these days he always has men do this job. Because when he had women do the job, he kept falling in love with them. And the love was never reciprocated. He wrote about one of these women, "Her pale, perfect skin, her strong, fleshy legs drove me to ecstasies of despair. See, she'd talk with me as a human instead of her savagely crippled employer." Here's a little scene about desire and yearning from this film. I hired a sex surrogate in '87 or '86. I forget when. I felt very crazy. I was angry at all women for not falling in love with me because I'd fallen in love with several attendants and they all said it was a business relationship. A sex surrogate is a person who has some psychological training that works with their body, having sex with a client who is referred by a therapist. The surrogate had this big mirror and she showed me naked and aroused. I thought of myself as the ugliest man in the world. But it's like something, someone who would want to have sex with. Not just my dick, but my whole body. And Carol was very kind to me. She kissed me on the chest after we had intercourse. I felt my chest was very unattractive, but she kissed me right there and the intercourse was so quick. I hate to say it, but it was wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. And it wasn't as great as I thought it would be, but being naked in a bed with a woman who's being extremely friendly was the most fun I've ever had. I think I'd like to do it again. Usually Mark O'Brien can't be outside of his iron lung for more than 45 minutes. But when the sex surrogate was with him, he was outside his tube for longer than that. Longer than he almost ever goes out. And he didn't even use his portable respirator. I didn't need it for an hour. I went for an hour without it. They should think of sex as respiratory therapy. Maybe Medicare would pay for it. About a year after I last saw her, I just felt terribly depressed. I expected somehow that seeing the surrogate would change my life. I'd started wearing cologne and I thought everyone would be able to tell I was sexy and handsome. But nothing happened. They tell us to think of ourselves as sexual and beautiful, but it doesn't do any good unless someone else sees us as sexual and beautiful. You just can't demand love. You have to be lovable. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that. This is Luis Rodriquez and the piece is called "Waiting." What made the waiting so painful? The woman had called, she was on her way. Tense, I waited sitting at the kitchen table. There had been too many nights waking up to bottles and books on the floor. Two small children parked on blankets in the corner. Alone ain't so bad. Dreams of women yet to be touched, to be smelled. It ain't bad. Up on a hill hidden by wood and shingled shacks alongside curbless roads visited by nobody unless they had to be here. Alone ain't so bad. Hammering holes into walls with fists, tears streaming down my face at saxophone riffs. Looking at old photos, feeding babies, taking out trash, and thinking of her. It ain't so bad. I couldn't stand it. Looked through personal ads in the weeklys. Made phone calls, wrote letters, came across a video date, the godsend for lonely people. I called. After three false starts, a lady said she would be here Saturday. It's Saturday and I'm going nuts. An hour finding the place, an old stucco white basement room. You can't miss it. Cholo graffiti on the front door. She came, made her pits. Saw the hurt in my eyes. I always spoke with my eyes, dammit. A longing for sweet companionship. Not of drunken home boys or angel dusted street women, for the mother of my kids out at Sunny's Lounge sucking Kahluas and highballs, and shooting out wicked smiles at discoed-out dudes. The lady looked in my eyes and then stopped. Refused to sell me the video date. Refused to take the check. This can't help you, she said, and walked out. He asked me to go for a walk. I said no, even though I knew I wanted to. This story about wanting love from Dolores Wilbur. We were sweeping out the cottage, cleaning up. It was time to go home. We had to leave that afternoon, less than a couple of hours away. He just looked at me without expression, not sure of how he should look. He knew I would go for a walk. He knew I wanted to. I knew I would as well, but I wanted to say no to try it out. I gave in almost immediately. So we walked. I kicked stones watching my feet. There were trees on either side of us. He said, I don't have anything to say. I just wanted to walk with you. I said stupid things. Or maybe it is that they weren't stupid, but saying them out loud sounded so stupid. He said, how do you feel? I said, upset. He nodded. I hated that he nodded. He knew it was going badly and he began to feel miserable. He tried to think of something to say. I said, I don't understand you. We thought we were alike, but we find we are not. I hate when you say you're sorry you hurt my feelings. You didn't hurt my feelings, you hurt me. And you're dumb. Why are you doing this? I hate this conversation. I hate this kind of conversation. He said, I hate this conversation too. I hate it so much. I said, well, you're the man. You're the one making it all wrong. You figure it out. He said, I'm the one who's supposed to fix it, is that it? I said, we can't be friends. We can't. I can't. It's not what I want. He nodded, looked down, looked away. Looked anxious, afraid to say anything. After a while he said, how you feel now, this has happened to me before. What? I said. He told me something that only made me mad. He wanted someone who didn't want him and it took a long time to be over. So what, I thought. Who cares? It's not the same. He said, can't we be friends? We can talk on the phone, but we can't see each other, I said. But will we talk to be friends? He said. No, I said. He said, what will we say? Hi, how are you? I'm fine. That's all? I don't know, I said. We walked aimlessly. It was hot. We looked for shade. He stopped at a bunch of rocks marking the gate in front of a white picket fence. He picked up one of the rocks with both hands. It was big and rough, salt and pepper with white spindly lines running through it. Some bits of sparkly dust glinted off it in the sun. He stood holding it to his chest for a moment and then, looking around, gently put it down somewhere else, less than a foot away. There, doesn't it look better now? He said. He looked satisfied, relieved at what he had done. I fought back irritation and wondered at what this meant to him. I guessed it was because he had done something. Sometimes just doing any one thing can make you feel better. It doesn't matter what. The look on his face picking up the rock, moving it, walking, it all made me so tired. Do you want to turn around? I said. He said, yes, looking anxious again. Then no, knowing he had said the wrong thing. We sat on a mound of tall, reedy grass down from a tree. It was cooler. I said, what are you thinking? He said, tall grass, and looked at me. His eyes were wide open. I smiled at him. He said things like that and I loved him. He lounged and I sat and picked up twigs and pushed them into the soft, moist ground, reaching for pieces of bark. Different mottled surfaces, rough, but warm and comforting in my hands. I placed them carefully between the twigs. He said, what are you doing? I said, I'm making a pile for a little animal to find and to use. And besides, the bark is so pretty. He said, I'm breaking up little pieces of twig and hiding them around. He laughed edgy and said, yeah, that's me. Hiding stuff like nobody could see. I wondered if he loved me. If e really loved me. That morning in bed he said, I love you. I love you. But when I said, then why? He couldn't answer. Now he said, I like you so much. So very much. And I noticed he didn't say love. It didn't matter so much, I just looked at the words for a while. I looked at the sound the words made after they were said. I knew he loved me, but that he didn't know what that meant. And the truth was that I didn't either. And I wasn't sure that it made any difference. We walked back to the cabin holding each other. It was warm again. Our bodies were wet against each other. The wet felt good. We walked up to the house. I held his hand tightly for a moment. He let go too quickly and I pressed my lips together. I watched him walk up the steps, push open the screen door. The breeze caught the door and it swung for a moment back and forth. I waited outside for him to lock up. Well, coming up in part two of our program, less gloomy stories. Not so many sad stories of yearning. Instead, stories of love, love, love and sex, sex, sex, and marriage. Stay with us, it's Your Radio Playhouse. Act two, it's Your Radio Playhouse. I'm Ira Glass. Sex. What would a Valentine's Day show be without sex? And we're going to start with this story of sexual discovery put together by audio artist Gregory Whitehead, who lives in Massachusetts. Just a little warning here, some of the material in the next two stories might be unsuitable for younger listeners. I was 13 and he was 15. And we were going to go to the movies. We went to the Blue Star Shopping Center on Route 22. To see Live or Let Die. And I think his mother drove us. And we sat in the movie next to each other and he didn't make a move. And nothing happened. And then his father came and picked us up and drove us back to his house. So he said, do you want to come up to my room? And as we went into his room, he closed the door and said, we're not allowed to lock our doors in my house. So otherwise he would have locked the door. This is really awful. So I don't know, he like roamed around and was showing me stuff. And I was just being sort of polite. And showing me all his toys and junk and silly things that he had. And then proceeded to make the moves. make the big moves on me. And I was just very innocent. And he was very aggressive. And just started kissing me and then just said, take off your shirt. And so I'm sitting there thinking, well, the door is unlocked. And he said, well, he had a little sister who was pestering us. So eventually I figured someone will just walk in. And he's likes well, no. And asks me, do I want to see it? And of course, I want to see it. I want to know what it looks like. But at the same time, I feel like I'm in this incredibly ominous, dangerous situation. It's pornographic. I'm just a little girl. Now I know how much of a little girl I was. I was just 13. I mean, 13 is young. But there it was. It was this mindless thing. And I thought, well-- So yeah, so he whips it out. And we both sit and we look at it. And he says, well, do you want to touch it? And I didn't want to. But I did. It was just horrible and dirty. More dirty than anything I've ever done since, even trying to be dirty. It was clinical. And I felt like I was being experimented upon. And the worse thing was that I was so passive. And I did what I was told because I was a good girl. It was like a game to him. Now that I'm older, now that I think about it, it was a game. It wasn't playful. It was a very sophisticated game. It was a game of erotic and it wasn't loving to-- it was just a nightmare, to coerce someone or to seduce someone. To seduce a little girl. It was as if he were 40. So here was this-- But there it was. This mindless thing. So he could like make it move and flop around all by itself. It was such a horrible situation. This spineless thing. But it has a mind of its own and a body of its own, so it moved around. And I was just appalled. I had no idea that this is what happened. That you could like make it move, all by itself without touching. And then it just stood up. It stood straight up. It was like wagging. It was like his little ventriloquist dummy that he could make talk to me. It wasn't playful and finally-- It wasn't erotic. His sister was knocking at the door. It wasn't loving. We put our clothes back on and-- My mother came and picked us up. And I walked outside on his nice suburban lawn. And his mother was there and my mother was talking to his mother. And I stared at our mothers. But then I knew I could never tell-- I just wanted to get out of there. To get to a safe place. But then I knew I could never tell anyone what had happened. So I could never be in a safe place. One of the associate producers here at Your Radio Playhouse, Nancy Updike, has this small sociological discovery about sex in America. It's an odd sort of discovery about one of the most politicized aspects of sex in America: condom use. I just want to know, am I the last one to know about this? Because the first time I had sex without a condom was only a few months ago. I was dating this 21-year-old Irish boy with a creamy body and a big mouth. After the first time we skipped it, we never used a condom. At the time, I was living with my best friend, Sarah. She and I were sort of married and we told each other everything. One morning leaving my lovely boyfriend sprawled out and sleeping, I went next door to Sarah's room and sat down on her bed. So how's the sex? She smiled. Fun, I said. Not the greatest ever, but vigorous and sort of sweet. Pause. I wanted to tell her about the whole condom thing because I knew she was assuming we were using them, mistaking us every day for good, righteous people instead of the bad, irresponsible people we, in fact, were. And the longer it went on, the more it felt like I was lying. We're not using condoms, I blurted it out, looking down. There was a long pause. Josh and I aren't using them either, she said. I looked up. We stared at each other for a second and we burst out laughing. It may be hard to convey the strange giddiness of this moment to anyone who didn't go to college in the late '80s and early '90s. For Sarah and me, and for our girlfriends, safe sex was the marker of the modern, straight, post-AIDS feminist. She has sex with who she wants and when she wants, but she always protects herself. It was about self-respect and it was about being down with the cause. Sisters knew that sisters used condoms. Well, that was then. Here are some of the sisters now. I don't think anybody uses them anymore. I used them-- oh my god-- many moons ago. Well, kind of. We use them once in a while like right around the time that I know that I'm ovulating. Statistics seem to indicate that, in fact, very few women are practicing safe sex. Nationwide, only about 20% of currently sexually active women report using condoms. And one out of five of those condom-using women hadn't used one the last time they had intercourse. Gay men, in contrast, seem more careful. But even here, a San Francisco survey showed only half of gay men saying they use a condom every time they have sex. Interestingly, these studies, the most current according to the Centers for Disease Control, are four years old, and are based on data collected four years before that, at the height of my alleged safe sex vigilance and that of my friends. So what now seems clear is that a massive nationwide campaign to shape our sex lives failed. And no one is talking about the fact that it failed. Most of us are not practicing safe sex and never did. At least not in that every time, for the whole time, no exceptions way that safe sex as we knew it was all about. And now, nearly everyone I know seems paralyzed in this weird state that's part shame at what we see as laziness about using condoms, and part stubborn attachment to our secret decision not to use them as often as we feel we should. For instance, I started out scared about not using condoms with my cute Irish boyfriend and had to keep rationalizing what we were doing by reminding myself that he was a drunk, not a junkie. And that he'd gotten head for a boy only once and hadn't liked it. But then fear faded to guilt, and now I don't even think the guilt makes sense. I'm not using condoms and my women friends are not using condoms because when we look around, we are not dying of this disease, and neither is anyone we're sleeping with. And it's been that way for 10 years now. Heterosexual, non-drug-using women simply have not, as a group, become the much-feared second wave of the AIDS epidemic as we were always being warned in college that we would. Only 8% of all diagnosed AIDS cases in the United States are from heterosexual contact, according to the CDC. But we keep calling ourselves lazy, my friends and I, I think because we're feeling like bad feminists. Giving up safe sex means giving up that solidarity we believed in back when it seemed like we were all going to be at risk together-- gay men, straight women, women across lines of race, and class, and age, all of us united against a single, deadly common enemy. Five years later, I think it's only a matter of time before the phrase, "No glove, no love" sounds to us the way "Sisterhood is powerful" sounds to our mothers. Act three, A Wedding. Shakespeare ends his comedies with weddings, and it's easy to see why. You want a moment of joy, of hope at the end of any program that touches on the idea of love. OK, hold his hand. All right, now whatever I say in English, you're going to tell him in Spanish. If you walk downstairs in Chicago's City Hall, you take the escalator down when you walk in that front door on whatever street that is. If you walk downstairs and you turn right, you come to marriage court. It costs $10. There's a big sign saying right up front you can't offer the judge a gratuity. And you know, you get the license down the hall and then there's a one-day waiting period, like if you buy a handgun or something. They don't want people rushing into it. 12,530 people were married in this court last year. That's more than any other place in Illinois, as best as anybody can figure. I'm going to ask them about eight questions. Now, I don't want them to answer each question. When I'm all done with the eight questions-- ocho-- then I'll say to him, OK, Francisco, what is your answer? And he'll answer once. Tell him that. Wednesday morning Francisco and Arminia Orosco stood before Judge Arthur Rosenblum. Arminia spoke English, but Francisco didn't. And although is was happening in a basement office with dingy carpet, and although the groom was in jeans with a Coors belt buckle and a leather jacket, and although they brought no witnesses, and although both of them were planning on going to work after the wedding-- her at an insurance office and him at a record store-- there was still something moving about watching her translate the vows, looking in the eyes of her husband-to-be. That is, once they actually got started. OK, ready? Here we go. Francisco, do you take her to be your wife, and to live together with her as husband and wife? What are you looking at me for? Translate it. And live together with her as husband and wife. Do you promise to love her, honor her, and respect her? Do you promise to be her friend? Do you promise to take care of her whether she's sick or whether she's well? Judge Rosenblum looks in their eyes as he does the ceremony. He doesn't have a piece of paper or anything with the script. And after both of them did their vows, Judge Rosenblum gave a little speech about the wedding rings, about how they symbolize an endless love, an endless friendship. And both of them put on the rings. All right, you're Senor Esposa. [SPEAKING SPANISH] A big embrace, he says. Beso, beso. Kiss, kiss. So they do. Judge Rosenblum has done a few things to make weddings in city hall a little more human. He's replaced the generic hotel art in the office with a Norman Rockwell print. One whole wall of his office is lined with snapshots of happy couples, him in the middle. In this office, you see the whole range of couples, all ages and races, all incomes. Though a lot of people come to City Hall because it's so cheap. And the full range of happy and unhappy couples. Joan Healey is the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] good humor, completely wonderful woman who greets you when you walk into the office and arrive at the front window. She's the one who takes your $10. And she says that she sees some couples she frankly has to worry about a little. I really think, walk away. Walk away. It's a long life together, long life together. And what are you seeing when you think that? What are they doing? I get a funny feeling in the tone of voice that they use to one another. This is kidding on the square, you are seeing this. And you're kind of hurting that person. Or just maybe sitting in a chair. If one will sit, go and sit in the chair, and the one that I kind of think is not the nice one would probably go sit in another chair on the other side of the room. Not really even wanting to be together, things like that. Just kind of shake your head and say-- by the time you get up to the escalator, the top of the escalator, I hope they're still together. In his chambers, between weddings, Judge Rosenblum reads and smokes a pipe. He was out til midnight the night before I visited in his regular gin rummy game. He's 79, married twice, but not currently married. He says that there's nothing the rabbi could have said to him under the marriage canopy when he got married that would've been useful advice. Each marriage runs the course it's supposed to, he says. It's just dumb luck. Nobody can really tell you anything. Some should marry, some should not. Some do, some will last. Some won't last. That's true of all life in anything, right? Joan, let me ask you something? Why do people get married? Oh, for various reasons. Some for love, some for money. Some I don't know why. Well, you married for money, right? Oh, yes. Can't you tell? If couples seem interested, Judge Rosenblum will pull a book out of his upper left-hand desk drawer and read a little bit. The book is Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. And this book is a great allegory. An allegory is a story like a parable. And what it does is it tells you something which really means something else. He turns to the chapters on love and marriage. I'll only read the parts that are worldwide known. But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing floor. In the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not with all of your laughter, and weep, but not with all of your tears." It can take away your faith in the romance of marriage to see 12,000 of them in a year. But Judge Rosenblum says he sees his share of truly happy couples in this job. The other woman working up front, Michelle Roberts, says that despite this job, she's still glad to be married when she goes home at night. And every day, dozens more arrive to take their vows. Some dressed in formal wear, some in jeans. Many with children in tow. Valentine's Day turns out to be the busiest day of the year here. 145 marriages last Valentine's Day. The halls were jammed. The elevator jammed. The escalator jammed with people who couldn't wait to get married on the holiday of love. Well, before we end our show, there's a song that we've actually been saving to play for Valentine's Day. We recorded this back around Christmas. And these are kids at the Daniel J. Nellum Youth Services in Chicago. And they sing this little song that they made up, a little crush song. They include Antwone Robinson, Warren Harris, Sean Cook, Edward G. Robinson, Junior, Willie Weddington, Curtis Perry, and Nate Settles. Here's their song. Tonight's program was produced by Dolores Wilbur and by myself, with Alix Spiegel, Peter Clowney and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rockland and Mr. Paul Tough. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. That's a really good name to mess up during the credits. If you would care to buy a tape of this or our other Radio Playhouse programs, call us. Call us, call us at WBEZ 312-832-3380. You can email us with any comments or thoughts and we will email you back. Our address, [email protected] And do you remember that really smart, amazing guy in the iron lung? You can actually email him. His name is Mark O'Brien if you want to chat with him. And his email address is marko-- M-A-R-K-O-- @well.com. We, this Radio Playhouse program, we broadcast proudly from WBEZ Chicago. We'll be back next week with more stories of this here American life, I'm Ira Glass.
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Travel to Africa. People from Africa sometimes told Eddy Harris that he looked like he might be from Senegal, instead of St. Louis where, in fact, he was from. And when he finally arrived at the border of Senegal, the first black nation he had ever set foot in, a man at the border found out that he was from America and, incredibly, told him, welcome home. We're glad you're here. It was a pretty magical moment, and I was expecting it to have opened the door into everybody saying, welcome home, brother. And I got a lot of, welcome home, brother. But I also got a lot of, how come you didn't come sooner, brother? Or, what are you doing to help us, brother? You, who are the most educated and the richest black people on the planet, how come you're not doing more to help us out, brother? As black Americans. As black Americans, yeah. For Eddy, as for a lot of black Americans, Africa had always been this kind of lurking spectre somewhere in the back of his mind. There was this idea that there was some place out there that could be a motherland. And then, there was the reality of life in Africa. For nearly a year, he traveled through the continent, staying with local people, living how they lived, eating what they ate. And he was often horrified at the conditions of their lives-- the lack of food, the disease, infant mortality rates, one repressive political regime after another-- all often accepted with kind of God-will-provide attitude. Anyway, it all came to a head at the end of his trip when he was on a boat going up a river in Zaire. There was this captain on this boat who, because I was taking pictures on the deck of this boat, had me and this English person, Justin, hauled up to the bridge. And while we were there, he was vilifying this white guy, this Englishman, because his ancestors had hauled my ancestors out of Africa. And he wanted to know why I wouldn't come to Africa to live and help build the place up. And he wanted to know, as well, how I could in good conscience, I suppose, live my life among these white people who had stolen my ancestors away. And after having traveled in Africa already now for many, many months, and I was tired and exhausted and had lived this African experience and was just beat down, I turned to this white guy, Justin, and said thanks for his ancestors having stolen my ancestors. In in mind and in the eyes of black Americans, that's probably a horrible thing to say. Because what it sounds like is I'm grateful for slavery, which is not the case at all. What it says to me is that I'm grateful for being alive and for having grown up as a black person in America. I don't know if I'd want to trade places with anybody African living in the middle of Zaire. Do you feel like there's a certain amount of pressure on black Americans to embrace Africa as a homeland? Yeah, and it's all around. And you're supposed to, as a black person, tow this black person party line and embrace Africa as your homeland, even though most black Americans haven't got a clue about Africa, no more clue about African than I had, no more clue about Africa than they've got about Antarctica. It's a faraway place that, if you dropped them off in the middle of no place and said, you're home now, they'd be completely lost. And yet, they're supposed to have this emotional allegiance to this place. And I can't buy it. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This. American. Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Going Home to a Place You've Never Been. A lot of people try it. Act One, Exile. A 26-year-old from Los Angeles gets deported to the country of his parents' birth. He last set foot there when he was five. He has no memories of the place. He knows no one there. People have a hard time understanding him when he talks. This, he's told, is his new home. Act Two, Brothers From Another Mother, two stories of people finding strangers who they become convinced are, in some way, the home they've never known. Stay with us, won't you? Act One, Exile. In 1996, tough new immigration laws were passed making it easier to deport legal US residents who committed crimes. The law expanded the definition of a deportable crime. It made the change retroactive. Gang members from the United States were suddenly being exported in larger numbers to their countries of birth. And many of them greeted these new homes away from home by acting exactly how they had acted here in the States. There have been big, big rises in gang activity in El Salvador and other countries as a result of the new laws. Jose William Huezo Soriano-- aka Weasel-- was deported just over a year ago to El Salvador. He had to make the adjustment from living in a very rich country to a rather poor one. And he had to figure out who to be in this place that he was told was his new home. Radio producer Joe Richman gave him a tape recorder to document how he's getting along. Here's the story they put together. What's up? My name is Jose William Huezo Soriano. They call me Weasel. I've been having that nickname ever since I was a kid, so I've had it for a long time. Here we go, I'm dialing out of the country right now, 0-1-8-1-8-5-0. I'm 27 years old. I live in El Salvador. I've been here a year, a year and a half. It's ringing. Hello? Hello. Hi. Flora, what's up? Not much. How are you doing? I'm doing good. My goodness. Where are you? I'm in El Salvador. Where else? I just wanted to talk to mom and see how she's doing. Here she is. Hold on. All right. My mom is cool, man. My mom's name is Esther. Esthaire. And I have her name tattooed on me, like with a little rose. Hi, mijo. Mom! Como esta, mi hijito? Bien, mom. Y como estas, mom? Yo estoy bien. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I'm the youngest of seven kids. I come from a close-knit family. We're used to being around each other. My mom's in LA. She lives in Burbank. My sister's in Burbank. All my nieces and nephews are in Burbank. My brother's in North Hollywood. And here I am. She's telling me she likes me to call her up and tell her that I'm doing all right, because then she feels all right. Bueno, mom. Ya me voy, OK? Te quiero mucho. Esta bien, verdad? Estoy muy bien, mom. OK, si. I love you, mijo. I love you, mom. OK, mi amor. I love you, mi amor. OK, bye. I've got this document right here. It says my full name, and it has a little box right here that's checked. And it says deportable under section blah, blah, blah. Remove from the States. Anyway, the bottom line is that I've been banished from the US, like they used to do in the Medieval days. They used to ban fools. I went to kindergarten in LA, elementary school, junior high school, high school. I grew up singing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," that song, "America The Beautiful." I learned pledging allegiance to the flag. I grew up with all that. Here they are, 20-some years later, kicking me out. OK, we're en route to San Jacinto. This is the number five bus. We're going to downtown. These are old school buses from the United States that they send over here, paint them up, and they use them for public transportation. Everybody's looking at me weird because I'm wearing glasses, headphones, I've got this microphone. I'm just looking at the people, all the little shacks. There's these little shacks on the side of the road. It's a trip right here. Well, maybe I should tell you a little bit about when I first got here. Damn, as I was driving to the city from the airport, it was hot. I would just look to the side and see little adobe huts, shacks. And I was like, no, I ain't staying here, man. This is crazy, man. I ain't going to live in no mud hut. It was like if they sent me back, like, 200 years. I was like, they might as well have put me on Mars. We're pulling over now. OK, here we are. We're in San Jacinto already. These streets we're walking on, this is where I first came when I got deported. I didn't know anybody know in Salvador because all my relatives are in the United States. So I got ahold of one of my dad's distant cousins that he hadn't seen for 10, 20 years. She gave me a break and let me stay here. Hola. Como esta, tio? Gordito. Hola. When I first got here, everybody thought I was a weirdo. They didn't even believe I was from here because I had such a tough time speaking Spanish. I speak Spanish, but a different Spanish, you know? We're walking in the door. I stayed in that room right there. It was like a storage room. I'll open this door here. [SPEAKING SPANISH] Man, there's no light here. When I first got here, I looked at the place where I was going to stay, and I said, this is it. Because I walked in and all I seen was pieces of wood nailed together. The house was made out of concrete, but it was all dark. The toilet was in the middle the yard. It was like a little outhouse. It was just nothing I was used to. I spent the night in this room. The first day I was there, I had almost fallen asleep, and a big old cockroach-- that sucker had to be at least three inches-- fell right on my chest. And I just jumped up. I grabbed at it, and I just threw it. And I heard it-- that's how big it was-- I heard that sucker fly across the room, boom, hit a wall, and I heard that sucker actually run away. It was a trip, man. When I was in the, I think, third, fourth grade, my teacher sent me to get an IQ test, and they recognized me as gifted and talented. My parents telling me, you're intelligent. You're going to be a doctor or lawyer. But things happen when you're growing up. You get caught up in other things. My criminal history started when I was a juvenile. I'm kind of a short guy. I'm not too tall. But I was a little tough kid. I got into a gang when I was, like, 14 years old. I was into drugs and violence and stuff, auto burglary. I was living a crazy life. So I was just hanging out with my homeboys one day, and I had a little gun, took it-- a little .25, I think it was, .22. I don't know. We were cruising in this neighborhood and seen some people. The driver pulled over, me and the other guy walked out, went up to the people, told them, It's not worth it, man. Give it up. So they gave it up, their wallets, their purses, watches. So we took off, went to go pawn the stuff. But as we were leaving the pawn shop, boom, the cops swooped on us, drew their guns, put us all face down in the middle of the street. Helicopter, in front of everybody, big old scene. Took us in. Gave me three years in prison. Anyway, right when my time was about to finish in prison, I was out in the yard playing handball. They came and called me. An INS agent came to visit me. And I didn't think nothing of it, because I thought he was just going to ask me, where's your green card or where's your papers? So he interviewed me to prove I was El Salvadorian. They said, what's the national anthem? I was like, man, I don't know. What's the biggest river? I was like, what? I told them, look, man, I don't know nothing about El Salvador. I've been in this country for over 20 years, man. I don't know nothing about that country. He was all pissed off because I didn't know what the biggest river was. I grew up in LA. Longest river there is the LA River. Anyway, the bottom line is that they said they seen a pattern of criminal history and criminal activity. They felt like there was no chance for me, that I couldn't change. And that's why they deported me. The longest river here is Rio Lempa, the Lempa River, and it goes all through El Salvador. Well, I know that now. Right now, we're driving through, making some bus stops. This is MS territory. And about four or five blocks down, we're going to enter a different gang territory. This is a little paragraph in a tour guide book. It says On Your Own in El Salvador. And there's a little paragraph here that's kind of highlighted. And it says, "Gang trouble. Gang violence in cities like LA and New York has spurred the US government to deport many of its worst offenders back to their native countries. For some Salvadorans with a history of violence and arrest, that means a return trip to El Salvador." So this is in the guidebook. I feel like I'm a tourist, a permanent one. We're at this place. There's Mexican food called Que Taco Garabato. I've tried the tortas here. They're excellent. I recommend them a lot. I'm going to try a quesadilla today. [SPEAKING SPANISH] Now that I accepted the fact that I have to stay here, I've started changing a few things. I've had a lot of help from my family, my cousins. They make furniture here. They're carpenters by trade. I work with them for no pay. I don't mind, considering the fact that I was a criminal, and I got deported, and they had heard a little bit about my past. Considering all that, they still let me stay. And I really appreciate it. But now I live out on my own. The food's here. A little chile right there. Damn, the food looks delicious. When I came back here, I remembered a few things, like foods that I hadn't smelled or tasted for years. And I tried it, and I'd go, hey, I know this flavor. Bam, I remember this flavor when I was a kid. It's like trying to remember a dream. It's fuzzy. You only remember little pieces. As you can see, I'm talking with my mouth full. We'll take a little break here, savor the delicacies, get back at you in a few minutes. Out. Where I live right now, actually, it's a good-looking place. It's got a high ceiling. It's pretty big. My room. I had it all painted. I did some graffiti-style spray paint. Artistic stuff. Anyway, right now, I'm just playing some music. Pedro Infante is a Mexican ranchera singer. My dad, he used to like Pedro Infante. There's just something about the music that brings back a lot of memories. I've got a little black photo album in front of me right here. Here's a picture of me in fifth grade. I had long hair. I had a Pink Floyd shirt on. I'm wearing Vans, Levis. Here's a picture of my brother and I skateboarding. We had a half-pipe in my backyard. Some memories, you know? I guess my closest relationship that I had would be with my brother. He's six years older than me, and he took care of me a lot. I remember this one time we were hanging out, and there was these two real pretty girls. And my brother was already a teenager. He was trying to make out with this girl. And I liked her friend. So I tried to do the same thing my brother did. So I tried to kiss the girl, and she popped me in the mouth and busted my lip, and I started crying. I remember my brother, he was hugging me, holding me, telling me, hey, shh, be quiet, be quiet, c'mon. Cleaning the blood off my lip with his shirt. I don't know. For some reason, I always thought I was smarter than my brother. I spoke better English. I had better skills, like math skills. But my brother, he always did the right thing. My brother's an LA sheriff. And me, I'm the convict. He did good things. I did bad things. My brother joined the army. I joined the gang. Que paso? What's up? What's this [? again ?] called? I don't know the name of it. Hey, you got Beatles here? All right. We're going to play The Beatles right now. It's a little loud. Got the Beatles playing in the background. Just relaxing right here in the billiards. Brand-new billiards. There's fluorescent lights. It's cool, man. It's like a place in the United States. Chalk? Where's the chalk at? Where's the chalk? I don't know. Well, when I first got here, I didn't know anybody. So one day, I seen two guys in the distance dressed LA-style, like, baggy. And I said, those guys ain't from here. Right off the [? back, ?] I knew they weren't from here. As he got closer I said, damn, I know that fool. He looks familiar. And he got closer, and I said, yep, that's him. And I told him, what's up, fool? And he looks at me, he's like, "damn!" He couldn't stop saying damn. He was just like, "damn, what's up, man?" He goes, "You're from here?" I said, "Yeah, man. I got deported, man." He's like, "Damn, me too, man, What up? Damn." I see you've got a couple of tattoos. You've got one on your arm, like by your elbow. What does that say right there? Pokey rest in peace. I see you've got a really nice one on your leg. Some real good work. Who did that work? Just kidding. I did it. They make you dress like this to go to work? Well, they don't make me, and the way I like it, the way I dress, you've got to change your style sometimes. A little bit classic, white, long-sleeved shirt-- I've ran into other guys I know from prison. They're doing all right. There's Edgar. He did some prison time. He got deported. Alex. Frank. Rabbit. It didn't matter that he had kids that were US citizens. They deported him anyway. They split up his family. Ringo has kids, too. A little daughter. They're like my second family. We're out in the main street now, walking by the mariachis here. We're going to go see what that's like right now. Here the come, watch out. Here they come. Aw, you did it now, man. Chiquita, chiquita. It's weird, but in a way, I'm glad I'm not in LA. Over there in Los Angeles, a lot of guys are dead, they're life in prison, or just lost in drugs. I feel lucky because I'm alive still. I'm just through with that lifestyle. I'm doing good. I'm working. I'm doing the best I've ever done in my life. I feel more alive now. I woke up. I just snapped out of it. I feel like I've been given a second chance. Here I am in my living room. I got this video. It's a tape that my family recorded. Let's see what's on here. There's Burbank, where we live. I see the main street right there, Victory. The apartments where my mom lives, and my sister lives next door. I'm going to turn up the volume a little bit. There goes my mom. She's smiling all goofy, making faces at the camera. She's all nervous. She doesn't know what to say. My mom says that she sends me hugs and kisses and that she loves me, she misses me. I haven't seen my mom for over a year, year and a half. I know I'm going to see her soon, but as for me to go live with her and just be around her, that's impossible now. I imagine it, seeing my mom, hugging her, feeling the love that she generates. Damn. Having a meal with her, talking to her, laughing with her, seeing my family. I'll be 47 years old by the time I'm eligible to go back. 47, man. I don't think I might even want to go back at that age. My mom ain't going to live no-- she's 66 right now. She's not going to live no 20 years, man. It's [BLEEP] up. We miss you. I love you, I miss you. Call me. I'll see you soon. I'll see you soon, man. And that was the end of the tape. Everybody's happy in the video. They're all telling me they miss me, they love me. That's really good to hear once in a while, especially if it's pre-recorded. You could always play it again and again. Well, got a few minutes left before I close. I just want to say, what's up to all my familia, let you all know that I'm thinking of you. And I don't want you guys to worry because I'm living good here. I love you, Mom. I miss you, and I know you're proud of me. That's about it. I'm signing out. It's a wrap. These days, Weasel's job is working with an organization in San Salvador called Homies Unidos. He's their treasurer. The group is made up of current and former gang members who are working to reduce gang violence in El Salvador. Weasel wanted to dedicate this radio story to his friend at Homies Unidos, Ringo, who was mentioned in the story, actually, and was shot and killed in El Salvador last week. Weasel's diary was reported and narrated by Jose William Huezo Soriano, that is, by Weasel. The story was produced by Joe Richman as part of the Radio Diaries series, with help from Wendy Dorr. Coming up, a photograph spotted by chance in a country other than the one in which it was taken, a man named Irving met one spring night in a living room, and how these random encounters push people's lives through 180-degree turns. That's in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's program, Going Home to the Place You've Never Been. Up until now on our program, we've heard stories of people who ended up in foreign countries that they'd been told was their motherland. But it didn't really feel like home when they got there. In this half of the program, we hear from people who stumbled upon a place where they instantly and instinctively felt more at home than in their real homes. We've arrived at Act Two. Act Two, Brothers From Another Mother. As Stephen Dubner a writes in his memoir, Turbulent Souls, he was raised in a big Catholic family in Upstate New York, youngest of eight kids, altar boy in church. And one year, after he went away to college, a student was giving him a ride back to his mother's during spring break. And they stopped at a house on the way. The driver announced that they were going to stop for two days to attend his grandfather's 80th birthday party. And Stephen found himself in this house full of strangers. And the night before the party, I was staying there, and there was this other family staying there. And there was this guy named Irving with his wife and two children. Irving said to me-- they said that they were from Brooklyn, that they had flown down from Brooklyn. And I said, "Oh, my parents are from Brooklyn." He said, "whereabouts?" And I said, "I don't know. I think my mother lives somewhere near Ebbets Field." He said, "you've never been back? You've never been back to visit your bubba?" I said, "What's a bubba?" And he looked at me, he said, "Aren't you Jewish?" And I said, "Well, no." I said, "But now that you mention it, my parents were both Jewish, and then they both became Catholic." And when I said that, he looked at me like I was a freak. For some reason, I was very relaxed with this family. And we were hanging out in this place where I had no idea why I was there, what I was doing there. And I started playing piano, and we played and played, and they sang. I played, they sang. And he said, "Well, you sure play the piano like you're Jewish." I said, "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" He said, "From where I sit, that's a good thing." And I felt this connection with Irving and his family like I'd kind of never felt before. It was a level of comfort that was very odd. For me to be a weird, shy teenager, in a place that I was uncomfortable, with people I'd never met, to be relaxed enough to hang out all night and play the piano with them and sing songs that were essentially silly, there was level of relaxation that went beyond-- it's like what you want your family to be. I think there was something that-- I'm scared to call it genetic, and it's obviously something more than some kind of cultural fingerprint-- but there was something in the way that Irving looked at the world and the people in it, and there was a manner about him that relaxed my genes a little bit. And it's one of those inexplicable things that is very real. It's like love, I guess, right? You can't define it, and you can't bottle it, and you can't turn it into an equation, but you know how much it either hurts or makes you feel good. And this was exactly like that. This is precisely the sort of not-easy-to-explain experience that changes people's lives. And it changed Stephen's. Later, he looked back on it as the turning point that led him to converting to Judaism, which brings us to our next story. A Hungarian journalist who was passing through the States told us about this one, and went out with a tape recorder here in Chicago to do the interviews for our program. Her name is Anna Lengyel. The story is about two people who had exactly the same kind of irrational moment of recognition that Stephen Dubner experienced. They simply decided, at some point, that they had more in common with each other than either one of them had with anyone else. The story begins with a woman named Ida, who was born in Poland during the Second World War to a Jewish family. When the Nazis invaded Poland and started shipping Jews off to concentration camps, she was separated from her family, including from her twin brother, Adam. A Christian family took her in and pretended that she was their child until after the war, when her father tracked her down and retrieved her. They searched for the rest of their family, but they never found them. And long after she moved to the United States-- to Chicago-- she couldn't get over the feeling that her twin brother was still alive, out there somewhere. She found that she was always thinking about him, imagining what she would say to him when she saw him again. It was kind of a compulsion. Whenever I went to another city or another country, the first thing I would do is pick up the telephone book and search for his name, Paluch. But I had no luck. There were Paluch, but they were not Jewish, or another country. They were maybe Italian or French or whatever. Wherever I went, I looked in the telephone book. I was looking for family almost for my whole life. While Ida was searching, there was a man in Poland named Jerzy Dolebski. He grew up in a Christian family, but he never felt right in his family. He says his parents never showed him the affection they gave to their other children. Like Ida, he told his story to Hungarian journalist Anna Lengyel. I was thinking, what going on? Because I saw other kids, they are kissing my parents. They walk in Sunday together. I never. My responsibility was only clean yards around home. Clean shoes for everybody. Were you badly treated? Yes, my Polish parents treated me like that. And they told me, this is for your best. Around the time Jerzy was 12, his Polish parents decided to send him to an orphanage. They told him it was because they didn't have enough money to keep him at home, but Jerzy noticed they didn't send their other children away. And he concluded that he must be adopted. His Polish family denied it for years, then finally admitted it. So as a teenager, Jerzy started to look for his real family. He contacted a Jewish organization in Poland, but they turned him away. They told him he wasn't Jewish. And what finally ended his search and brought these two people together-- Jerzy and Ida-- was a photograph-- one photograph-- that happened to be published in America. One day-- it was 1995-- my girlfriend sent me this article from Connecticut, from Jewish Ledger. And she inscribed on top of it, you might find it very interesting. And in the article, there was description of Jewish Holocaust children survivors and the picture of a bearded man, who kind of took me into a little shock when I look at him, because he looked like my grandfather. So I was in shock a few months. And finally, one day, I decided I must do something about it. And I wrote to the reporter of that Jewish Ledger. And when I found her, I ask her about this man that she interviewed in Poland. What does she know about him? And she said, actually he does not remember much from his childhood. I don't remember anything from wartime. This is like blank something, like, doesn't exist. And I thought many times that the reason I do not hear from my brother is probably he does not remember. And I decided I'm going to get in touch with him. So on January 13, 1995, I finally called him. And he said, "Why do you think I am your brother, your twin brother? When were you born? "I was born on May 3, 1939." So he answered, "You're not my sister, because I was born October 15, 1942." So I said, "How do you know for sure?" He said, "Because my Christian birth certificate says so." So I took a breath and I told him, "Guess what. My Christian birth certificate says the same thing, that I was born in 1942. So there are discrepancies here because we had false papers." So I felt very, very strong about it. And I said, my God, how am I going to convince him that he's my brother. Because you were sure? My instinct told me, my everything. I was already sure. And I ask him, "Do you remember anything from the past? Anything?" And he says, "I told you first time that I did not remember, but now I know that I remember one thing. When I was taken by my Polish foster parents after the war, I was praying-- something that they reminded me all the time-- I was saying, God help mommy, daddy, and Mr. Leon." And I said, "Do you know who is Mr. Leon?" He says, "No." I said, "That's the name of our father. You were praying for your father." You had been married by this time, hadn't you? I married my wife in 1965. And when I saw my wife, after three days, I decided to marry her. And I don't know why til I found my sister. She sent me picture of my mother, you see here? My wife looks similar, very similar, to my mother. And I think [UNINTELLIGIBLE] I remember something. Since that time, when we both established that there is possibility we are twins, I cried every day for any little thing. I was so sensitive. I couldn't concentrate at work. And I missed him. I wanted to hear him all the time. I wanted to talk to him. And it seemed like we had like tele-- Telepathy. Yeah, right. Whenever I thought about him, he would call me. And in the beginning, he called me once in two weeks. Then he called me every week. And toward the end, he called me five, six times a day. It was not enough. Still, there was no concrete evidence that they were brother and sister. And nothing in the official paper trail suggested that they were related. But Ida decided to go to Poland anyway, to meet the man she believed was her brother. So the final date that we established that I'm going to go to Poland, April 28, 1995. And we met in the Warsaw airport for the first time. And it was like a magnet. From all the people that stood there, I knew which one is my brother. My brother also brought some people from Polish television to record this moment of us meeting. So there were cameras, and we felt like celebrities. And, of course, we had no privacy. Wasn't that too bad? It was a little strange, but I just see my brother, nobody else. I just see the miracle, what happened. And people were standing and crying, not knowing, actually, why we are crying. First night in our life together, we slept in one room. But we were talking, all night. And we talk. And in one moment, we started to sing same song. Lullaby. And I ask her, from when do you know this song? Because for today, I don't know from when, because I never heard it from my Polish parents. We were singing the same lullaby about two kittens, like twins. Ida was supposed to stay in Poland just two weeks, but two weeks became four. They just could not stand the idea of being separated from each other. Then Jerzy decided to change his name to Adam Paluch, the name Ida told him he'd been born with. Meanwhile, his family was having trouble adjusting. And his wife of 30 years-- the mother of his children-- started to become jealous of Ida. When my sister came, I bring her to our home. And this was understandable for me. I hold her hand. We walked on the street, for example. We talk all the time. And I have no time for my wife. Me and my sister, we have so much information to say. And your wife was jealous. My wife, for example, told me, "I don't want you to go to walk without your sister hand with her-- Hand-in-hand. --hand-in-hand, because people started to talk. You have other woman. Nobody knows this is your sister. And I tell her, "Don't fight with my sister, because you will lose." His family did not respond the way he expected. When I came, I was the proof that he was a Jew. And they did not want anybody in Poland to know that. They told us not to advertise that we are Jewish. When I was about to leave Poland, he told me that he would like to meet my family. And I wanted him to meet my family. So he came here as a tourist. He had a visa for a few months. And once he came with me to Chicago, every time we talked about that separation, it was harder to talk. And also, unfortunately, his family got cooler toward him, his wife and his children. They stopped calling him. They stopped talking to him. His wife wouldn't come to the telephone when he called her. Things fell apart. I suppose you had a family of your own. Yes. It's a very good point you're asking me. My family was surprised and felt like they're losing me. Like, what's happening to me? All heart somewhere else. They were not ready for that. I was stranger. And they tried to understand how, in which way I am her brother. It was very hard. Even my daughter told me that I'm neglecting her children because of my brother. In Poland, they show, on TV, movie about our meeting, about my life. And they prepare opinion I am bad man because I leave my family. He was portrayed as the one who left the family, the bad guy. And they were the victims. And the movie was prepared like that, [SPEAKING POLISH] This is a true Jew. That's why he left his wife. There was no way to come back. They didn't make him welcome anymore. The truth was, I burn after me bridges. Adam decided to stay in America. He filed for divorce. He'd been struggling in his marriage for years anyway. He moved in with Ida's family for two years and moved down the street from her. He took English classes. But getting a green card was difficult. Ida wrote letters to congresspeople, to immigration officials, to anybody she could think of. My sister fight for me about almost two years. And this was really fighting. She lost, two times, job because of that. How come you lost jobs? Because I couldn't concentrate anymore on anything. I wanted him to stay. And I felt very, you know, to defend him like a mother. And I have this closeness to him. I have to protect him. Nobody in my previous life took care of me like she. Did. Did. We are inseparable. Every day, we call each other. And now that he lives in his own apartment, we still see each other almost every day. It's very strange but true. I cut finger, she cut finger in the same time. In the same place. In two different houses? Yeah. Ida and Adam told reporter Anna Lengyel story after story like this, of coincidences that seemed to prove to them in some way that they must be brother and sister, even though no hard proof exists. Their families both agitated for DNA tests, but they refused. To them, they don't need further proof. They just know. There's an uncanny quality when you fall in love. And there's an uncanny quality to finding the home you've never had. And at some level, what is there to say? What makes home feel like home? The fact that it feels like home. You mentioned that you are the two people feeling closest to each other, really closest in this world. So if you happened to have a DNA test tomorrow, which would prove that you're not sister and brother, how would you feel after those-- We'll be still sister and brother, definitely. A DNA test was already thrown in our faces many times, which in the beginning, upset us. Not anymore. We don't want to prove to anybody anything. We just prove to each other, and that's enough for us. Anyway, it seems that you were absolutely sure, or you wanted very badly, very much, to believe. No. No. When I saw her first time in airport, my doubts gone out, away. Immediately. You don't really take after each other. Well, he is exact copy on father's side and I'm copy of mother's side. When I was in Poland, I decide I will not do any blood test. We don't need it. And I told to my son, if you need, I will do, and I will close an envelope, and I left it in lawyer office, and after my death, you can open. I can't tell anymore. He'll cry. I believe in God. I don't need DNA test, because I believe what happened to us, it has the hand of a higher power. People who are not touched by Holocaust, they don't understand Holocaust survivors, what every little thing means to us. To some, it might be unimportant, nothing to think about twice, and to us, are very important things, because we'll look for every little piece of evidence. We are already sister and brother when we are Holocaust survivors. We have the same past. We understand each other very well. Not only me and Adam but all the people who are in our group of hidden children and Holocaust children survivors understand each other. You can say one sentence, and they'll finish it for you. Those interviews by Anna Lengyel, a senior producer for Hungarian Radio in Budapest. Our program produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, and Sylvia Lemus. Marketing by Marge Ostroushko. Research help this week from the authoritative Julie Rigby. Eddy Harris, who I spoke with at the top of our program, writes about his long journey through Africa in his book, Native Stranger. To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who greeted me today as he greets me every single day-- Damn. Damn. He couldn't stop saying damn. He was just like, damn. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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When it comes to teenagers, we always get it wrong. Even in the most widely scrutinized, widely reported stories, we get it wrong. Take Tiananmen Square. This week is the 10th anniversary of the crackdown and the massacre there. And you think you know the story. Idealistic students trying to democratize their government. But in fact, it was more complicated than that. The majority of students were like me. I was a very typical student at that time. And our knowledge of what democracy was was really limited. Wen Huang was part of the student movement, first in Shanghai, where he was a graduate student at the time, then in Beijing at Tiananmen Square right up until the crackdown on June 4, 1989. And he says that for him and most of the students he knew, the movement was not about turning China into more of a democracy. He says students wanted the government to cutdown on corruption, do something about inflation, allow them to criticize the government without being thrown in jail or kept from good jobs. It never occurred to us that we wanted to overthrow the Communist government. It was like the Communist party was a God-given thing. And we were born with it. We're going to die with it. And the only way to make it work for us is just to have some modest reforms within the government. But Wen says that for most of the students he knew, most of the students in the movement, he believes, there was another motivation besides politics, an equally compelling, if not more compelling, motivation. It was really like a big party. I never heard about Woodstock until I came to the US. Woodstock, yeah. Woodstock. And then later on, I watched a video tape. And then suddenly, I realized that the student movement in 1989 was just like a big-- similar to the Woodstock experience. Why? What were you seeing that was similar in 1989 in China, in Tiananmen Square, and in Shanghai that was similar to what was going on at Woodstock? The festive atmosphere and the playfulness. And we were singing pop songs, and people playing guitars. It was exciting, Wen says. Midterms were coming up. Papers were due. And everybody would skip class together to go to demonstrations. This is not to say that there was not political idealism behind all this. There was. But as one of the best known student leaders, Chai Ling, said in an article in The New Yorker magazine commemorating the 10th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the demonstrations, even the hunger strikes weren't primarily political as far as she was concerned. It was about a kind of sheer pleasure in living, she said, a rock and roll bravado. Wen Huang agrees. I think that was kind of accurate statement. I think there was more of an honest assessment of what's motivated us to take part in this movement. Because I noticed when I first came out here, the student leaders who escaped China-- The student leaders who escaped, uh-huh. The student leaders who escaped China, when they came over here, they exaggerated the motivation. They portrayed themselves as such democracy fighters, as if they knew so much about democracy. And that has a lot to do with how Americans have this romantic vision of the Tiananmen Square movement. Of course, it goes further than this. We Americans have a romantic vision of what it means just to be a student, what it means to be young. And we ascribe a lot of motivations and meaning to what young people do that simply don't bear much relation to reality. Today on our program, we try to set the record straight with a few typical case examples. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Kids Are Alright, stories in which people try to set the record straight about actions that adults seem to widely misinterpret. Act One, Where The People Walk Around Upside Down. A story about what you think you know about the 1989 student uprising in China versus what really happened. Act Two, When Czechs Bounce. The true tale of how young people's music in Czechoslovakia in the 1940s and '50s seemed to pose a threat first to the Nazi occupation, then to communist authorities. Act Three, When We Were Animals. Someone who helped perpetrate high school violence when he was a teenager tries to find the blurry line that divides childhood prank from social pathology. Act Four, When We Were Angels, in which we hear the purest possible student uprising imaginable, the most innocent, documented by an actual student using the crude tools of telephone answering machine and shiny, red boom box. Stay with us. Act One, Where the People Walk Around Upside Down. Growing up in China, Wen Huang believed that China was an advanced country, a civilized country, which provided for all its citizens, not like those countries with poor people in them. I remember when I was growing up, each time I couldn't finish my meal, my mom always say, "Oh, you gotta finish your meal. Just imagine how lucky you are. People in America are starving." And of course, I heard the same thing. And of course, once you came to this country, everybody told you, "My mom would say to me, 'Yes, finish your meal because there are children starving in China.'" Yeah, I actually believed that. I remember that was our impression of America. We thought China was very strong. We felt very lucky to be under the socialist system. In a more advanced system, where that wouldn't happen. In a more advanced system, everybody's equal. And then suddenly, in the 1980s, when China opened up to the outside world, we suddenly felt that we were left behind. And there was the phrase saying that we were at least 30 or 40 years behind the United States and England. And we felt humiliated in a way. Students like Wen had friends who'd gone overseas, who'd seen that in Europe and America, the grocery stores had 30 different kinds of cookies, that it was fantastic prosperity abroad. Meanwhile, opening to the West meant the end of wage and price controls back home in China, and prices were skyrocketing. Wen remembers living on $10 a month American and watching the price of tomatoes climb from $0.01 a pound to $0.30 a pound. It just didn't seem like there was any kind of future to be had in China, anything to be idealistic about. That was what sent students to the streets, Wen says, not some idea of American-style democracy, which they didn't know much about anyway. We really had a mentality of "We could save this world." We were young. There was a Chinese phrase, saying, "A newborn calf doesn't know the danger ahead." That is exactly what we were. We felt like the whole future-- we could change the future. We could change the country. As how we're going to change it, we didn't know. So we grew up watching these movies about the martyrs, for example, during the early communist movements, how people would face the bullets to die for a cause. And that really had the impact. We felt like we wanted to be part of it. I remember during the Cultural Revolution, thousands of Red Guards-- like my uncle and my aunt, they were Red Guards-- thousand Red Guards, they traveled hundreds of miles to Beijing to see Chairman Mao Zedong, who was the leader of the communist movement. He was like a living god. And my aunt and my uncle told me that they were young, and they would walk hundreds of miles. And sometimes, when they took the train, the train was so crowded that people had to stand in the toilets for 7 or 8 hours or 20 hours. And also, people have to cram into the luggage rack just to go to Beijing to see Chairman Mao. And later on, during the 1980s, we found that was kind of stupid. The Red Guards, they really did a lot of damage. But on the other part was the fantasy. I felt like, I wish I could live in that time to experience the excitement that my aunt and my uncle, they lived. Because each time they reminisced that, their voice started changing. They got excited. It's like part of the experience. I always felt like I wanted to be that part of experience. That was why, when I was in Shanghai after the students' hunger strike, I felt like I really wanted to go where the action was. So I took the train to Beijing. I remember very clearly that on the spur of the moment, I said, "I want to go to Beijing." And my classmates said, "Let's go." And we had a bag, only had a toothbrush and several books. We never had the idea, "We need to change." We said, "We want to be a revolutionary." And when we went to the train station, it was so crowded, there was no way we could get a ticket with a seat. So we just bought a platform ticket, and we snuck in. And when we got on the train, it was very crowded. And then I thought about the experience of my aunt and my uncle. I kind of hoped that the train would be so crowded that I had to go stand in the toilets for 20 hours to go to Beijing. I just sat in the aisle, and I kept thinking, "Oh, this is not as exciting as my aunt and my uncle experienced." It's just the side of living the fantasy. And also, when I was in Beijing, when we heard the martial law, the troops were going to march in, my classmates and I, we were always wanting to talk, we said, "If the soldiers start shoot us, we'll walk hand-in-hand, and then just walk towards them, and then we may die as martyrs." The fantasies we got from watching the movies is so heroic. Now, looking back, I thought I was very stupid. But then I still think it was a very important part of my life. I'm glad I did it. One of the actions that led up to the events in Tiananmen Square were the hunger strikes that took place in different cities, students in different cities, including in Shanghai. And that seems like a situation where students actually were putting themselves on the line and would starve themselves for days. Yes, I can say that when my best friend, we grew up in the same city, and he said, he was going to be on hunger strike. I said, "What is hunger strike? How are you going to do it?" He said, "Oh, you're just going to starve yourself." And I was really touched since I went with him, I saw students, they had a massive sit-in in the square. And then those who were on hunger strike, they were in a special place. They were really serious. And the next day, I decide to help my friend. So I brought some water, bottled water, and a quilt. And I went to the square to look for him. So I went over there. I couldn't find him anywhere. And also, I noticed that there were a lot of new faces. The students who were there the previous night were no longer there, a lot of them. So I just went back to the school. And I was in the students' cafeteria. I found that he was eating a big bowl of noodle. I said, "Aren't you supposed to be on hunger strike?" He said, "Oh, after the first 12 hours, I was so hungry, I just couldn't stand it. And that's why. It was too much for me. I decided to come back." He said, "We're human." You're not saying that no one was sincere and that no one was striking. No, I'm sure there were a lot of people who were very sincere about that. And actually did starve themselves. They did starve-- a hunger strike. But a lot of people-- I come back to the point that because it was a big party and, also, it was such a big show, a lot of people join us. And we were young kids. They just started to go on hunger strike for the show. And then when nobody was looking, they go and eat something. Wen, do you think that when the Western press has tended to write about Tiananmen Square and the student movement that they've been more pious about it than it felt to be in that movement? I think that my general impression of the Western media, their coverage of Tiananmen Square is they tend to romanticize the movement. When I came over here, the first things, people started to call me "democracy fighter." I always cringe at that idea when people start to-- of course, I like the treatment. I remember one day I was invited to talk about Tiananmen Square. That's the first year I was in Springfield, Illinois. I went to talk to a civic group about Tiananmen Square and human rights in China. And I had some pictures of me marching in Tiananmen Square. So try to impress audience, I show them some pictures. And then the organizer of the speech immediately started to refer to me as "a democracy fighter." And then they all stood up and clapped hands. I felt like I was a hero. I kind of liked the treatment. But then also, I felt obligated to tell them that I really didn't know anything about democracy at that time. So I just said, "I wasn't really a democracy fighter. I had no idea what democracy was." And they were little disappointed. Wen Huang is a freelance journalist here in Chicago. Act Two, When Czechs Bounce. If part of the impulse behind the Tiananmen Square uprising was the pure desire to feel like life had possibility, that the future had potential, that was the same impulse behind another movement among young people in Eastern Europe, back before the Berlin Wall fell. That movement was not, strictly speaking, political, though it took on a political dimension. It had to do with music. Josef Skvorecky wrote an essay about jazz in Czechoslovakia as a preface to his novella, The Bass Saxophone. That was also before the Berlin wall fell. We asked actor Ed Dixon to read an except for us here. In the days when everything in life was fresh because we were 16, 17, I used to blow tenor sax very poorly. Our band was called Red Music, which, in fact, was a misnomer since the name had no political connotations. There was a band in Prague that called itself Blue Music. And we, living in the Nazi protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had no idea that, in jazz, "blue" was not a color. So we called ours "red." But if the name itself had no political connotations, our sweet, wild music did. For jazz was a sharp thorn in the sides of the power-hungry men, from Hitler to Brezhnev, who successively ruled in my native land. What sort of political connotations? Leftist? Rightist? Racialist? Classist? Nationalist? The vocabulary of ideologists and mountebanks doesn't have a word for it. The essence of this music, this way of making music, is not simply protest. Its essence is something far more elemental, an elan vital, a forceful vitality, an explosive creative energy as breathtaking as that of any true art that may be felt even in the saddest of blues. Its effect is cathartic. But of course, when the lives of individuals and communities are controlled by powers that themselves remain uncontrolled, slavers, czars, fuehrers, first secretaries, marshals, generals, and generalissimos, ideologists of dictatorships at either end of the spectrum, then creative energy becomes a protest. That is the way it is. Totalitarian ideologists don't like real life, other people's, because it cannot be totally controlled. They loathe art, the product of a yearning for life, because that, too, evades control. If controlled and legislated, it perishes. But before it perishes, or when it finds refuge in some kind of samizdat underground, art, willy-nilly, becomes protest. Popular mass art, like jazz, becomes mass protest. That's why the ideological guns, and sometimes even the police guns, of all dictatorships are aimed at the men with the horns. Red Music used to play, badly, but with the enthusiasm of 16-year-olds during the reign of the most Aryan Aryan of them all and his cultural handyman, Doctor Goebbels. It was Goebbels who declared, "Now I shall speak quite openly on the question of whether German radio should broadcast so-called jazz music. If by jazz, we mean music that is based on rhythm and entirely ignores or even shows contempt for melody, music in which rhythm is indicated primarily by the ugly sounds of whining instruments so insulting to the soul, why, then we can only reply to the question entirely in the negative." Which was the reason we whined and wailed, rasped and roared, using all kinds of wah-wah and hat mutes, some of them manufactured by ourselves. But even then, protest was one of the lesser reasons. Primarily, we loved that music we called jazz and that, in fact, was swing, the half-white progeny of Chicago and New Orleans that our non-blowing contemporaries danced to in mountain villages out of reach of the Schutzpolizei, the uniformed security service. For even dancing was forbidden in the Third Reich, which was in mourning for the dead of the Battle of Stalingrad. The revelation we experienced was one of those that can only come in one's youth, before the soul has acquired a shell from being touched by too many sensations. In my mind, I can still hear very clearly the sound of the saxes on that old, terribly scratchy Brunswick 78, spinning on a wind-up phonograph with the almost illegible label, "I've Got A Guy, Chick Webb And His Orchestra With Vocal Chorus." Wildly sweet, soaring, swinging saxophones. The lazy and unknown voice of the unknown vocalist who left us spellbound, even though we had no way of knowing that this was the great, then 17-year-old Ella Fitzgerald. But the message of her voice, the call of the saxes, the short wailing, weeping saxophone solo between the two vocal choruses, they all came across. Nothing could ever silence them in our hearts. There was even a swing band in the notorious Buchenwald, made up, for the most part, of Czech and French prisoners. And since those were not only cruel, but also absurd times, people were put behind barbed wire because of the very music that was played inside. In a concentration camp near Wiener Neustadt, sat Vicherek, a guitar player who had sung Louis Armstrong's scat chorus in "Tiger Rag" and thus, according to the Nazi judge, defiled musical culture. Elsewhere in Germany, several swing men met a similar fate. And one local Gauleiter issued an extraordinary-- really extraordinary in this world of ours-- set of regulations which were binding for all dance orchestras. I read them, gnashing my teeth, in Czech translation in the film weekly, Filmovy kuryr. And 15 years later, I paraphrase them, faithfully, I'm sure, since they had engraved themselves deeply on my mind, in a short story entitled "I Won't Take Back One Word." One, pieces in foxtrot rhythms, so-called swing, are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands. Two, in this so-called jazz-type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy and life, rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics. Three, as to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones, so-called blues. However, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo, so-called hot jazz, or in solo performances, so-called breaks, be tolerated. Four, strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit, so-called cowbells, flexatones, brushes, et cetera, as well as all mutes, which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Free-Masonic yowl, so-called wah-wahs, hats, et cetera. Five, all light orchestra and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violincello, the viola, or possibly a suitable folk instrument. How naive we were, how full of love and reverence because Doctor Goebbels had decided that the whining Judeo-Negroid music invented by American capitalists was not to be played in the territory of the Third Reich. We had a ball inventing aliases for legendary tunes, so that they might be heard in the territory of the Third Reich after all. We played a fast piece, one of those forbidden "brisk" compositions, called "The Wild Bull," indistinguishable to the naked ear from "Tiger Rag." We played a low tune, "Abendlied" or "Evening Song." And fortunately, the Nazi censors had never heard the black voice singing, "When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls." And the height of our effrontery, "The Song of Resetova Lhota," in fact "Saint Louis Blues," rang out one misty day in 1943 in eastern Bohemia, sung in Czech by a country girl, the lyrics composed so that they might elaborate on our new title for W. C. Handy's theme song, "Resetova Lhota is where I go. I'm on my way to see my Aryan folk." In fact, we were fortunate that the local Nazis had never seen Chaplin's The Great Dictator, never heard the bullies sing about, "the Ary-- Ary-- Ary-- Ary-- Aryans." Neither had we of course. The song of "Resetova Lhota" was simply an indigenous response to Nazism. Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller. You name them, we knew them all. And yet, we knew nothing. The hours we spent racking our brains over song titles we couldn't understand. "Struttin' with some barbecue." The definition of the word "barbecue" in our pocket Webster didn't help at all. What on earth could it mean? Walking pompously with a piece of animal carcass roasted whole? We knew nothing. But we knew the music. It came to us on the waves of Radio Stockholm mostly since that was the only station that played jazz that the Nazis didn't jam. Far from Harlem, from Chicago, from New Orleans, uninformed and naive, we served the sacrament that verily knows no frontiers. Then The Great War ended. I had the splendid feeling that finally, the beautiful age of jazz had arrived. My mistake. It took only a lean three years before it was back underground again. New little Goebbelses started working diligently in fields that had been cleared by the old demon. They had their own Soviet bibles, primarily the fascistoid Music of Spiritual Poverty by V. Gorodinsky and I. Nestyev's Dollar Cacophony. Their vocabulary was not very different from that of the little doctor except that they were, if possible, even prouder of their ignorance. They characterized jazz and jazz-inspired music by a rich assortment of derogatory adjectives, perverted, decadent, base, lying, degenerate, et cetera. They compared the music to "the moaning in the throat of a camel" and "the hiccupping of a drunk." And although it was "the music of cannibals," it was at the same time invented by the capitalists "to deafen the ears of the Marshallized world by means of epileptic loud-mouthed compositions." Unfortunately, these Orwellian masters soon found their disciples among Czechs, who, in turn, after the fashion of disciples, went even further than their preceptors, declaring wildly that jazz was aimed at "annihilating the people's own music in their souls." Finally, the aggressive theoreticians even organized a concert of model jazz pieces composed to order for the party's cultural division. It was an incredible nightmare. Bandleader Karel Vlach, the greatest among Czech pioneers of swing, sat in the front row, going from crimson to ashen and from ashen to crimson again, probably saying a prayer in his soul to Stan Kenton. Beside him sat an unholy trinity of Soviet advisers on jazz led by, of all men, Aram Khachaturian, colleague of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, gloomy and silent. And next to them, a senile choir master using a hearing aid. And yet, not even the emasculated musical monster presented to them satisfied the Soviet advisers. They criticized its "instrumental makeup" and described it as "the music of a vanishing class." Finally, the old choir master rose. We heard him add the final chord. "Now take the trumpet. Such an optimistic-sounding instrument. And what do these jazz people do? They stuff something down its throat and right where it sounds despicable, whining like a jungle cry." After that, Vlach was unable to refrain from a few heretical remarks. If they didn't give him something better than Stan Kenton, said he, he would keep on playing Stan Kenton, which is perhaps what he did in the traveling circus to which he was shortly thereafter relegated along with his entire band. In place of Kenton, they pushed Paul Robeson at us. And how we hated that black apostle who sang of his own free will at open-air concerts in Prague at a time when they were raising the socialist leader, Milada Horakova, to the gallows, the only woman ever to be executed for political reasons in Czechoslovakia by Czechs, and at a time when the great Czech poets, some 10 years later to be rehabilitated without exception, were pining away in jails. Well, maybe it was wrong to hold it against Paul Robeson. No doubt, he was acting in good faith, convinced that he was fighting for a good cause. But they kept holding him up to us as an exemplary progressive jazz man, and we hated him. May God rest his hopefully-innocent soul. The steel chariots of the Soviets swung low, and I left. Jazz still leads a precarious existence in the heart of European political insanity, although the battlefield has shifted elsewhere. But it is the same old familiar story. A spectre is again haunting Eastern Europe, the spectre of rock. And all the reactionary powers have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise it. Brezhnev and Husak, Suslov and Honecker, East German obscurantists and Czech police spies. Anonymous people hold underground Woodstocks in the same old obscure towns, gatherings often ruthlessly broken up by police, followed by the arrest of participants, their interrogation, their harassment, all the joys of living in a police state. My story has drawn to a close. Das Spiel ist ganz und gar verloren. Und dennoch wird es weitergehen. The game is totally lost. And yet, it will go on. The old music is dying. Although it has so many offspring, vigorous and vital, that will naturally be hated. Still, for me, Duke is gone. Satchmo gone. Count Basie has just barely survived a heart attack. Little Jimmy Rushing has gone the way of all flesh. "Anybody asks you, who it was sang this song, just tell them it was-- he's been here and gone." Such is the epitaph of the little five-by-five. Such is the epitaph I would wish for my books. An excerpt from Josef Skvorecky's essay "Red Music," which is collected in his book of essays titled Talkin' Moscow Blues. It was read for us by the magnificent Ed Dixon, an actor in New York City. He's now appearing on Broadway in The Iceman Cometh. Coming up, the most innocent childhood pranks in the world, and the least innocent, and why some people have a hard time telling one from the other. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, The Kids Are Alright. Stories about teenagers who take things into their own hands and what to make of them, which we bring you today in the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, When We Were Animals. Now we turn to a different kind of student action. The high school shootings in Littleton, Colorado have sent parents and teachers looking for warning signs that the children in their lives might suddenly strike out in some way. But the dividing line between normal childhood anger, normal childhood aggression, on the one hand, and social pathology, on the other, is usually not too easy to spot. Paul Bravmann tells this story from his boyhood in a suburban neighborhood on the West Coast about the sheer human difficulty of spotting that line. There were six of us. Most nights, we sat around the living room at Gus and Jack's house eating Nutter Butters and watching movies on the Betamax. But there were other nights when we just had to get out and goof around. It started innocently enough, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer type of stuff. Like we'd go swimming on my neighbor's strip of private beach. Or we'd play these wild games of tag in the local graveyard. There was our own small version of train hopping. We'd jump these slow-moving freight trains that carried apples, and car parts, and these fat tanks of chlorine gas through town, just ride them up and down the waterfront. Forms of play that bent the rules a bit. That's what made it exciting. That's what made us feel like our boyhood was the real deal. But then the nature of our play began to change. I'm not sure why exactly. So I've been going back, trying to piece together the history of those years. I contacted four of my former friends, Jack, Philip, Gordon, and Chris. Called them up out of the blue after 15 years. Here are Philip and Jack. I remember once we took a garden hose and fed it through the window of a neighbor's car, a neighbor that we found somehow unsavory, and turned on the garden hose, and let 'er go. So come morning time, she had a small aquarium instead of a car. I remember one really disgusting prank is we all urinated into a five-gallon bucket for about a week until we had rancid stew of urine. It was so foul, you couldn't even go near it. But we somehow managed to put it in the back of a truck. And we drove around the island, looking for something or someone to dump it on. And we ended up finding some hapless person who was walking along the road in the middle of the night, fool that he was, and spilled this thing out the back onto him. That poor guy, going home reeking of piss. Around this time, we were also getting really into pyrotechnics. We graduated from fireworks to Molotov cocktails, homemade napalm, and pipe bombs. We had gotten our hands on a pair of CIA explosives manuals and just followed the government recipes. None of them were harder to make than a bologna sandwich. At this stage, most of our pranks were property crimes. We blew up mailboxes. We tried to demolish a local monument, a real eyesore. Even these early pranks didn't sit too well with me, but I kept my mouth shut. We had adopted this sort of punk rock pose that didn't give a rip about society or other people's feelings. Decent was suspect. Philip remembers the following scenario. There was an overpass. Actually, it was a bridge. And it overlooked the water. And we had this idea of throwing rocks off the overpass onto passing boats. So we did that, attempting to hit a boat that was passing underneath. And I don't even know if we hit it or not. We couldn't tell because it was so far down. But when we started arguing about whether that was a good idea or not, I was telling Gordon, "I just have a feeling. This guy working on his boat every weekend to try to make it polished and beautiful. And takes it out for an afternoon, and we drop a rock on it. That's just evil." And Gordon looking at me and saying, "Philip, I'm really concerned that you care at all about this person. I'm concerned that you have empathy for this person." One point I should make is that I'd never really had friends before. These were my first friends, and I was glad to have them. Didn't know how I got them, but intended to keep them. Once the pranking started, there was this slow pull, this strong, slow pull towards the most extreme acts we could imagine. It was like the pranks had their own logic that pulled us further and further. It starts out with these common, little pranks that are fun and creative. And then, for some reason, it gets darker. And we are pushing each other further. We had done some pretty bad stuff. And it was just this one-upmanship attitude, where we were just trying to think of what would be the next bad thing that we could do. And Chris came up with this idea. And he said, "You know, guys, I got an idea." Oh, when you-- thinking about the fact that we did these things is just-- Chris looked at us and said, "There's a black family that lives down the street. Let's go to their house and write 'nigger' on their door." And none of us were racist. And none of us were white supremists. And none of us had any political motivation about anything like that. It just seemed like just the most anti-social thing we could do. I know this sounds god awful. Of course, it does. This time it was Gordon's turn to try and squash a really bad idea. He stood up to Chris, which was almost inconceivable because he was like our alpha male. And Chris backed down. But Chris was the driving force behind our biggest property crime, the local power plant. It happened one night when the five of us were in Gordon's pickup truck. In the back were a couple lengths of heavy chain. Gordon and Jack tell the story. Chris was in the back of the truck. And he saw these chains. And as we were driving by the power plant, he had the idea that we should go and try to blow it up. I remember Chris took the chain, which was the bigger of the two, and looped it in half and just tried to wing it over the fence at one of the transformers. And honestly, I didn't think that-- I thought this was a futile effort. I didn't think that it was going to do anything. I couldn't have been looking directly at it when it connected, when the chain connected with the transformer. And I was blinded for a minute there. And the next thing I noticed was how dark it was in that already dark, rural area. But it was so dark because every street light was out. Every house light was out. It was real dark. That's when the fear set in on me. I thought, "I really want to get out of here because whatever we've done, it's serious. And this is really bad." All I remember is Chris begging us to get going. "Let's get going." I don't remember anyone saying that they felt bad for having done untold-- I don't know how much damage-- how much that would have cost to repair. That must have been huge. But yeah, I certainly don't remember anybody expressing any remorse for it. And the whole way back, we were just talking about how crazy it was, and how people on life support systems could be suffocating, and that kind of thing. It was exciting. I point out here that most of us weren't seen as problem kids. When I wasn't out with my friends, I collected Chinese stamps, went to Hebrew school, practiced the viola, not that a sociopath can't play the viola. Then there came this point when their talk about pranks, if you could still call them that, shifted from property to people. This was the beginning of the end of us as a group of friends. Here are Philip and Jack. We were trying to decide one evening what would be our next step in what we were going to be doing violent-wise. And objects-- destroying public property or private property was just not exciting enough anymore. And so we went out one night. We were driving around downtown. And we saw this staggering drunk. And Chris got out of the car with his Taser. And he was acting really sweet to this guy and just chatting with him, being chummy. And the guy was smiling. And then Chris took the Taser out of his pocket or wherever and showed it to him. And he said, "Look at this. Do you know what this is?" The guy shook his head. "Well, it's for doing this." And he put the Taser on the guy's arm or something. And it didn't knock him down. But it was, obviously, extremely painful. And the guy shrieked and pulled away. There was another time when Chris attacked a vagrant that mirrored a scene from the film A Clockwork Orange, which we watched and rewatched during those years. He kicked him. I remember. And he did it in this overly dramatic way. And I remember laughing. We were all exhilarated, and we were all laughing. I think we were in awe of what we had done. But because we didn't know how to talk about it, we were just laughing. And then all of a sudden, I realized how twisted all that was. I was there in the car for the first of these incidents. I remember feeling trapped. I remember wanting out. That was it for me. I dumped my friends. I was surprised to hear it wasn't long after that everyone left for the same reason. The strange thing was that each of us thought he was the only one who reacted adversely to this new violence, that the others somehow enjoyed it. When I started to hear about the Littleton shootings and when I started to hear about the shooters, the kind of kids they were, I found myself thinking about this ugly slice of my personal past, things I hadn't thought about in years. I found myself asking questions about who we were exactly. Here's Jack. I turn on the TV, and I saw what was happening at Littleton and the descriptions of the kids that were coming out to the media were-- I remember thinking, "My god, that was us." This is Philip. When I first heard about Littleton, there were these kids in trench coats. And I wore a trench coat. And there were these kids that called themselves The Trench Coat Mafia. And I don't think we had a name for ourselves, but we had that attitude. And I won't go so far as to say, "It could have been me." Because I never would have killed anybody. Maybe. Definitely, I remember thinking that it's way too close to home. Philip. I don't think there's any difference between what they did in Littleton and what we were doing. When Eric Harris decided to take a gun to school and kill his classmates, he was thinking the exact same way we were when we decided to stay out at night and mash people's mailboxes. Or when we decided to take that monument and destroy it. It was that same anger, inarticulate anger. Here's Gordon. I guess in some sense, what we were doing wasn't all that different. They took it way further, way, way further than we would. What they did was inconceiveable to us. But I suppose, if the circumstances in my life were a little different, I suppose that I could have walked over that line. But the circumstances of my life weren't that extreme. How are we supposed to think about Littleton? And how are my friends and I supposed to think about the awful things we did as kids? I usually hear people talk in two different ways about the kinds of trouble teenagers get into. Either they see it as a kind of innocent boys-will-be-boys joyride. Or they see it as social pathology. And they feel they have come down on one side or the other. Based on personal experience, I think I can say, it's a little of both. Paul Bravmann is a freelance writer living in New York City. Act Four, When We Were Angels. Let us end our program today with an example of the most innocent childhood prank, the most innocent student uprising imaginable. Hillary Frank is in graduate school, studying drawing at the New York Academy of Art. A few months ago, she mailed our radio show a story that she wanted to get onto the program. She had recorded the interviews using her microcassette answering machine. And then she edited the interviews and recorded the parts that she said, her script, by dubbing and recording onto her shiny, red boombox. For all the crude sound quality, the story sounded remarkably like a story on This American Life. But for one reason or another, and time considerations, that unsolicited story never made it onto the radio. This week, though, she has put together another story using the same style, which we added music to here at the radio station to make it fully sound like a story on our show. It is about an incident which happened to her back when she was an undergraduate. Tufts University is a pretty straight place. Entertainment for most people means fraternity keggers. It's not the sort of place you'd expect people to watch a guy sitting on another guy's shoulders pretending to be a giant. It happened by accident in 1994. My friend, Scott, was the top half. It was beginning of the school year. And we were bored one night. And we decided to go up to the quad. And I guess, basically, Jeff got up on someone's back. And he started yelling and screaming about how giant he was and how magnificent he was. And I think, actually, right after that, I might have gotten on someone's back and said, "Yeah, I'm also giant." And I guess that really struck a chord in me. I thought that was pretty amusing. I guess I thought a lot about it. It actually did start me thinking along a particular path. Scott talked about the idea one night in the dining hall. The next day, on the way to class, he saw signs all over campus that said in bold print, "I am nine feet tall. Come see Giantman. 8:00 PM on the quad." Scott had no idea who put them up. He learned later that the signs were posted by a guy who had overheard him talking at dinner. Scott decided he would go to the quad at the specified time and undertake the challenge. To pull this off, he would need to create a character and a costume for the giant. He gave Giantman a booming voice. I don't even know exactly. It was something like, "Behold, I am giant." Not even loud, but just weird and suggesting man-ness in a vague way. I don't know. Scott asked his tallest friend, Podo, to act as Giantman's legs. They grabbed some props before heading up to the quad, a blanket to wrap around their middle to hide Podo, a long wooden staff, and a black, curly wig, like the guys in Kiss. We had picked a point in the bushes, Podo and I. We really couldn't see what was going on out on the quad. And so the time came, and I got on his shoulders, basically, and tied the blanket around my waist. And we walked out. And I remember there just being maybe 10 people, 15 people. And I remember them being way on the other side and running. What was so ridiculous about it was there was just a handful of people, and they were so spread out. But they were all coming towards me. It was like, what the hell am I doing here? They decided to plan another Giantman appearance the following week. They posted more signs and told everyone they knew, "Go see Giantman. It'll blow your mind." Word spread quickly. And amazingly, they were able to keep it secret that they, themselves, were Giantman. Most students believed there was an actual nine-foot man come to Tufts for some mysterious reason. I was friends with these guys, and I didn't even know yet. At the next appearance, almost 200 people were waiting for Giantman and chanting his name. It was like a political rally. Some of them carried signs that said things like, "We love you Giantman. Why are you here?" "Save us from ourselves, Giantman." "Nine feet of loving." And "Giant freak, go home." Giantman made his way onto the quad, and the quad went wild. People came rushing out of their dorms to see what was going on. When Giantman reached his fans, he made a small speech. "I am giant," he boomed. "I am huge, and I have brought you butterscotch." He then threw cellophane-wrapped butterscotch to the crowd, and they dove for it. On the walk up, I just stopped in the bookstore and saw some candy. And I was trying to think, "What was the most ridiculous candy that nobody every ate?" There was butterscotch there in some kind of cellophane wrapper. It looked like nobody ever was eating it. Butterscotch became Giantman's trademark treat. When he ran out of things to say, he would revert to throwing candy. The fact of the matter is Giantman had very little to tell the Tufts community other than "My strength is amazing. My girth is enormous. And my height is unequaled." He would brag like this for only two or three minutes and then retreat back to the bushes. Problem was, Podo would get really tired really quickly. He walked out really fast. He almost was running out. And he got really tired and didn't even know where he was going. It must have just looked absolutely idiotic. So he couldn't see? Yeah, his eyes were covered. I remember I would sit on his head, and I would put both my hands on his head, kind of give him direction by maybe forcing his head in a certain direction. Giantman became a phenomenon. Enthusiasts wore "I love Giantman" t-shirts, which had silhouettes of a huge man with a bulging middle. There was once a parade across campus with noise makers and a trumpet to greet him. Another time, there were torch jugglers and bodyguards. Letters were written to the student newspaper pro and con Giantman. Teachers were mentioning Giantman in class. There was a discussion in an ethics course in which people who hadn't seen Giantman argued about whether or not we were exploiting a freak of nature. Do you think that if Giantman had been an actual political cause that you would have gotten such a big turnout and there would have been such a big deal about it? Yeah, I doubt that. That's one of the things, I think, that was a big draw about it was that it didn't have any meaning. And for whatever reason, people were really drawn to that. If it had meaning or was trying to pitch some idea or something, it would seem less real, I think. There was really something fundamentally interesting and truthful about Giantman, I guess. There is something that people are drawn to that absurdity for whatever reason. By the end, Giantman's following had grown to about 350 people. I don't think any of us have had any experience like it since. When you're a student, it still feels like something exciting might happen at any moment. Life feels full of all this potential. But when you get out of school, that potential just doesn't seem to be there. What do you know now? Well, I'm an engineer. What kind of engineer? Computer engineer, designing computer circuits and things like that. And do you have Giantman-like experiences today? No, not really. I'm not parading around, talking about my magnificence. There's actually a recording of Giantman's final public appearance. There was a band called The Electric Fun Machine that dedicated a song to him. And he appeared with them at a concert on the quad. [SINGING] The Giantman. Giantman. Nine feet tall. Giantman. Students of Tufts, fear me not for I am the benevolent Giantman. I have come to show love. As a symbol of my benevolence, I shall, once again, shower you with-- And then Giantman threw butterscotch candy. Hillary Frank in New York. A program note. Producer Alix Spiegel leaves our program today, and producer Nancy Updike goes to half-time for a few months, and then she will also leave, which means that this program is the last one made by the team that has done most episodes of This American Life since it began in 1995, the team of Elise, and Nancy, and our third producer, Julie Snyder. For me, I have to say, it is like knowing that Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman will never play together again. They are each amazing in their own way. And they are more amazing together. This show that you hear on the radio every week is not mine. It is ours, the four of ours. I'm the front man, but the sensibility of the show is the four of ours. As you might expect, getting a radio program on the air each week is a little battle. And we feel about each other the way that any people who have been together in the trenches feel, namely, bonded for life. We created this thing together, this show that has become so much larger than the sum of its parts. And we will always have that together. Nancy and Elise are both skilled reporters. You will hear them here and, I expect, on other public radio shows, though I have to say, I will miss the time that we have had together very much. It has been a very unusual and a very lucky thing, this time we've had together. So This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Alex was seven. He had a Teddy bear named Tony. Tony had been with him forever. Tony was with him back when he had all sorts of surgery and nobody was sure if he was going to pull through. But Alex did pull through. And afterwards, when the nerves of the family were still jangling, Alex continued to carry around Tony for years, sleep with Tony. When he was seven, he took Tony with him to Disneyland. And, when the family got back home to San Francisco from Disneyland, Alex's parents unpacked the bags and looked for Tony. And Tony was not there. Alex's dad, Jon, tells the story. So Alex was in the room and we told him it appears that Tony isn't here. And it took him about a minute to really realize that Tony was gone. And, at that point, he said two things. The first thing is he said that he couldn't imagine life without Tony, and the other is he said, "I feel like I've lost my spirit." At that point, what's a parent to do? You know, what do you do? So they call the hotel, and the hotel says over the phone they have not found this Teddy bear. And so Jon flew down there the next morning. He tried to be a good dad, rented a car, retraced the family's path, made his way to the hotel. After waiting for a few minutes in the lobby, a security guard came and said, "Well, Mr. Holtzman, we have bad news for you. We know what happened to the bear." And they explained that a maid had seen the bear, apparently, in the garbage and that he'd been thrown away. And so my immediate reaction was well, that's great. That's not bad news. That's good news because at least we know where he is. And he said, "Well, no. You've got to see the problem here." And we went around to the back. And there was this huge sealed dumpster with a compacter on the front, literally, the size of a semi trailer and 25, 30 feet long, at least. They looked at it and there was, literally, no way into this dumpster. Jon started to despair. And I started asking, "Well, when is the next garbage pickup?" And they said, "Well, it's a day from now." And I'm thinking what am I going to do? And, just as we were having this discussion, the truck arrives to pick up this giant dumpster a day early. And this was kind of an amazing thing because, if I had gotten there 15 minutes later, or 20 minutes later, the garbage truck would've been gone. A squad of hotel employees was deployed to travel with Jon and the garbage truck to the recycling plant to search for the Teddy bear. And, you know, there are only two possible attitudes that adults would have towards this particular mission. One, they would be into it, or, two, they would think that Jon's a nut. And, incredibly, none of them thought that he was a nut. But why? Because almost all of them were parents. And, at some point or another, almost all of them had been in the same or a similar situation. I mean, you couldn't be a parent without having dealt with your kids dealing with loss, you know? And it's so horrible. And, yeah. I mean, I think everybody rallied to exactly that cause. It's interesting because I think that a lot of parents get to points, at different points in their child's lives, where they want to intervene, and they feel like they will not allow fate to hurt their child. Absolutely. And they will simply do whatever they can to stop fate. There's no question. And, you know, if you've ever had a child who almost dies, it means a lot, in a way, to be able to protect your kids from that kind of thing. Well, on this Father's Day, we bring you stories of dads trying to protect their kids and kids trying to protect their dads. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, the protection racket that is parenthood. Our program today in three acts. Act One, Paddington's Day at the Dump, the story of a man, a small toy bear, and tens of thousands of pounds of soggy garbage. Act Two, A Trip Down Memory Lane. A son takes his father on one, last road trip to jog his dad's failing memory of his own life. Act Three, Age of Enchantment. Writer Lawrence Weschler and his daughter, Sarah, talk about something that he did intending to be kind, intending to protect her from disappointment, that inadvertently broke her heart, and how she saved the day for the two of them. Stay with us. Act One, Paddington's Day at the Dump. So Jon Holtzman and the hotel employees followed the garbage truck that's hauling the dumpster away. In his car, four conscripts. And, at this point, essentially, this story becomes the movie, Saving Private Ryan. And, you know, why don't we have some of the music from the movie just to set the right mood? Perfect. Somewhere in Southern California there's a little bear named Tony. And these four recruits are going to get him out to assuage the grief of one American family. OK, so we're in the car and there is this kind of silence. I made a deal with everybody in the car. I offered each of them $100 for the person who found the bear. And we were kind of plotting strategy of, well, OK, when they open this dumpster, how are we going to find the bear? Where is he going to be in the dumpster? How many days of garbage is there? And, you know. And so we finally arrive at the recycling plant. And, first of all, the scope of this plant is not at all what I'd imagined. I expected it to be just a garbage dump. But, instead, it's what I imagine to be, essentially, a modern recycling plant. And there were these huge caterpillar trailers and tractors running around the plant. And there were these huge steel floors. And the scope, the scale, of the place was just really awesome. It's like acres is what you're trying-- Yeah, it's just huge. It takes a long, long time to talk their way into the plant. If they enter, all work at the recycling center has to stop. But, incredibly, finally, they're allowed in under one condition. We would have 15 minutes to search this pile. But that's all we could have, which put a lot of pressure on us. Although, I'm not sure we understood how much pressure it would put on us until they dumped the garbage out of the trailer. So they dumped the garbage out of the trailer. And, even though the trailer was large, I guess I'd kind of underestimated how much garbage can go in a trailer that size. And so they dumped this out on the floor. And, of course, it spread out, so it occupied this really massive space on the floor. And it was full of this brown sludge, and liquid, and just tens of thousands of plastic bags floating, essentially. Not really floating, but oozing in this-- This soggy sort of-- --soggy mess. Exactly. And I took one look at this pile and my heart truly sank because I just thought I don't even know where to begin. A number of the people who came with me jumped in and immediately started ripping open bags trying to find the bear. And so, after 30 seconds or so of taking in the enormity of the thing, I just plunged into this pile along with them. And, watching us do it, these garbage men, the folks who were running the recycling plant, at least four or five of them put on their gloves and started doing the same thing with us. So, at this point, there were a group of maybe eight or nine of us pulling apart bags and frantically looking for this bear. Seven or eight minutes into it I just despaired of ever finding the bear. And I couldn't believe it, you know? We'd come this far, you know? And it just seemed that it ought to work out, but I didn't see how it would. It was just too big. And I remember saying to myself, "Tony, if you're here, you're really just going to have to appear on the surface because there's just no way. I mean, the only way this is going to happen is if you make yourself appear." And the next thing I knew I was holding the bear. Wait a second. What do you mean? Do you mean you picked up a plastic bag and you shook-- I picked up a plastic bag, and there he was. And he was in a plastic bag, so he was completely dry and unscathed. How do you explain that? Oh, I don't. You know, I'm a rationalist. I'm not religious. I'm not really spiritual in any way. I'm a labor negotiator. I don't explain it. You know, the thing that's strange to me is not just the way I found him, but we had eight or nine people looking, you know? And why was I the one who found him? Because you were touched by an angel that wanted to save you $100? Yeah. [LAUGHS] Jon Holtzman is an attorney in San Francisco. The hotel that deployed its forces to get the bear back, I feel like we should give them credit. Let's say their name on the air. It's the Sheraton Anaheim. But one last note. Here is the thing about being a father, being a parent. Jon gets the bear. His whole squad is giddy, completely giddy, on the drive back to the hotel. And there, he calls his son to give him the news. He was really, really happy. But there was also a slightly of-course-ish response to the thing, which is, "Well, good. I'm glad you got the bear." He doesn't quite understand it for the heroic gesture that it is. I think that's true. He's like, oh, yeah. Dad went down and got the bear. That's completely true. The theme to Star Wars is not playing in his head as that happens. Act Two, Trip Down Memory Lane. Joel Meyerowitz is a photographer. He grew up in New York City. In the 1970's, his parents moved to Florida. Joel would visit for a few days at a time. As time passed, his father, Hy, developed Alzheimer's. Before he retired, Hy was a salesman for 40 years. He did a few years as a comic in a vaudeville act before that. He was a boxer. He won his weight class in the first Golden Gloves competition. But now that he had Alzheimer's, the doctor said that he should stay inside, avoid a lot of stimulation. His son, Joel, thought, what if we tried, for a brief time, something different? He wanted to have one last adventure with his father, one last road trip before the Alzheimer's made it impossible to have more adventures. Joel also hoped that, maybe, being on the road, visiting places that he'd been, going back to the old neighborhood one more time, might spark some memories that had been gone for his dad, that had been long, long vanished. It was a gift to his dad. So they got a camera. They went on a three-week trip driving from Fort Lauderdale back to New York City. Joel Meyerowitz's son, Sasha, filmed lots of the trip. You actually hear his voice only a few times in this footage I'm about to play you. When they set out on the trip, Sasha was 27, Joel was 57, Hy was 87. Do you know what ocean this is? Well, I'll be honest with you, Joel, I don't know remember. Not the Catskills ocean? Catskills are mountains. Yeah. This is an ocean. Uh-huh. Which one? Well, I don't know. Is it the Pacific or the Atlantic? I would take it as the Pacific. Wrong. Yeah, wrong. So, which one is it then? Either the Permissia? or the-- The Permissic. Right. The Permissic? The Pershimmoth. The Pershimmoth ocean. I am at the Pershimmoth. What are you asking me so early in the morning a question like that? Where were you born? 1092-- 109207-- no. 159059 East-- Well, it was East 100th Street, right? Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. He taught me all the street smart things. He set up a punching bag for me. And he taught me how to fight, how to take my stance, how to throw a punch, how to put your body behind it. He had me work out on a light bag too. Like this, you know? He always felt that, if you got into a scrape in a neighborhood, that you shouldn't run away. His motto was, "Step in and deliver the first blow." And he said, "Take the biggest guy down." And that was his attitude. He wouldn't stop and run away from anything. On Morrison Avenue, the block we lived on, he was considered the mayor of the block. Any time there was a dispute that had to be settled, they would actually come and ask him, "What do you think, Hy?" Or, if there were strangers coming through the neighborhood and they needed to be told to get out of there, they'd get him. The scenes I remember are that people would gather in front of our window and they'd yell, "Hymie. Hey, Hymie." And he'd come to the window. And he would adjudicate from the window. He would say, "No. No, you shouldn't do that." And, "He should do this. And, "You get that. Let him alone." It was like the judge. Here they come, baby. Yeah, watch him now. Hey, ya. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hey, Pop. What? Do you know what this reminds me of? No. Does that remind you of Melvin? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. You didn't think of the neighbor that time. Do you remember Melvin? Yeah, sure, I remember him. What was Melvin? It was a little Chinese-- a little bird. A parakeet. Parakeet, right. I didn't think of the-- Do you remember the things that Melvin said? He called to us. He spoke to us, and he also called his name out a lot. How did he say it? Do you remember? Hi, I'm Melvin. Hi, Melvin. Isn't it, "Hi Melvin?" No. He said I'm Melvin, what? Melvin Belvin? I'm Melvin Meyerowitz. Oh, yeah. [LAUGHS] Can you tell me the story of the time he-- I can't tell you about it. Look at this. I can't tell you about it. And look at this. Another one coming. Hi, boys. Hello. Hello. We know you. We know your grandfather. Pop, remember how he used to say my name is Melvin Meyerowitz, I'm a Jewish bird? Yes. Yes. That comes back to you? I know it. It didn't. But that-- Good morning, Doctor Goldberg? Oh, yeah. Remember Dr. Goldberg came to visit Mom when she was sick? Yeah. Do you remember the time the bird flew away across the Bronx? He went out the door on Mom's shoulder and he flew away? And we were all so heartbroken that the bird was gone. And then some woman called up. Do you remember? She called Mom and she said, "Do you have a bird named Melvin?" My mother said, "Yeah, we have a bird. It was a green and yellow parakeet." And the woman said, "Well, the bird landed on my window and said, 'My name is Melvin Meyerowitz. I'm a Jewish bird.' And I looked you up in the phone book. And I called a Meyerowitz, and they said, 'Oh, no, that's my brother Hy's bird." We went and we got the bird back. Do you remember that? No. I'm surprised. Come on. You want to go? You want to go-- don't fall. Take it easy. Take it easy. Do you want to go? With the onset of memory loss, it's not only his memories that are fading away, but it's the memories that I shared with him that are fading away. So I could no longer say to him, "Hey, Pop. Remember, we did this," and have him say, "Yes, that was fantastic," remember it. So I found myself progressively left alone with my memories. And then you look at your own memories and you realize, I've got this handful of really insignificant things, and I've made them my world, my world of memory. And it's astonishing how the few things that I recall to share with him are minor notes, you know, the bird or the handful of things that I ask him. So, that was a lesson, for me, about what it is that rises up out of our experience that we hold onto. Pop? Yes. I want to ask you a few questions about the family. About our family? About our family. Yes. You've got three sons. Yes. What are their names? Joel, Ricky-- And who's your youngest son? The youngest one is-- I think it's David but I don't remember his name any more. Joel, Rick, and-- Joel, Ricky, and-- yeah. Stevie. Stevie, oh, yeah. Do you know what Rick does to make a living, what his career is? Well, he tries to do a lot of stuff. If he were following me, he'd be doing it on the crook, but-- What's he famous for? Ricky? Yeah. Well, in the first place, he's my kid. You are also. And because that alone will get you enough fame. So you don't know what Rick does? Ricky? Rick is a half-time, a part-time-- that book, I don't know the trade name. OK, you're getting closer, Pop. Just try. Try to think about what Rick does. Rick? Rick is an artist. Right. You got it. Not? You got it. You got it right. And I'm Joel. What do I do? Ah, you're a doll. You're my best number one for-- Come on, get serious, Pop. Do you remember what it is I do? What do I do? You make money. [LAUGHS] I'll tell you what. I'll give it to you straight off the street. What's my profession? What's, what? What's my profession? What's your most attachment? What's my profession? Your profession? Now I've got it figured out. I don't know, a crook, or a thief, or whatever. You're known as an artist, serious artist, in the art field. OK. What about Stevie? What's Stevie's business? Judy? Stevie. Stevie? I don't know. Does it bother you that you can't remember your kid's names sometimes? And you can't remember what they do? Well, I tell you, yeah. I see them. Hello. Goodbye. And that's it. I'm not complaining. Is it hard to see him like this? Does it feel painful? Honestly, It's sad. I mean, I have a feeling of sadness. But I also have a feeling of acceptance. We've been apart for 20 years in the mutual prime of our lives. When I was raising my children and he was a grandparent, we weren't together. And so, I guess, I'm just accepting of where he is. If we had been together for 20 years, and I had seen the decline, and I had been relating to him emotionally and lovingly all that time, I might feel a deeper sadness. But, even though he's my father, the distance that we've been apart all these years has put some kind of a buffer in there. So this is the guy that I know now. We have a much closer relationship in the way we see each other and talk to each other and have continuity. I just know, at one point, you said to him he was your hero. Actually, I thought it was so sweet. And I thought it must be hard to see-- --your hero fall. Yeah, right. Well, he was my hero, my childhood hero, you know? But that's so far away. I can't relate to the sadness of that. I mean, I love him in that unequivocal way that a child loves a parent. And I feel, when I care for him, a kind of, I guess, a renewal or a rebirth of feeling in this period. I know, when I take him after a shower and I rub him down and I actually feel his head in my hand and I feel his flesh in my hands, it's been many years since I had that kind of contact with my father. And it was a little strange at first. I thought, what's it like to rub this other person's body, touch this other person's body? There's a slight deference. And then I realize it's my pop, you know? And he's in need. He can't take care of himself this way. Mom? OK, here's Papa, Mom. Hold on. OK. Here comes Dad. Joel? Is it my Joel? Don't you know who I am? Who? What do you mean how come I'm on the phone? Don't get mad at me. Don't get mad at me. It's very important because I've been traveling. I think my father had a classic marriage of his generation. He loved my mother. She was beautiful and hot-tempered, an exciting person to be with. But he wanted something from her that either he didn't know how to get or she couldn't give. And that was a kind of mother love that he, himself, hadn't experienced. Oh, yes. I'm OK. No, I'm not having a good time. Are you having a good time? You are, really? OK. I want you to be healthy and strong and smile, Sally. You know, his mother had been bedridden after his birth. And then she died soon after, so he never really knew her. And that's the deepest groove in his memory, which is, I think, unrequited love. Don't get down to judge this because, right now, I'm beginning to face one of Joel's tests. And I will be back home, maybe, who knows, a couple of months from now. I don't know, Sally. Would you go with me the next trip? Would you go with me the next trip? OK. All right, babe. Take care, sweetheart. Be careful, will you? Be careful. Bye-bye. And I think that, from my point of view now, that, if he had really just loved my mother without demanding something from her or needing something from her, which was that childhood need, that she probably would have just loved him back for the kind, warm, funny man that he was. But, because there was something that he was demanding, she couldn't give it to him. A kind of perverse logic of relationship occurred. She's mad. She's mad about something. She's mad about me. I didn't do nothing. Why is she mad? She's mad that's all. She sounded very, very bad. She sounded like she didn't care. Well, she probably was caring a lot. Oh, sure. Which is why she was mad that you didn't call. I waver also, when I think of her being by herself. And I would rather be there than be here. But you're having such a good time here. Yeah. I'm, to my limits, I'm having what I like. And I would love to be involved with [INAUDIBLE]. But the idea is that I always have to include Mama. Throughout the trip he asked for Sally every single day. "Where's Sally?" "Where's Mom," thinking that she should have been in the car next to him. Sally. Did you leave Sally upstairs there? Yeah, Pop. We said goodbye to Mom. No kidding? Right? Because I noticed, right here, that there's no Sally. I thought this was Sally all bundled up, and I see it's not bundled up. It's your pillow. That bed pillow's going to have to be your Sally for the next two weeks, though. Yeah, yeah, the pillow. Oh, you guys are starting to pull tricks on me now. I know. I know. I know. Well, is she--was she here? Nope. That's your pillow, Pop. Jesus Christ, almighty. I know she's not in the trunk. You wouldn't do that to her. I'm not even going to come through this Joel. You know, I'm not the smartest or the cutest in the service. If my mommy don't come up, and then don't come down in five minutes, I want to know where she is. This is my wife. So we'd better check the trunk. Yeah, or the bed is in the trunk. I wouldn't be surprised. There was a time, when we were driving with her in Florida before we made the film, and she was sitting right next to him. And he leaned over to me and he said, "Where's Mom?" And I said, "Well, who's sitting next to you?" And he looked over at this person sitting next to him and he said, "Where's Sally? That's not Sally." When my father was young, he was a wonderful dancer and athlete and a natural comic. And I guess Charlie Chaplin was the rage. And, just as there were Elvis imitators, there were Chaplin imitators. And, my father, he became a Chaplin imitator. And he had that act that, I guess, he took on the road or around the vaudeville circuit in New York. I was trying to fit in myself too, all the years, with the joking. I was trying to be a Chaplin. I didn't know if I was doing that right or wrong. But I saw that poor little guy that he'd bend down, pick something up, everybody'd give him a kick in the ass. That was what I used to see. That is what I didn't want to happen to me. What was it that you liked about Charlie Chaplin, that made you want to do the Charlie Chaplin act? He was a giant in the height of a little midget. He was a little guy righting all the wrongs, helping others. As he'd pass by, we'd pat him on the top of the head. He was remembered out there. And I just meditate, look at the little party. And the little person had no money or no nothing. And he was going-- on the inside. He'd come out here, like this, like shake his shoulders and then traveled on. And that was what I loved, the goodness, the goodness. And not everybody understood him. But those that understood him, they would put their arm around him, and he would do the same. But it was a beautiful deed for the day. Did you feel connected to him in that way? Always. Always. Always. Aw. With Alzeimer's disease, most memory finally dissolves. And, even though he was a man who was easily lovable, I think he forgot that these were his qualities. And that he was, in fact, loved by people faded from his memory. And, at the end of his life, he remembers a few of the more painful things-- that he's a motherless child, that he was not loved the way he wanted to be loved. And it's amazing that, with the murkiness of Alzheimer's clouding everything, that something as primal as being an unloved child stayed with him. Well, everybody would show a little bit of something to me that I was accepted. And they would talk to me. And they'd pat me on the top of the head or they'd put their hands around me. I'm home. I loved everybody. I loved everybody, but nobody saw me. Nobody remembered me. Nobody knew me and nobody saw me, but I was there. And, to this very day, I have the same thing. I have poor Mommy and she doesn't see me. She doesn't see me. Aw, Pop. Well, your boys saw you. We all saw you. I loved when you were the strong man in the neighborhood, but I loved when you were the Chaplin figure and the comic. I loved the way you drove the car. You were such a great driver. I loved the way you talked to people. You could talk to the big guys or the little guys, and you made them all the same, Pop. I used to think of you as the great equalizer. You could take a guy who was a doctor, or a principal of the school, or a business man, and you can take another guy, who was just an ordinary worker, and you would treat them the same. And you would bring them all to the same level, and that would be the level of laughter. You saw me. You saw Papa. That's right. Joel Meyerowitz; his father, Hy; his son, Sasha. In the year since they recorded that footage, Hy has died. Joel and Sasha cut their footage into a film. It's called, Pop. It aired on the PBS show, Frontline. This September, Joel is putting out a book, called Aftermath, with his large-format photos from the Ground Zero site in New York City. Coming up, can a dad try too hard? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle that theme. Today's program, for Father's Day, we bring you stories of kids trying to care for and protect their dads and dads trying to protect and care for their kids. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Age of Enchantment. Lawrence Weschler is an author and journalist. He used to write a lot for The New Yorker magazine. This story is about his attempt to protect his daughter, Sarah, from disappointment and to thrill her. And how, with the best of intentions, all of this went awry and led to an odd breach of trust between father and child. He and Sarah went into a studio in New York City to tell us this story. At the time, Sarah was 11 years old. The story begins simply enough. She would get into very active conversations with the characters in the books while we were reading. So, for example, when we were reading Little House on the Prairie there would be these moments where she would interrupt my reading and say, "Wait a second. I want to talk to the Indian." And we'd have to go look for a picture of the Indian. And she'd say to the Indian, "Now look, Indian, in a few pages you're going to meet Laura, but you've got to understand. I know she's taking your land, but it's not her fault. She's just a kid. Now, let me talk to Laura." And we'd go back and we'd talk to Laura. And in these things I would take on the role of the Indian, and I'd say things like, "Who's that talking," and so forth. And we would have these incredibly elaborate conversations. Do you remember that, Sarah? Yes. Anyway, this sort of thing would go on all the time. And, at a later point, we began reading The Borrowers series, the series of wonderful books by Mary Noble. Norton. Mary-- excuse me. Norton. By Mary Norton, that's right. And, well, should Sarah describe what the book is about, maybe? Sure. Sarah, explain what the borrowers are like. Well, The Borrowers, it's about these little people who are, I think, like four inches tall. And they live under the floorboards in the house. And what they do is they take things from people, little things, that they can use around their house. So what kinds of things do they take? Well, they take pocket watches, and stamps, or pictures on the wall. And part of the point about borrowers is that they're not allowed-- are they allowed to talk to people? No. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Well, because they think that people can really hurt them because, according to the book, it's happened before. Right. So, anyway, we were reading this book. And one day I came home and Sarah was incredibly excited. Her face was just glowing. She said, "Daddy! You won't believe it! We have borrowers here in our own house!" And my memory is that-- maybe you remember this differently, Sarah, but-- my memory was that she went to a particular place in the basement. And she pointed at this little hole in the wall in the basement near the floor. And she said, "I was coming down the stairs. And there was one of them standing right there, a little girl. And she was wearing a pink taffeta skirt." That's what you said. "And I froze. And she froze. And we looked at each other. And I knew I wasn't supposed to talk to her, that she shouldn't talk to me, but we just looked at each other. And, after about 30 seconds, she kind of waved her hand, just slightly, and she ran away. And it was right there." And Sarah took me to the place where it was. And, Sarah, let me just ask you. What do you remember of this? Well, I remember having seen-- well, you see, it's so strange to say this because I feel like I'm betraying the borrowers, but I still believe in them. And, if I ever actually got to meet one, I'd never tell anyone. And I do remember having seen something. And it wasn't really for 30 seconds. It was for, maybe, 10 seconds, and then it ran away. And, even now when you think about it, you can picture? You can picture seeing it? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't imagine it. It was definitely there. And it was a little girl? Yeah, I think. And then, over the next few days, Sarah began leaving things for this borrower. And the first thing in the morning she would race downstairs to see whether the things had been picked up. Do you remember what kind of things you left? Sometimes I'd leave toothpicks or pieces of food. What do they use toothpicks for? Oh, just to dig with, you know? Kind of an all-purpose tool? Yeah. Yeah. Walking stick. Yeah. Things like that. Anyway, so she would leave these things there. And she would be so disappointed, and disappointment verging on desolation, that they weren't picked up. And she'd have long conversations with me. She said, "Why aren't they picking them up? Don't they know that I'm giving it to them?" And I would try to explain that, maybe, they were scared, or nervous, or something, that's how borrowers are. But she was so sad. And this went on. I figured this would end but, at some point, this went on for a week. And I don't know why I did it because it began a cascade of consequences. But one night I picked up the stuff and put it in my pocket. And, the next morning, she came bounding up the stairs saying, "Daddy! You won't believe it! There are borrowers just like I said! They took the stuff! They took the stuff!" And she was transported with delight. And I figured that would be the end of it, but it wasn't. Well, what happened next, Sarah? I started writing to them. I started writing letters. OK. Why don't I ask you to pull out one of those letters, and let's hear what you wrote for the first one. All right, the first one. OK. Now, you were six at the time, right? Seven. Seven. Dear Borrowers, I have seen you, but I want to meet you. If I do, I will not tell anyone without your permission. Agreed, or not agreed? And then this is the borrower explaining-- Just one second. So what happened is that, that note on a little yellow Post-it, lay by the hole for several days. And for several mornings Sarah would be completely devastated that it had not been answered. So I went through several days of not quite knowing what to do because she was getting more and more sad about this and more concerned. And so then I figured, well, it won't do any harm to pick up the piece of paper and write a little, tiny message back, which I did. Do you have that there as well? Yeah, it's on the same piece of paper. OK. So-- Dear Sarah, gosh, this is strange. Who are you? How do you know about borrowers? I thought no human beings ever knew about us. My dad says it's too dangerous for borrowers to meet a human being. And he even says I mustn't write to you. But maybe, at least, I can write. Will you write back? I hope so. I'll keep it a secret from my dad. Signed, Annabel Lee. PS, I am 11. How about you? And so you got this. Do you remember getting this letter? Mm-hm. Do you remember that morning, what you said when you came up the stairs? No. What did she say? Do you remember? Oh, she was just, "They are! I told you! I told you! And she answered! She answered! And she wants me to write back!" And she was over the moon. And she wrote back, immediately. Yeah. So, Ren, did you conceive of your borrowers as being descendants of the borrowers in the book? Well, it was unclear. I mean, it was a possibility. And it was up to Sarah to keep dredging and find out more. And so a large part of the correspondences is Sarah doing genealogical work on the family and asking all kinds of questions. Yeah, I would ask, "What was your grandmother's name?" And it turned out that her grandmother was Arrietty, which is the main character. The main character in the book? Yeah. And she says that she calls her dad Pea, as in a pea pod, because, in the book, the dad is Pod. Oh. And then she calls her mom Homie because, in the book, the mother is Homily. How long did the letters go back and forth? How many letters were there? I think there were over 17 because I didn't finish counting, but I counted up to 17. And, Ren, during this time, were you frightened about where this was all going to lead, that at some point you would get found out? Well, it was getting strange and, actually, kind of nerve-wracking. And I would do things. I kept on figuring that Sarah was going to grow out of this or that Sarah would make the association that this was kind of like what we used to do when I would read about the Indian or about Laura. I kept on thinking that she would just enjoy that, but she was getting more and more into it. And it was becoming more and more involved. And the more involved, the more I could see how invested Sarah was in it. I mean, it really was the main thing going on in her life during that season. And, as she began telling friends about it and so forth, the stories had to get more and more elaborate to include all the stray bits of details that were seeping into things. And I didn't quite know where it was going to go. I would do things. I would send the borrowers on vacations. You would send them on vacations? I'd just have them suddenly disappear for a while. And they'd be gone for a while. And I would hope that, by the time it was over, Sarah would have forgotten. If I had said they'd be gone three weeks, there weeks later on that day there'd be a note for them from Sarah. And, Sarah, did you suspect at that point? No. No. The second I suspected it, I was almost sure that it had been him. And I just went up and asked him if it was him. Why is it that you started to suspect? Do you remember what happened that made you suspect? I think it was sort of the fact-- not his handwriting, actually. It was that I would tell my dad, for instance, that I was in the basement and I stuck my finger into this hole, and I felt something sort of silky or something. It was probably just something, an old piece of cloth that was stuck there. But I felt it, and I told my dad. And it sort of slipped away from my finger. And told my dad about it. And then, in the next letter, Annabel Lee'd be saying, "Oh, was that you who touched me when I was wearing my silk dress? And so I started to think I tell my dad things that, sometimes, I'd exaggerate a little bit. When I was younger, I exaggerated some things. I made things a little bit more exciting than they might have really been. And then I read the letter, and it had that exaggerated part in it. And so I started to go, that didn't really happen. I was just adding that to my story. And so I got-- That made you suspicious? Yeah. And I asked my dad, and-- So what happened there was we had moved to the new house. We had been there for a couple of months at that point. And I was down in the basement moving some boxes around. And Sarah came down there. And, how old? She's now eight. Yeah. OK. In this story, yeah. At this point in the story, yeah. And she began. Her lips were trembling. Her lower lip was trembling. And she looked at me very firmly as she is quite capable of doing. And she said, "Daddy, I'm going to ask you a question now, and you have to tell the truth because it's a sin for daddies to lie to their daughters." And my heart just sank. And she said, "Daddy, are you the one who's been writing Annabel Lee's notes?" And I looked at her. And she looked at me. And there was silence for five or six seconds. And then I said, "You know, it's kind of complicated. Can we talk--" and she said, "Daddy, it's not complicated. It's simple. Are you the one?" And I said, "Well, can we talk about it later?" She said, "No. Just tell me. Are you the one or not?" And I took a big breath and I said, "Yes, it is me." And she broke into-- I was crying. Oh, god. She was sobbing. I was so sad. She started sobbing. It was, easily, the most wrenching thing that had happened in my parenthood up to that point. I mean, I had totally blown it. I just felt total disaster. And I was crying. And she was crying. And, you know, we were both kind of clutching each other and holding each other. And we were really in a trap there. We were down the hole at that point. We were in big trouble. And, suddenly, this kind of calm came over Sarah's face. It was kind of like the sun rising in the morning. And her forehead stopped being furrowed. It became smooth. And she just looked at me, and she said, "Daddy, don't you realize? You've ruined everything because there are borrowers. And you were taking the letters before they were able to get them." And she had solved everything there because, among other things, that was what she was going to be able to tell her friends. And they could all chortle about what kind of a crazy father she had. And it was amazing. She found a way of getting us out of this disaster that, I suppose, I had fashioned for us. Because I remember saying that you should have left it there. Maybe they would have really written back. You shouldn't have done it because maybe they would have actually written back to me, finally, at some point. Like I said earlier, I still believe in them. And I know that may sound really baby-ish to some kids who might listen to this, but I still believe in them. And when I told Megan, my friend, when I told Megan that it had been my dad, she stopped believing in them. And she'd just, whenever I'd talk about it from then on, she'd laugh at me and tell me, "Oh, Sarah, stop being a baby." Because she's a year older than me, so she, at that time, she still considered herself really superior to me even though we were best friends. And she said, "Oh, Sarah, stop being a baby. It's not true. It's just not true." And I said, "But I've seen them." And she said, "No, you haven't. You just imagined it. And it's not true. And you can just stop imagining it. And stop telling me about it because it's not true." How do you feel about it now when you look at those letters? I don't know. Sometimes, when I read them, I still can think, "I wonder why this happened to her? I wonder why that happened to her? I wonder why she would say that?" Even though I'd know that it was my dad writing to me, I still, sometimes, think of there being an Annabel Lee somewhere out there. When we pulled out the box last night, of letters, did it bring you pleasure to look at those letters? Well, actually, I look at it a lot. You do? Yeah. You look at it a lot? Yeah. And what do you think when you look at it? Well, now, looking back, it was sort of nice of him to do that. Because I remember, when it was happening and after I had figured out that it was him, I had asked him, "Well, can we still write to each other?" And we never really, actually, wrote to each other after that. But I just thought, after a while, that it was a nice thing. And that, even though, maybe there was no borrower writing to me, there was, maybe, having my dad make up this whole family was, maybe, just as special. Or maybe almost as special as having actually been writing to a borrower. Sarah, can I ask you, what do you think the lesson of this story is? That is, if parents hear you tell this story, you and your dad tell this story on the radio, and, if another parent gets into this kind of situation, what's your advice for them? Should they go along with it? Should they write letters, and should they pick up stuff? I don't know, because it was really fun for me to have this kind of experience. But, when I found out that it was my dad writing, it was really upsetting. And so I just-- I don't know. I think that I wouldn't. If I were a parent and I had that kind of thing, I would not pick it up. You would not? No. I would keep encouraging my kid and my child to keep on writing to the borrowers and trying to get them to write back, but I wouldn't pick it up. What if they keep coming to you so sad every morning, the way you were sad coming to me, and just pleading, "I wish. I wish. I wish they would come?" Can you imagine ever picking it up? No. Really? I don't think it's fair to lead someone on like that. Ren, as far as you're concerned, what's the lesson of this story? If you had this to do again, if you would get into this situation again or if you could go back with the benefit of hindsight, what would you do? Would you have left the letters? I mean, I'd like to say that, had I to live it over again, I wouldn't do it this way. But I'm not sure because it started so naturally. And, in the end, by the way, what I'd have to say is probably the most poignant, closest, amazing moment I've had, you know, the moment I'll remember of a particular phase of my life, is the holding onto each other in the basement, both of us crying, but Sarah not running away and Sarah saving us. And that kind of cemented our relationship in a really wonderful way. It might not end that way for everybody. Yeah, it might not end that way for everybody. That's true. I continue to puzzle about it. And it is unresolved for me, as my answer is indicating, I suppose. It's interesting, to me that the way that you view the lesson of this story is that Sarah saved the two of you. That, as a parent, you got yourself into a moment where you literally didn't know what to do, and that she finally said the thing that made everything OK. I absolutely feel that. Has it affected our relationship, do you think? Do you not trust me in the way you used to trust me? No. No. No, I still trust you. Sarah, do you view this as one of the moments when you were closest to your dad? Well, I'm very close my dad, so I don't know. It's like, yeah, I guess so. But it's not like much closer than I am usually because I'm probably close to my dad all the time. But, yeah, it is one of the times that I was closest, I guess. Yeah. So, my heart is in my throat. Lawrence Weschler, he's now the artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. And he's the author of many books, including his latest, Everything That Rises, A Book of Convergences. Sarah is now 19. This past year, she's been teaching kindergarten in a remote village in Tanzania. She goes off to college in the fall. Back when we recorded this interview, eight years ago, she said that even at the time that we were recording the interview she still believed in the borrowers. In fact, she said she was going to listen to the story, but not in the house. She was going to listen in the car. I don't want us to listen to it at the house because, if there are still borrowers in our house, I don't want them to hear that and think that they can't trust me. Because, right now, I'm telling their whole story, so I feel like I'm sort of betraying them. And I just wanted to make sure that they knew that, you know? If I actually did meet one, I wouldn't tell anyone. I would never tell a single person in the world. Our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alex Blumberg, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and Jorge Just. Contributing editors for this show Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and Consigliere, Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Sylvia Lemus, Sativa January, and Seth Lind. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to all of our programs and our archives for absolutely free, 24 hours a day. Or, you know, you can download today's program and our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia who declares every time someone chooses not to pledge to this radio station-- I feel like I've lost my spirit. I'm Ira Glass. To my dad, Barry Glass, off in Baltimore, Maryland, happy Father's Day, Dad. And see you soon in New York City, OK? To all the rest of you, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Consider for a moment all the art forms that were created on this continent by Americans-- jazz, the blues, musical theater, rock and roll, phonograph recordings themselves, television, motion pictures, video games. I would argue that all of them are eclipsed by the art form at which we truly excel as a nation, the art form which more Americans practice than any other, the art form which actually dominates all the other art forms and our political life as well. And that is the art of selling. That's what we do the most reliably. From Wall Street to the pollsters in market research firms and focus group operations all across the fruited plain, from the telemarketers who phone us during dinner to the junk mailing operations that fill our mailboxes in the morning, from James Carville selling candidates on our televisions to the gang kids on Chicago's West Side selling weed in Humboldt Park, from the corny ads on every other radio station to the pledge drives that I participate in myself on this very station. From sea to shining sea, sales is our great democratic art form. And I would argue, nothing wrong with that. And in any case, we don't have any choice about it, so we might as well decide to feel good about the whole thing. To help you do that, today on our radio program, inspiring case studies and some horrifying ones too. The whole gamut. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Sales. America's greatest art form. Act One of our show today, How To Talk Your Way Into Half A Million Dollars In Just 45 Minutes. In that act, Sandra Tsing Loh accompanies a Hollywood screenwriter, as he tries to sell a movie idea. Act Two, Jail Sell. That's S-E-L-L. A story from Danny Hoch in which a true American salesman gets thrown in the slammer for simply being an entrepreneur and has a few words to say about it, believe me. Act Three, Who's The Man? We have this story of how becoming a salesman can change your life, make you more confident, make you able to charm anyone. And why you might decide that that's not such a good thing. Act Four, The Secret To Being Rich And Happy. The life of 76-year-old salesman Jimmy Roy in Braddock, Pennsylvania raises the possibility that being a rich salesman and being a happy salesmen might be mutually exclusive. Stay with us. Act One, How To Talk Your Way Into A Half Million Dollars In Just 45 Minutes. Friends, let us consider one of the many crossroads where art and commerce meet and ask the question, is commerce the greater art than art itself? In our first story today, writer Sandra Tsing Loh takes us into a setting that, as an occasional screenwriter, she knows well herself-- the Hollywood pitch meeting, where movie and TV deals are made. And we thought we would start our show here because it is a sales situation where the stakes are enormously high, where things are decided very quickly, and where people who often like to think of themselves as artists-- I mean, writers, and producers, and people like that-- are basically forced to be salesmen. Here's Sandra. I'm with writer Scott Fifer two days before a big movie pitch meeting. We're in his small office nested deep in an office building on Wilshire, where Scott works on the writing staff of Beverly Hills, 90210, a waning Spelling TV show about increasingly long-in-the-tooth teens. It's not where he wants to be forever. What Scott really wants to do is write movies, big, funny movies. And he's had some luck. Four years ago, he sold a pitch to Columbia-- a kind of Lysistrata, but with football widows-- and was paid to write the script. Although it's now in turnaround, hiatus, limbo, no more money will be forthcoming, et cetera. Scott knows he's a good pitcher and writer and that he has a really funny, new movie idea, which he's pitched, so far, to seven producers. In fact, every producer I've gone to has responded very positively and very excited. So that gets me excited. And I think, "Wow, this is going to sell. I'm going to sell this pitch. I'm going to be rich." So what happened with those seven so far? They didn't sell, and I'm not rich. Friday is pitch number eight. In the movie industry, different salesmen have different styles. Scott approaches the pitch like a performance piece. He acts out the whole movie, goes into different character voices, loads on a lot of detail. I am a little worried that I'm giving them too much information. My pitches tend to be a little long. They go about 20 minutes. And I know other people that pitch just the trailer to the movie. I was talking to Andrew Marlowe, who did Air Force One. And when he goes into a pitch, he's just like, "Arnold Schwarzenegger coming back from the dead and meeting Satan. And he turns to the camera and says, 'I'll meet you in hell.'" And that's all he has to do when he sells a million dollar pitch. What's the secret to a million dollar pitch? Before we head out to the big meeting, for a quick primer on pitching theory, I turn to veteran pitcher Bob Kosberg, reputed king of the one-line pitch, currently a producer at Merv Griffin Productions. I don't know that they're great or that they're legendary. But I can give you examples of pitches that we've sold that had those one-line, two-line hooks to them or premises that were very high concept that when an executive heard it, they right away got the idea. We sold a project called Man's Best Friend, which was really about a dog that had been genetically enhanced and then went out of control. But the key line that sold it was to then say, "In other words, Mr. Executive, it's basically Jaws on paws." And then the Jaws with paws doesn't make it a better movie, but it makes the executive remember it better? It makes the executive remember it. It's a cute, little, glib sales tool that will allow them to take your pitch and go down the hall, remember as much of the pitch as they can. But then in the middle of while they're forgetting it, they can say, "But I remember the poster. It's sort of Jaws on paws." Then they can get the laugh. It's like telling a good joke. The joke travels well down the executive corridors. We sold a story called Busby to Turner. That was a fun pitch because we actually brought a dog. Everyone knows the Taco Bell chihuahua. Well, a few years ago, there was a dog that was very hot from another movie. At this point, I'm trying to remember which dog it even was. I think it was the dog from As Good As It Gets. But we took that dog around to the studios to pitch meetings. And the dog would sit at attention with a pencil in his mouth like he was ready to take notes. But ultimately, the pitch was the story-- Busby was the story of two guys who wanted to steal the world's smartest dog right off of a studio lot. "The dog was working at Paramount," we said, "making a movie called Bite Hard III." Well, once we got to the point in the story where we could say, "These kidnappers break on to the studio lot, steal the dog, and bring it back, and wait for the phone to ring," we could stop the pitch and say, "Basically, it's Ruthless People with a dog." And it helped that the dog was in the room. So sometimes, I'm not above cheap stunts. As Kosberg goes on to describe other legendary pitches he has sold-- Norma Rae with long legs, The Lust Boat, a Bette Midler fertility clinic mix-up caper called Scrambled Eggs-- I realize that, paradoxically, I'm much more entertained by the pitches than, well, I'd probably be by the actual movies they'd spawned. Think about it. While the phrase "Jaws with paws" is a laugh, the 90-minute hilarious summer movie version of Jaws with paws with a car chase, and a teen romance, and a wacky cameo by the comedian Sinbad sounds a little painful, which makes me wonder. Have we come to a point in Hollywood history when the pitches have become better than the movies? When the pitches themselves are somehow a purer form of movie? Bob Kosberg says, "Sure. And why not?" Well, that's one of the wonderful things about pitching. When you're pitching the story in the first meetings, everybody visualizes the movie they want to see. It can only be the best possible version at that moment. It can only get worse from that point on because then you have to write the darn thing and directors come in with their version. And now, of course, to give credit to all the talented people of Hollywood, sometimes they take a pitch, and the writer, the director, the stars, the studio make it better. But you're right. A lot of times, when you're just pitching, what's great about that stage of the development process is it's all about potential. Scott Fifer-- and remember that his brilliant Lysistrata football-widows pitch is now lost in turnaround limbo-- couldn't agree more. That may very well be true. It's sad, but true that the pitch is as good as it's going to get. And it's just downhill from there. You keep getting notes on how to change it, and why it should be different, and all these other people start adding their opinions. And it's frustrating that I still can think of that pitch and think, "My god, that's such a great idea. That's such a movie. I can see it. It stars Julia Roberts. I love it." And it may never happen. And that's so frustrating. To avoid frustration, Scott knows that the producers he's pitching to Friday are looking specifically for a Liar Liar type comedy, which is the very type of movie he's pitching. Although, depending on his audience, he can also pitch it as a Dumb And Dumber comedy or a Nutty Professor comedy. How will he know his pitch is succeeding? When the executives laugh. Who is he pitching to? Two successful and in-demand producers, whose most recent movie is being released by Dreamworks, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen. I am sure that I met these people once. But sometimes, they might not remember me because they meet more writers than I meet producers. It helps if you know the people because it is much less comfortable when you're pitching to a complete stranger. So it would be nice if they actually have some recognition when they look in my eyes. They don't. Hey. Scott. Nice to meet you, Scott. Dan Jinks. How are you? I'm Sandra. It's nice-- Sandra, how are you? We've met before. Yes, we have. We have. I don't think I've never met before. But I read you. You wrote Starstruck? Yes. Though actually, we have met. But that's OK. I couldn't remember. There's a lot of mes, and not a lot of yous. I came to your house up in the Hollywood Hills. That's right. Now let me cue you in to what's physically happening. Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, the producers, are settling themselves into chairs on the right side of the room, which is fairly bare. These are relatively new offices, ones they've just moved into. Scott, looking subtly natty, and yet casual, in black, button-down DKNY shirt and black jeans, is settling himself into a chair on the left. What's extraordinary, given the clear division between seller and buyer-- I mean Scott is here to pitch an idea which Dan and Bruce will either buy or reject. It'll be over as soon as he leaves the room, possibly even before he leaves the room. Anyway, what's extraordinary, given that there are literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake, is the intense sense of casualness, openness, even democracy, in the room. Everyone's 30-ish or so. No one's in a suit. It's as if the stakes are so frighteningly high that the only way anyone could get through this is if everyone does their best to pretend nothing's at stake. And so the producers are bantering with us. And, more importantly, they are practicing that peculiar playing-field-leveling gambit you might think of as "The ritual of the water." How's everyone? Do you want waters? I would like some, please. Yeah. Can I tell you the exciting thing is that we were renting furniture here. And now we've bought furniture, but we don't have a couch yet, so this is why-- oh, who didn't get a water? You didn't get a water. Anyway, so-- In a nutshell, here's what the plastic bottled water, traveling hand to hand, from producer-- buyer-- to writer-- seller-- tends to mean. And the water always travels buyer to seller. Do writers ever bring producers bottles of water when they pitch? No. Anyway, in my personal experience, the water is a courtesy gesture that always implies a lack of something. At the beginning of a meeting, "We don't know you. Have a water." In the middle of a meeting, "Leslie Ann here, may be nothing more than a poorly-paid intern, but even she deserves a water." At the end of a meeting for an unsuccessful pitch, "In lieu of actual money, here, take an extra water." At this moment, rolling around on the floor of my car, are literally about a dozen half-filled plastic bottles of water. What the water is, also, is a banter helper. The pre-pitch banter, of course, being another key democratizing ritual. "How was your drive over? Did you find our office OK?" "Yes, I did. But that left turn onto Santa Monica, I hate that turn." The four basic modes of executive banter are, one, how was your drive over? Two, we know some of the same people. Three, I was just reviewing your work, which I followed for many years, and thinking how much I especially loved your piece on-- you'd be surprised how rarely that happens. And finally, of course, there's the dreaded four. "Sorry you had to wait for 40 minutes. It's just that my son's 10th birthday party is happening on Saturday, and the whole household is in an uproar." In general, the actual content of the banter is less important than how long it lasts, which is always a delicate matter. As the pitcher, you don't necessarily want to be the first to cut the banter off, abruptly transitioning a warm, us-focused human room into a crude, me-focused "Have I got something to sell you" room. Also, if an executive encourages a long period of banter, it can be a good thing because it means "I'm loving this conversation. I'm loving you. Eddie Murphy enjoys working with down-to-earth people. Let's make a deal." On the other hand, it can go on too long. I once went to a pitch meeting at a major television network, where the executive told hilarious stories about herself for 45 minutes out of a 1 hour meeting, with apparently huge enjoyment, eliciting regular, rhythmic howls of laughter from her sub-executives. She had literally talked so long, I'd forgotten why I was there or what I was supposed to be pitching. All I was aware of was of my body tossing forward and back with the others, slaves rowing together in a kind of merciless comedy galley of hilarity. Perhaps you've noticed the hilarious TV sitcom Suddenly Sandra wasn't on last fall's schedule. Scott's transition from banter into the very act of selling is perfectly smooth. He unobtrusively takes out a stack of his three-by-five cards and says, Anyway. Anyway. So I have this pitch for you. Yes. Wonderful. And I don't know if you know too much about it. I don't think I have any idea what it is. So I'm excited. All right. Well, I'll tell you it's a comedy. And that it's in the vein of Liar Liar. I used that as my role model because I figured, that's a great way to go. I like it a lot actually. Exactly. So if you're ready. We're ready. Our hero is TC-- Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler-- he runs a Mrs. Goody's. Think of Mrs. Field's store. And he hates it. He hates rolling the dough, hates baking the cookies. He hates being nice to his picky customers we see. And he hates the sappy logo, which is a saccharine photo of Mrs. Goody herself, TC's mother. The premise Scott is moving toward, what's calculated to strike the listener at about minute six or seven of the pitch, is what if all the sayings your mother ever said to you came true? An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Frown in your face will stay that way. Swallow a watermelon seed, and a watermelon will grow in your stomach, et cetera. It's commercial. It's funny. It's well worked out. And yet, as Scott pitches on, exuding confidence, calmly flipping his index cards, I remember a thing he'd said to me on Wednesday. When they're not laughing, if there's a long gap, it probably makes me talk faster. Because then I think, "All right, I'm losing them. I've got to speed up here and get to the next funny point." So if I even speed up and talk faster than I was before, which is almost impossible, then you know I think I'm in trouble. And I'm just trying to get to something even funnier. And I'm flipping through the cards like, "When's the next funny thing?" And now, midway through the pitch, I realize Scott is literally talking faster than I've ever heard him-- or really, any other living human being-- talk before. TC's completely stuffed, but he has to eat it all because of the starving kids in Africa. So now he's comically gobbling down food. He doesn't want it. It's not the romantic evening he planned at all. Now the CEO is always-- Throughout all this, Bruce occasionally laughs. But Dan makes no sound at all. He just sits there, smiling. Is it a warm smile? A civil smile? I can't tell. Around minute 13 though, when Scott gets to the big masturbation joke, he clearly starts to win them over. And, to my surprise and relief, the ending of the pitch is warm. But he gives him a long, passionate kiss to hold him over. And he thanks her and asks her if she has any carrots because he's going to need them in the morning. The end. Bravo. There you go. Can I have some water? I will tell you my thoughts. Are you open to hearing thoughts and suggestions about it? Of course. I really like it a lot. I had a couple of thoughts. Right now, the way you describe this guy is he seems like he's almost too much of a schmuck. It's hard for us, as an audience, to care about what happens to him. And I think that to make this movie work better, I think that we need to have an investment in his story and in him. Dan and Bruce critique the pitch for 10 minutes, an unusually long time. And it's hard to know how to read this. Does this mean they're interested? Or that they hate it? And then, at the end, their final question is, "Have our notes made sense to you?" They don't promise they'll call or consult with others in their production company. This does not seem to bode well. Well, thanks for listening. Thank you for-- Thanks for coming in and telling it to us. Now the only thing that remains is the long walk to the elevator. Before we leave the building, I make Scott duck into the only private place I can think of, the ladies lounge, for a quick post-mortem. So how do you feel the pitch went from your side? Obviously, it went great. But what was the experience like for you? I felt it went well. I could tell that they were into it. They were paying attention. I didn't feel like it was the greatest pitch, but I could tell it was going well. Into the ladies lounge suddenly appears a lady. I'm sorry. We're just finishing an interview. Go through. Sorry. So any other thoughts about how it went? No, they gave a lot of notes, which usually-- I'm surprised they gave so many notes. That was more than I expected and, sometimes, more than you want. Because you're just like, "All right. You know what? I just did it. I'm done here. You decide. Let me go home. I don't need to hear your philosophies on filmmaking." But their notes were good. I think they're just tweaking notes. And they were just little things. They weren't about major-- I think it maybe a matter of them, how they perceive some things. Or maybe I spoke too fast. And just hitting different points and emphasizing. So their notes were fine. And I agreed with them. Scott heads to the elevator, and I walk back into the producers' offices for a quick Siskel & Ebert on Scott's performance. So what's your feedback on that pitch? How was that in the pitch? Do you think you're going to buy it or go with it or something? Yeah, what we'll do now is talk to-- obviously, we'll talk to each other. But because we talked a lot, I think we're pretty much in agreement. We'll call Adam Shulman and Brant Rose, who are Scott's agents, and have a conversation with them about taking this into studios. And so good news for Scott Fifer. He sold the pitch. A half a million dollars could be his. But first, Dan, Bruce, and Scott have to go out and pitch the project to a studio. The studio will go out and pitch the project to directors and stars. If they make the movie and are successful in pitching it to theater owners, in order to get the widest possible distribution, then the actors will take it out into the public. It'll be Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy, or Adam Sandler sitting on that chair next to Jay Leno, bottle of water in hand. And after some preliminary banter, when asked what the movie's about, if they're lucky, they'll be able to say, "Well, it's kind of a Jaws with paws." And the studio audience will erupt. Sandra Tsing Loh's off-Broadway show Aliens in America opens in Los Angeles this August at the Tiffany Theater for a limited run. She's writing an original screenplay for Dreamworks. Act Two, Jail Sell. You could argue, and in fact I am arguing it for the purpose of today's program, that selling is what this country is all about. So imagine the outrage when people are thrown in jail for doing nothing more than being salesmen, for being so profoundly American. This comes up in Danny Hoch's show, Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop. The guy who tells this particular story is a guy who has been locked up for selling. A warning to sensitive listeners. There are no nasty words in this story. But I have to say, there are a lot of beeps. Yo, trust me, man. Just plead guilty, guilty, guilty. Me, I got totally different problems, man. I try to do the right thing. They lock me up. You know, Giuliani's like, "People on welfare are lazy." I'm trying not to be on that [BLEEP], right? I'm working. I'm in Fordham Road. I'm selling Bart Simpson t-shirts and-- what you call it-- OJ Simpson t-shirts, right? This cop come out and arrest me because I don't got a license. All right? I'm not selling drugs. I'm selling drugs. I'm selling Bart Simpson, OJ Simpson t-shirts. That's work, man. You think that [BLEEP] is easy? That [BLEEP] is hard. I don't even want to go into it. No, but they said, it's illegal. That's not legal. Come on. I try to do right in my life, man. I want to be an entrepreneur or whatever you call it. No, you know if I was that little girl that they show in that commercial selling lemonade in front of her house, you think the cop gonna arrest her? Nah-uh. Nah-uh. But you see, what it is, if you think about it, the little girl, she's an entrepreneur just like me, man. She's a businesswoman. She got-- what you call it-- overhead, right? She got to get her sugar, her lemons, her cups. Then she make her little stand. And she stand outside all day, right? Me, I got my shirts. I got my stand. I stand outside all day, right? But you know the cop gonna see her in front of her little white picket fence or whatever, he gonna be like, "Oh," all jolly and [BLEEP], right? "Let me get a lemonade, sweetheart. Mmm. Tasty." Whatever, whatever, right? Then he leave. Then he go beat up some people, right? Then he go home. Then he [BLEEP] his wife. Then he think, "Oh, it's not really such a bad day today. God bless America." Right? But then he see me on Fordham Road. Aha, different story. He step to me like this, "Hey you, where's your [BLEEP] license?" He gonna say, "Where's your [BLEEP] license?" to the little girl? Nah-uh. Nah-uh. But you see, what is it? If you think about it, in the car, you don't give a [BLEEP] I don't got a license. He doesn't like the way I look, right? I live in 163rd Street. I got a certain look, whatever. People in Park Avenue, they got a certain look, whatever, right? But you know the cop gonna see somebody from Park Avenue or Tribeca, right? Hauling two kilos of cocaine to their girlfriend's house in their designer [BLEEP] rollerblades or whatever, right? He's not gonna get disturbed about their look, right? Probably say, you know, "How you doing? Have a donut. Okey-dokey, buddy." Or whatever the [BLEEP] he say, right? But then you see somebody that looks-- I don't even know what you call it-- unprofessional, whatever, he automatically think criminal, right? So he gets out the car with all his cops [BLEEP] like this, right? Well, see, he has sunglasses in the car. So when he look at me first from the car, I look darker. When he get out, he get confused. Nah, 'cause you put me next to the car, I'm more white than the cop. So he gets confused. He says, "Whoa, hold up. What are you?" I said, "That's not your business. You want to buy a shirt, right?" Next thing I know, he knock over all my [BLEEP]. The shirts in the street. Everything's dirty, right? I have dirty [BLEEP] products. Everybody pointing at me and laughing and [BLEEP]. Next thing I know, he throw me in the ground. He got his nightstick in my back with the spit and the gum from the sidewalk is in my face and [BLEEP]. He said, "What are you? What are you? Are you Puerto Rican? Are you [BLEEP] Puerto Rican?" I said, "No, I'm not Puerto Rican. Yo, I'm selling Bart Simpson, OJ Simpson t-shirts. What's the problem, officer, right?" Well, see, he want to know what am I. My color is white like Bill Clinton, right? But that's not good enough for him, you know. And the way that I'm speaking. I don't even know. He got a complex. He needs to see a therapist because he's confused. Then he look in the t-shirts, he gets more confused. Because he don't know who's Bart Simpson. Nah, he knows Bart Simpson is Bart Simpson. But he don't know Bart Simpson is Dominican, Jewish, Greek, Puerto Rican. What is he, right? But he knows that Bart Simpson, OJ Simpson make more money than him, right? And then he looks at me, and he sees somebody that's an entrepreneur, that's trying to better his situation in life, right? That I have the opportunity to increase my status in the world or whatever you want to call it, right? And then he looks at himself. And he sees that he's just a servant, and that's it. And that's all you gonna be. Even if he become captain, police chief, lieutenant, whatever, he just a servant. So he feel threatened. So because he feel threatened, that day, he decided to make capitalism illegal, right? And me, because I got a prior felony on my record, they put me in here. So you got a cigarette? Good lookin' out, man. Nah, if you think about it, if you analyze it with the little girl on the TV, right? If that's not America, that you can stand outside your house and sell whatever, don't advertise it then. You know? Don't put it in the [BLEEP] TV. To be honest with you, I seen that commercial. I got inspired by that [BLEEP]. Nah, since [BLEEP] ain't really that bad. I got chances or whatever, you know. And I'm in [BLEEP] jail, bro. I feel like suing the lemonade mother [BLEEP], man. For false advertising. I know I wasn't selling lemonade. Yo, shut up, man. I didn't really ask you to respond and [BLEEP] Nah. Yo, you got a light? Danny Hoch, writer and performer from his great one-man show Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop. The show is available on CD and in book form. His website, dannyhoch.com. Yeah, don't touch that dial. Coming up, if you become a salesman and your personality changes from what it was to something else, where you're suddenly able to charm most anybody, where you're not scared of people saying no to you, is that necessarily a good thing? A cautionary tale in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers and reporters to tackle that theme. Today's program, Sales. America's greatest art form. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Who's The Man? There are many jobs that change you. We've all met grade school teachers who continue to talk like grade school teachers even when they are among adults at dinner parties. Or psychiatrists who never stop talking like psychiatrists, nothing duller really. Here's a story about how becoming a salesman, a salesman of radio ad time, changed one person. I didn't want this job at all. I was working as a reporter. And they needed to fill this slot. And so they brought me in and said, "We're moving your salary to sales. And if you'd like to continue to receive that salary, we suggest you join it there." I think those were literally their words. How very graceful. So I decided I did want to keep that salary. I had a great first three weeks when I was first selling. I made every sale. And I remember talking to this friend of mine who was a real long-time veteran. And he said, "You're doing it all wrong. You're doing it all wrong. If you make every sale, that means you're only going for the surest things. And there's just not that many sure things. So you're not going after enough money." He said, "The sign that you're succeeding is that you're making 8% of your sales, 10% of your sales. So it's really important to embrace them saying no. It means you're going far enough and deep enough." I had this boss who had been in sales his whole life. And he taught me that when I started feeling nervous, it probably meant they were feeling nervous. And that was good. And the more good I felt about it, the more control I had over both of our nervousnesses. And, therefore, if they were just blinded by it and afraid of it and I was encouraged by it and energized by it, then I just stood a better chance of coming out the winner. Suddenly, I'm going to these sales calls. And I can't wait. I'm running to these sales calls. I'm clicking the elevator button to make it come faster because I can't wait. Because-- it's all sorts of things. It's a feeling of power. It's really fun to go into a meeting with three people who are much older than you, who make a lot more money than you, who have a lot more power in the world than you, and you know that you're going to be the guy in the room who's totally calm, and they're going to be really nervous. And I love that. I love just being the cool guy, being the calm guy. And I loved creating these relationships, a type of relationship I've never had before, which is just this glib, friendly relationship based on complete empty chatter about the weather or TV. I developed this theory that those really popular TV shows, one major function is to provide conversation to Americans. And not conversation about the show, but the actual conversation of the show. You would just say, "Hey, do you remember last night when Kramer said that? Boy, that was funny. And remember when Elaine said this to Jerry? Oh, that was funny." I didn't know that people did that. People would do that to me. And then the next sales call, I'd do that to the next person. And they seemed to like it. I started realizing it doesn't matter what you say, it doesn't matter how vapid it is. All that mattered was that I felt comfortable and that I gave them the illusion of some kind of false intimacy. At first, I found it really great, really exciting and freeing. It kind of amazed me. First of all, how quickly I just became this different person and how much I enjoyed it. I found I would do things that I hadn't done before. I would hold doors open for women. And I would wait on an elevator until all the women had gotten off. Or I would compliment people on their-- if a friend made a joke, I'd say, "That's very funny. That's a very amusing joke. It reminds me of a joke I once heard." And I'd use my hands in these ways that I had learned made people feel at ease, never folded over my chest, but open and inviting. And my whole voice would change. My whole affect would change to the point where, when I would hang out with my friends, they'd make fun of me. "Why are you so formal? Why are you so fake?" When your friends would say these things about how you were changing, were you in any way alarmed? No, I loved it. I felt like I had superpowers. I could go anywhere and talk to whoever I wanted and not give a [BLEEP]. I had always had trouble with women. I'd always had a hard time asking them out. And suddenly, I was asking out anyone. It didn't matter to me. But I just felt like I could put on this persona, and, at least in my mind, it was smooth. And people liked that person. And I liked it. There's something essentially optimistic about being a salesman. It seems very American, very forward thinking. A no is an opportunity. It's an opportunity to learn why you got that no, what went wrong there, how you can do better. So there's this notion of self-improvement? Yeah. There were a few times where this whole process really felt like the violation of something. It felt like I went too far. There was this guy who was president of a major company. And he wanted to buy what turned out to be a lot of money in ads. And it would mean a lot of money to me personally and a lot to the station. And it was a big decision for him because, even though he was the president, he was trying to establish his own base within the company. And they didn't want him to be on this particular station. They didn't think he should be. And I felt like I had always known his company shouldn't be on our air. I knew we weren't going to sell that product. But I prepared the charts that made it seem like we would. And I gave him the ammunition and the encouragement to fight the good fight. And he was really fighting for it. There's this one moment where he and I went out for drinks at this private men's club, which was another part of this whole ridiculous life that I had for that period of time, was belonging to a private-- not men's club-- private club. And he was really opening up. He was really talking about his wife, and their relationship, and his fears of being in this job, and whether or not he wanted to have kids, and what that would mean to him, and how he ended up being a businessman, and what other kinds of lifes he could have led, and sometimes wished he had led. And it was so awful because he really bought my false intimacy. He really saw us as friends. To be honest, I had had these moments before. I'd even gone to clients' homes for dinner to meet their family. I started finding that when I hit these moments of false intimacy-- there were a few stories from my childhood or a few set pieces that seemed like they were emotional sharing, but really were just set pieces that I felt very comfortable uttering. I probably said them almost word-for-word, verbatim each time. But they gave the illusion of opening up. And so I threw a couple of those at him. But I just knew he would never be a friend. I would never open up to him in that way, in an authentic way. And I couldn't tell him, "You know what? You shouldn't be on our air." Because he'd probably sue us. Or who knows what? Because he was already on your air? He was already on my air. And I wanted his money. I did. It meant a lot of money to me. And I couldn't tell him that I didn't want to be his friend. What would be the point of that? And I just remember feeling just stuck, like I didn't know-- There didn't seem to be any way to deal with him honorably. So what did you do? I kept selling to him. And eventually, he left that company. And I never knew if he got fired or if he quit on his own. I never knew if it had anything to do with us. He might have lost his job over that money. Yeah, it's possible. I don't know. Yeah. And he trusted you? Yeah. At the end of the day, you have to decide, look, it's their money. They're spending the money. And if they're spending the money based on the information I've given them, and only the information I've given them, then it's their fault. Shame on them for not doing the research and not seeking advisors. Of course, that's like saying, shame on them for believing me. Right. Yeah, it is. But you say that a lot. Act Four, The Secret To Being Rich And Happy. There are usually only two stories we Americans tell ourselves about our salesmen, about our own lives as salesmen. There's the super salesman story. Picture, please, the early days of Donald Trump. And there's the tragic, down-on-his-luck salesman. Picture the man in anything by, say, David Mamet. For a more accurate look at the life of an American salesman, consider, please, Jimmy Roy. "Diamond" Jimmy Roy. 76 years old. Lives and works in a town not far from Pittsburgh. He has sold everything from used cars to antiques to jewelry, all with a philosophy of sales that he has created himself, as many salesmen have to create a philosophy for themselves, to get themselves through it. Reporter Dan Collison hung around him for a few days. As Jimmy Roy tells it, there was a time in the 1950s and '60s when he owned the town, the town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, located just downriver from Pittsburgh. But not everyone in Braddock remembers those days. How you doing? You know me? Huh? You know me? No, I do not. J. Roy. My name is Clifton Nelson. OK. You're not from around here, are you? Yes, I am. Clifton Lamont Nelson, Junior. And you don't know J. Roy that used to own all the property here? No, sir. Automobile business and everything? No, sir. OK. Used to own a car lot over here. Owned this building here. Owned that house over here. Owned the Dillinger building, the furniture stores down here, the two furniture stores. I owned The Chicken Shack. You know The Chicken Shack on Fifth Street? I think I know of it. I think I know it. And I forget what else I owned. Back then, Braddock was known as the "valley's greatest shopping center." On Saturdays, people would come from all over, and the sidewalks were jammed with shoppers. Then the steel mills started shutting down. People moved away. Suburban malls sprang up. And no one came to Braddock anymore. [SINGING] Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven. Don't you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven? By the mid-'70s, Braddock was becoming a ghost town. It was about this time that filmmaker Tony Buba featured Jimmy Roy in one of his short documentaries on Braddock. That's Jimmy there singing. The occasion was the grand opening of J. Roy's Flea Market and New and Used Furniture Store. His other businesses had died. It was Jimmy's last stand. What's so good about this building is we have a drive-in ramp, where we can hold about 50 used cars up there. And the future plan, we're going to put a drive-in used car lot, plus a drive-in used and new furniture store upstairs. The nice thing about it is people will able to drive right in, get out of their car, look at some used cars, look at antiques, look at new furniture, and look at used furniture. And I really believe that this time I've struck on something that people really need. But I think we'll have no problem here in making it go. And I believe after that, that it's going to be Easy Street. I really believe that Saturday is going to mark a big day in my life. The grand opening of the J. Roy Flea Market and New and Used Furniture. Today, the street sign at the corner of Verona and Braddock Avenue, where the store was located, is so rusted out, it can't be read. J. Roy's Flea Market and New and Used Furniture didn't quite live up to Jimmy's expectations. I bet everything I had. And I bet my last penny, what I could borrow, and everything else. I bet it on this town. I bought everything. I stretched myself out to the last penny. I bet on it. I had no fear. But when I saw I had to face reality, everyone started to be scared to come to the town. You can't sell people who don't come to the town. So I figured I better get out while I can get out alive. So I did. I go along with Shakespeare, "Nothing is good or bad, except thinking makes it so." Or the so-called words of Jesus. He says, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." They musta knew something. These days, if you're looking for Jimmy Roy, chances are you'll find him at the Plaza Restaurant, just over the hill from Braddock. The Plaza is sort of like Jimmy's office. It's located in a 1960s strip mall next to a Shop and Save. It's the kind of family place with racks of pies in a glass case by the front door and where waitresses and their daughters work side by side. Jimmy Roy sits in a booth in the back of the smoking section. He's dressed in a white fedora, a white linen jacket with a maroon, silk handkerchief, a colorful tie with a diamond stick pin, and black and white alligator-skin shoes. He's wearing five diamond studded gold necklaces, two gold bracelets on each wrist, and he has diamond rings on every finger. These are just some of the things I pick up when I sell, right off my hand. This is a little cluster, a men's pinkie ring. This is another cluster, index ring. They're not the most expensive, but they're diamonds. This is another cluster. And this is a emerald. Yeah, that's my store now. That's the store. I operate my stores. No overhead there. I don't have to pay rent. This kind of change of fortune, going from owning virtually half of Braddock to hustling jewelry from a restaurant booth, is the sort of thing that might crush other men. Not Jimmy Roy. He's steeled himself against hardship with a philosophy of salesmanship that's more like a philosophy of life that he's been refining for decades. I think it's the mind. I'm so convinced that for 42 years of some studying of the mind, the mind is the most important thing we have. The mind is the directing force of thinking, is responsible for where you're going, whether you're going to be successful, whether you're going to be a failure. To Jimmy, it's all very simple. You tell yourself who you want to be, what you want to be. And if you do these positive visualizations long enough, great things will happen to you. It goes like this. Early in the morning when you rise, you feed yourself great thoughts, such as concentration, peace, poise, non-resistance, achievement, vitality, strength, life, youth. You feed yourself these thoughts before you leave the house. And don't concern yourself about how these thoughts are gonna manifest the beauty that you'll receive from planting the great thoughts in your mind, no more than you would be concerned about planting a tomato seed. Once you plant it, you're unconcerned. You know you planted in nice dirt and nice ground. You know that you will receive your tomatoes. To control your thinking is to control your life, control your success. I'm wanted on the phone. I'm wanted on the phone. Excuse me. His regular customers reach him on the Plaza's pay phone to set up appointments. Hello? Yeah, That's be fine. What time? Between 10:00 and 11:00. That'll be fine. Right. I'm glad you called. I'm glad you're all right. Yeah, we were worried sick about you. Jimmy got his start in sales at the age of 22 in the used car business. Just home from World War II, he was determined to stay out of the steel mills, where he worked as a teenager and where most of his friends were headed. He quit his first sales job after just a week because his dealership was ripping off customers. He's tried to be more honest. He's been a salesman for 54 years. Hi, sweetheart. How you doing? How you doing? How you doing? On the way out of the Plaza, Jimmy stops to admire a baby. Besides being beautiful, how do you feel? You look great. Say, "Thank you." You look great. You look good. You look like a good girl. It's an old salesman trick. Win over the parents by flattering their kids. May I give her a lucky dollar? Put it in her piggy bank when we get home. Put it in your piggy bank? Or your horsey bank? Does she chew bubble gum? I got bubble gum for her. That makes me feel so bad and good. It's unexplainable. I make a baby smile. It makes me feel so great. Honest to god. Jimmy drives a gray 1990 Lincoln town car, loaded up with boxes full of bubble gum and fruit exactly for moments like this. He calls them his "giveaways." His dashboard is plastered with scraps of paper printed with motivational aphorisms. You are very fortunate if you have learned that the most certain way to get is to first give. Choosing to develop an intelligent level of yourself and all of mankind will motivate you to accomplishments above and beyond your expectations. Maintain a positive mental attitude to achieve mental and physical health and to live a longer life. Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better. And see, all we gotta do is accent the positive. For years, Jimmy Roy has given motivational seminars, where he preaches his philosophy of life. Recently, about 70 people packed the back room at the Plaza Restaurant to hear him give the latest version, entitled "The Secret of Being Rich and Happy." He also gave the seminar to salesmen at Parkway Ford, an auto dealership just up the road from the Plaza. Today, he's back to hand out some cufflinks. That's it. Merry Christmas. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. You're welcome. And to see how his motivational talk went over. It was a very, very inspirational speech, very, very motivating. And the guys been rocking ever since. Sales went up. I'm glad to hear that. It's a little hard to tell whether these salesmen are sincere or whether they're just humoring Jimmy. But they seem to truly like him. And why wouldn't they? The proof is in the numbers. Sales at Parkway Ford did, in fact, increase by 10% after Jimmy's seminar. What are some of the things that he told us? Peace. I am peace. I am harmony. I am goodwill. I am-- Poise. I am law. I am order. I am spiritual. I am spiritual. I'm vitality. I'm understanding. I am successful. And is it working for you? It's working great. He comes by, and man, we pumped up. You're all pumped up when you leave the house. Without a doubt. See, you feed the mind. The mind is the dynamo that supplies the power. Your thinking is a directing force of that power. And when you have all these things being directed, it's impossible to fail. You cannot fail. You cannot fail. That's right. Naturally, as he leaves Parkway Ford, there's business to do. One of the car salesmen wants to look at an engagement ring. That's a marquis in the center. It's a wide band. With the wide band. We have that. Jimmy does deals like this because after 54 years as a salesman, it's who he is. He has to sell. When he tried to quit a few years back, he says, he nearly lost his mind. Well, that seems to be a sure sale there because he inquired about it before. And he seems to be very sincere. I can generally tell when it's a sell. I just look at them, and I study-- being that there's only one mind in the universe, his mind and my mind are identical. And if I concentrate hard enough, I can walk right into his mind and feel what he's thinking. It's a great advantage, not to be abused, but to be used. So you're saying, you can actually read his mind. Many times. If you concentrate hard enough, you can reach right in there and feel whether he's telling you the truth or he's lying. I believe that all of us have that, but very few use it. Jimmy says, he'd like to take his seminar-- "The Secret of Being Rich and Happy"-- on the road. He's writing a book by the same name, though he has no publisher. Of course, Jimmy's philosophy hasn't actually made him rich. And as I hung around him, I kept trying to figure out a polite way to ask him about this. Jimmy, there's a question I've been wanting to ask you for a while that's been bothering me a little bit. The name of your seminar and the name of the book you're working on is "The Secret of Being Rich and Happy." But, with all due respect, you're not rich. Well, I think I'm one of the richest men in the world. I'm so abundantly blessed in more respects than money. I have money. I have some money. And I have health and happiness with me. I have things that money can't buy. Why don't you call it "The Secret of Being Happy?" Well, because you're rich when you are happy. We could use that title. But that seemed to come from within me, "The Secret of Becoming Rich and Happy." Well, I'll tell you the truth. Another reason why I used the word "rich," I'm going to be very honest, most people desire to be rich. So I figured it would sell more books, to be very honest with you, by them seeing how the secret of becoming rich and happy. I believe it'll sell more books. But somehow, I can't believe that you wouldn't want to be more wealthy, that you wouldn't want to be rich. Oh, excuse me. I never said I didn't want personal wealth. I think you misunderstood me. I like to have enough, like I have now, to live comfortable, and to eat good, and to have a nice place to stay. And I like money in my pocket. I like to give. And I have that. And I don't think there's a richer man in the world than I am as far as the state of mind is concerned. I believe I have the best state of mind in the universe, in my honest to god opinion. By and large, Jimmy does seem genuinely happy. Ask anyone in Braddock. Filmmaker Tony Buba, who's known him just about all his life, says he's never seen Jimmy down. But consider this. The philosophy that's made Jimmy happy may be one of the things that's kept him from being rich. Tony says the reason Jimmy isn't wealthy is because he's too honest. What I think is he doesn't have that thievery in him. Because I think if he had that thievery, if he had that edge of not really caring about other people, then he probably could have been a millionaire. I could have probably been a multimillionaire if I wanted to go the wrong way. Because I had the opportunity to cheat people in the automobile business and different businesses I had. But I never would be comfortable. I think I would've been what they call a poor rich man. People might think, "Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy." Nobody'll walk away from the man. He has a lot of friends. And everybody likes him. Because he's never cheated anybody. "The Very Thought of You." [SINGING] The very thought of and I forget to do the little ordinary things that everyone ought to do. Our final stop is Moray's Lounge, an upscale piano bar near downtown Pittsburgh. Jimmy comes here to have a few drinks, to listen to Shirley, who's been playing the lounge for almost 20 years, and, every once in a while, to sing a song. It's tempting to see salesmen like Jimmy Roy as kind of tragic Willy Loman characters. But here at Moray's Lounge, people recognize Jimmy. They call him "Diamond" Jim. He chats with Shirley. He chats with the bartender. His philosophy seems to be working. He looks as happy as a man can be. That story by Dan Collison. Well, our program produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Speigel, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, and Sylvia Lemus. Marketing by [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this program, call us at WBEZ here in Chicago. We are selling right now. 312-832-3380. Buy, buy, buy. But you know you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Picture of Jimmy Roy there this week. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who actually has his own philosophy for selling This American Life to new stations. It doesn't matter what you say, it doesn't matter how vapid it is. But the key line that sold it was to then say, "In other words, Mr. Executive, it's basically Jaws on paws." I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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We think of our lives as a series of events, of things happening one after another. But, you know, it's just as accurate to see our lives as a series of things that don't happen to us. There's this story where all the crucial action takes place within just a short bike ride from the spot where I speak to you from right now, here in Chicago. The setting, a summer, much like the one we're living through even as I speak, on this humid, midwestern day. It's a piece of fiction, a really, really great piece of fiction actually, by a writer named Stuart Dybek. We Didn't. We didn't in the light. We didn't in darkness. We didn't in the fresh-cut summer grass, or in the mounds of autumn leaves, or in the snow, where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn't in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you'd slept in as a child. Or in the backseat of my father's rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa that he delivered on weekends for my Uncle Vincent's meat market. We didn't in your mother's Buick 8, where a rosary twined the rear view mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs. After this opening paragraph, Stuart Dybek has 11 pages, thousands of words, describing all of the things that two people can do when they're not doing something. Turns out, that not doing something is every bit as vivid and complicated an experience as doing something. But, my friend, where are the stories of the things that we do when we're not doing the thing itself? Well, we bring those to you today, right here. Part of our ongoing quest to document our actual lives in this country. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme. Today's show, We Didn't. Act One, You Come And Go, The Waiters Remain in which we hear a few words from the D.H. Lawrence of not doing it. Act Two, Dance. A scientific investigation by Mr. Danny Hoch into what exactly is happening between two people, step by step, moment by moment, when they're not falling in love. Act Three, Same Time Next Year. A couple nearly gets together, but does not. And then an uncanny coincidence intervenes, as in a fable, as in a dream, as in a movie. But what does it mean? Act Four, Saying No For 75 Years. The story of what happens when you say no to exactly the wrong person at the wrong time when you're 21 years old and looking at prison. Stay with us. Don't say no now. Act One, You Come And Go, The Waiters Remain. We begin today's program with this story. It's a part story, part philosophical inquiry into the nature of not doing things from Geoff Dyer. For years, I wanted to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, a homage to the writer who'd made me want to become a writer. It was a cherished ambition. And as part of my preparation for realizing this cherished ambition, I'd avoided reading anything by Lawrence so that at some point in the future, I could go back to him, if not afresh, then at least not rock-stale. Then after years of avoiding Lawrence, I moved into the phase of what might be termed "pre-preparation." I visited Eastwood, his birthplace. I read biographies. I amassed a horde of photographs, which I kept in a once-new document wallet, blue, on which I had written "D.H.L. Photos" in determined, black ink. I even built up an impressive stack of notes with Lawrence vaguely in mind. But these notes, it's obvious to me now, actually served not to prepare for and facilitate the writing of a book about Lawrence, but to defer and postpone doing so. There's nothing unusual about this. All over the world, people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off, and standing in for. My case was more extreme. For not only was taking notes about Lawrence a way of putting off writing a study of and homage to the writer who'd made me want to become a writer, but this study I was putting off writing was itself a way of putting off and postponing another book. Although I'd made up my mind to write a book about Lawrence, I'd also made up my mind to write a novel. Writing them both at the same time was inconceivable. And so these two equally overwhelming ambitions first wore each other down and then wiped each other out. As soon as I thought about working on the novel, I fell to thinking that it would be much more enjoyable to write my study of Lawrence. As soon as I started making notes on Lawrence, I realized I was probably sabotaging forever any chance of writing my novel, which, more than any other book I'd written, had to be written immediately before another protracted bout of labor came between me and the idea for what I perceived as a rambling, sub-Bernhardtian rant of a novel. It was now or never. So I went from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean I went from not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel. Because all of this to-ing, and fro-ing, and note taking actually meant that I never did any work on either book. All I did was switch between two empty files on my computer, one conveniently called C:\DHL, the other C:\NOVEL, and sent myself pinging back and forth between them until, after an hour and a half of this, I would turn off the computer. Because the worst thing of all, I knew, was to wear myself out in this way. The best thing was to do nothing, to sit calmly. But there was no calm of course. Instead, I felt totally desolate because I realized that I was going to write neither my study of D.H. Lawrence nor my novel. One of the reasons that it was impossible to get started on either the Lawrence book or the novel was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere. There were no constraints on me. And because of this, it was impossible to choose. It's easy to make choices when you have things hampering you. A job, kid's schools. But when all you have to go on is your own desires, then life becomes considerably more difficult, not to say intolerable. Even money wasn't an issue since, at this stage, I was living in Paris. And nowhere could have been more expensive than Paris. The exchange rate got worse by the month, and Paris became more expensive by the month. What the money situation in Paris did was to emphasize that although I had settled in Paris, really, I'd just been passing through extremely slowly. That is all anyone English or American can do in Paris, pass through. You may spend 10 years passing through, but essentially you're still a sightseer, a tourist. You come and go. The waiters remain. The longer I stayed, the more powerful it became, this feeling that I was just passing through. I'd thought about subscribing to the cable channel, Canal Plus, as a way of making myself feel more settled. But what was the point in subscribing to Canal Plus when, in all probability, I would be moving on in a few months? Obviously, the way to make myself more settled was to acquire some of the trappings of permanence. But there never seemed any point acquiring the aptly-named trappings of permanence when, in a couple of months, I might be moving on, might well be moving on, would almost certainly be moving on? Because there was nothing to keep me where I was. Had I acquired some of the trappings of permanence, I might have stayed put. But I never acquired any of the trappings of permanence because I knew that the moment these trappings had been acquired, I would seized with the desire to leave, to move on. And I would then have to free myself from these trappings. And so, lacking any of the trappings of permanence, I was perpetually on the brink of potential departure. That was the only way I could remain anywhere, to be constantly on the brink, not of actual, but of potential departure. These were all issues I intended to address in different ways, either in mediated form in my study of Lawrence, or directly in my novel, or vice versa. But there was an additional practical complication too. Since I was obliged to spend a certain amount of time away from wherever I lived, and since the rent on my Paris apartment was so high, and because of the exchange rate was becoming higher every month, I was frequently obliged to sublet it. Strictly speaking, to sub-sublet it since I was subletting it myself. And since if you are subletting your apartment, you do not want to acquire too many valuable or personal items, which might get destroyed, it then comes about that you, yourself, are living in conditions arranged primarily for those subletting from you. Effectively, you are subletting from yourself. That's what I was doing, subletting from myself. Strictly speaking, sub-subletting, living in an apartment devoid of anything that might have made it my apartment in the sense of "my home." I'd conspired to arrange for myself the worst of all possible worlds. And my days were spent in this unbreakable circle of anxiety, always going over the same ground again and again, always with some new variable, but never with any change. I had to do something to break this circle. And so I decided to sign a contract that would make me the official tenant, as opposed to the illegal subtenant. I wasn't even sure that I wanted to stay in an apartment where I'd actually been extremely unhappy for 90% of my stay, where 90% of my stay had been dominated by anxiety about, A, whether I was going to stay, and B, whether I was going to start a novel or start my study of Lawrence. But as soon as the managing agent said that they were unwilling to let the place to me, a foreigner with no job and no steady income, I became convinced that I had to stay in this apartment where I'd actually been sublimely happy. That there was, in fact, nowhere else on earth where I could hope to be as content. Eventually, my rich friend, Herve Landry, "Money Landry," as I like to call him, agreed to stand as guarantor. The managing agents relented, and I signed the lease that made me the official locataire. I was ecstatic for about five minutes. Then I realized I'd taken on an awesome, not to say, crippling responsibility. And far from solving the problem of where to live, I'd actually put a lid on it, so that now my uncertainty was boiling away under pressure, threatening to blow me apart. The one thing I could be sure of was that I had to leave this apartment where I'd never known a moment's peace of mind as soon as possible. If I stayed here, I saw now, I would fail to write both my novel and my study of Lawrence. That much was obvious. Round and round I went, making no progress, resolving one thing one moment and another the next. I wrote to the agents and officially renounced the flat, claiming that "professional reasons" had obliged me to return to England. The agents wrote back, acknowledging my decision to leave the apartment. I wrote back, saying that, "Professional reasons now oblige me to remain in Paris. Could I, therefore, unrenounce my apartment?" Relieved to be free of the trouble of re-letting it, the agents agreed to let me remain in the apartment, which I had just renounced. And so it went on. I wrote again to renounce the apartment definitively. They sent a somewhat curt acknowledgement of my decision. I wrote back, changing my definitive decision to leave to a definitive decision to stay. But it was too late. I had to leave. Now that I did have to leave, I was faced with the terrible prospect of having nowhere to live, of having to decide where to live without delay. And only then did I realize how much this apartment meant to me, how it had actually become my home. Although I believed that I'd hardly any of my things in this apartment, there were actually many of my own things that I now had to find a place for. Over the years, I'd actually acquired quite a few of the trappings of permanence. I even owned a surprising amount of furniture, some of it rather nice. Where was I going to store it? And what about me? Where was I going to store myself? Rome was a possibility. Laura, my almost-wife, had a lovely apartment in Rome and was always arguing in favor of our settling there. I fretted and wondered. Why was I even prevaricating like this? I was mad not to go to Rome. Rome was in Italy, the country where the Lawrences had spent more time than any other. If I was to stand any chance of making any progress with my study of Lawrence, it was probably the very best place I could be. As soon as I arrived, I knew I'd made the right decision. My mind was made up. I was ready to begin my study of D.H. Lawrence. The only trouble was the heat. The heat was tremendous. And nowhere in Rome was hotter than Laura's apartment. Even the light was hot. We tried to keep the light at bay, but it drilled through the keyhole, squeezed under the door, levered open the smallest of cracks in the shutters. My mind was made up. I was ready to work. But it was too hot to work. It was so hot, we spent our waking hours dozing and our sleeping hours lying awake, trying to sleep. We were in a kind of trance. The perfect life, the perfect lie, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done, painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry, but which, in fact, you've no wish to do. People need to feel that they've been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted. Whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It's a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit, contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted. Most people don't want what they want. People want to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he'd be lost without it. That's why children are so convenient. You have children because you're struggling to get by as an artist or failing to get on with your career. Then you can persuade yourself that your children prevented you from having this career that never looked like working out. And so it goes on. Things are always forsaken in the name of an obligation to someone else, never as a failing, a falling short of yourself. I've devoted more of my life to thoughts of giving up than anyone else I can think of. Nietzsche wrote that the thought of suicide had got him through many a bad night. And thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that's kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis, but always come up against the problem of what to do when I've given up. Give up one thing, and you're immediately obliged to do something else. Let's suppose, for example, that I decided to call it a day, to give up, to abandon any attempt not just at earning a living, but having a life. But what then? What would happen next? Within five minutes, I'd be thinking about listening to music and would put a CD on the stereo. Five minutes after that, I'd be up again because I would have grown fed up with that piece of music and would be scanning the shelves and shelves of CDs, searching in vain for a piece of music that I was not heartily sick of, thinking to myself that if I had more CDs, there would surely be one that I would like to listen to. And before I knew it, I'd be out of the house and on my way to the megastore, looking for a new CD. Should anyone flatter us by asking what we're looking for, what we are searching for, then we think immediately, almost instinctively in vast terms. God, fulfillment, love. But our lives are actually made up of lots of tiny searches for things like a CD we are not sick of, an out-of-print edition of Phoenix, a picture of Lawrence that I saw when I was 17, another identical pair of suede shoes to the ones that I'm wearing now. Add them together, and these little things make up an epic quest, more than enough for one lifetime. Thinking specifically of the search for CDs, let's assume that after deciding to give up, after sitting around listening to CDs and going out to buy a new CD, I found a CD I liked the idea of listening to. Still, at some point, I would not simply grow tired of listening to this new CD, but would actually become heartily sick of the idea of listening to CDs and would think to myself that sitting around listening to CDs is a much more enjoyable activity, a much more enjoyable inactivity if it is a relief from something else, anything else. And so I would resign myself to picking up my pen and trying once again if for no other reason than to render listening to my CDs a little less dispiriting, to make some progress with my study of D.H. Lawrence. And there you have it. One way or another, we all have to write our studies of D.H. Lawrence even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions. Still, we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D.H. Lawrence. The world over, from Taos to Taormina, from the places we have visited to countries we will never set foot in, the best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D.H. Lawrence. Geoff Dyer reading an excerpt from his amazing, little book Out of Sheer Rage. He's also the author of Paris Trance and But Beautiful, a book about jazz. Act Two, Dance. What do we do when we're not doing something? Not writing a book, not doing our jobs, not falling in love. Sometimes, we just feel self-conscious. Sometimes, we spend a lot of time explaining ourselves. And sometimes both. We have this from Danny Hoch. As he tells this story on stage, he limps back and forth across the stage on a cane of some kind. Hi. How you doing? Excuse me. So nice to meet you. So what's your name? My name's Victor. Right? Nice to meet you. So you come here often? Ha-ha, I didn't think so, right? So what you doing here? Wait, let me guess, let me guess. You're visiting your grandfather, right? I was close though, right? Is she sick? Oh, I'm sorry. So you know I'm not here all the time. Nah, I just have to see the doctors like this week and next week because I have sort of like complications. Not really like complications. But like somebody shot me two years ago. It's complicated. Ha-ha. Don't worry. You didn't shoot me, right? So so you're very pretty. Know that? So you live around here? You sure? I'm saying 'cause I seen this really pretty girl on 149th Street. I thought maybe that was you. But that wasn't you? You sure? I'm just making sure. Ha ha. So you want me to talk to the guard to see if they'll let you upstairs quicker? Nah, 'cause like they make you wait a really long time just to visit somebody. It doesn't matter how sick that they are. And if you want, I can ax them because like, you know, I know him. 'Cause like he's a friend of mine 'cause like I have to come here like every week. So like, you know, we kind of know each other. I mean, I don't have to come here like every week. But, you know, like every now and then, I come here for like rehabilitation. I mean, not rehabilitation like I'm a drug addict or some [BLEEP] like that, but, you know, for like therapy. I mean, not therapy like I'm crazy or some [BLEEP] like that. But, you know, for like physical therapy. Oh, nah, I can't really talk about it. I can't really discuss it 'cause like I can't get into it. Nah, I can't really mention it. Because like my mother, she doesn't like me to talk about it 'cause like it's just, you know, it's not cool. I mean, I mean, not like I do everything my mother tells me to do. I'll do what I want, you know, but. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, ha-ha, ha, nah, nah. Ha, ha-ha, nah, ha. Aight, aight, aight, aight, aight, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, aight, aight, aight, aight, nah, aight. Like, it was two years ago, and I was outside my house. And my friends that came by, and they asked me if I want to go for a ride, right? But like I didn't know the car was stolen. I mean, I thought it might have been, but, like, I wasn't sure. I mean, like, my friend, like, he could have bought it, but he didn't, right? And like, in one block, the cops stopped us, and they made us get out. And then, like, I don't know what happened. I guess, like, my friend had moved or something. I mean, you have to move when you get out the car, right? But I guess, like, this one cop had panicked 'cause like he thought that my friend had a gun or whatever. So he, like, just started, like, shooting or whatever. But like I told you, I can't really talk about. I can't discuss it 'cause, like, if my mother-- it's not right. I can't be talking, you know, about this situation. But I mean, that said, it was an accident. No, like, I was really in the New York Post. And they were talking about, like, 12 different reasons why it could have been an accident. No, I mean, I was there. I got shot. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying, like, the more I read about it, the more I think it might have been an accident. But man, you got a nice smile. Where you live at? Staten Island? That's far. But you speak Spanish though, right? You're Dominican? But you're Dominican though, right? You're Dominican. You're Dominican. You're Dominican. I know you're Dominican. Czechoslovakia? Damn. I'm kinda off, right? For real? Nah, I thought she was Dominican. So Czechoslovakia. Where's that at? That's, like, near Germany, right? I'm close though, right? Nah, I know it's like, it's right in that area. Matter of fact, I think it, like, borders it because I look at maps a lot, like, in my room at home. I just kinda like-- I have maps up in the walls and everything. Nah, just, like, to look at different places or whatever. So what they eat over there? Like, cheese? Oh, you never been there? Oh, my bad. Oh, your parents? Oh, my bad. My bad. So you go to school? I could tell. I'm saying. 'Cause you got that look. I'm not saying you look stupid, like a nerd or something like that. I'm saying, like, you look smart. Like, you definitely got plans for your future or whatever. Like, you know, mission or something. What you study? Oh, that's good. We need more business people, right? Ah ha ha. Like, me, personally, I would like to go into the Air Force if they let me. I heard it's still possible, right? Nah, 'cause I would like to protect this country. From like whoever. From evil dictators, or like from Saddam Hussein, or Fidel Castro, or whoever. Nah, 'cause you don't realize. I'm not saying you. But, like, it's people out there. They don't realize, like, this is the greatest country in the world. And, like, other places, you don't know what could happen. Like, people could just be savages or whatever. Like, the government, they just, like, shoot you for whatever reason. But at least here, you know, we have democracy. Everybody's protected. But mostly, I would like to fly, like, a F-15 or a stealth bomber. Because I would just kind of like to like fly over all the different places in the maps. Nah, I wouldn't really start nowhere. I would just kind of like fly over, look at it, maybe drop a few bombs, or whatever. Nah, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I mean, not really but. Man, they make you wait a long time. See? I told you. So you sure you don't want me to talk to him? It's not a problem. I mean, like, it's messed up. Your grandmother got cancer and everything. You know, they shouldn't make you wait down here for, like, four hours. Are you sure? Alright. I'm just making sure. So would you like to go out with me some time? I'm saying, you know, I'm not Tom Cruise or nothing, but I'm Puerto Rican. You know what they say about Puerto Ricans, right? You didn't watching The Discovery Channel entertainment special? Nah, they did a whole report. They discovered us. They said that Puerto Ricans are the best dancers in the world. I mean, like, they didn't say it. But, like, that's what they were saying. I bet you like to go to the clubs dancing, right? What you dance to? Oh, yeah? That's it? Nah, I go almost every weekend. Like, and my friends take me. I dance to whatever, merengue, salsa, hip-hop, classical. Nah, like, even like grunge. I don't even think people can dance to grunge, but I could do it. You don't think I can dance, right? Nah, I been practicing for the last two years. And plus, they said on The Discovery Channel, it doesn't matter as long as you're Puerto Rican. You don't think I can dance, right? Girl, you and me could practice right here. There's nobody looking. There's nobody looking though. Oh, all right. No, that's all right. I understand, understand. Nah, it's all right. I understand, understand, understand. Well, tell her I hope she feels better, all right? All right. Um, nice meeting you. All right. Bye. It's the fourth floor. Push the button. You're very pretty. Man, I thought she was Dominican, word. Danny Hoch. That series from his one-man show, Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop. CDs of his show are available at his website, www.dannyhoch--with an H--.com. Coming up, making a deal with the prosecutor means 25 years in prison and not making the deal means 75 years. Why you might say no to the 25 years. And other stories of what we do when we don't do something. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, We Didn't. Stories of what it is that we do when we're not doing all of the things that we think of as our actual lives. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Same Time Next Year. This is the story of a couple that did not fall in love, did not get together, did not form a future, and some other stuff that'll be clear as this story unfolds. It all begins simply enough when Amanda Marks is 13, going on 14, and she goes to Madison Square Garden to buy tickets to the Rolling Stones' Tattoo You tour in the early '80s. And she stands in line next to a cute 21-year-old for three hours. And they get to talking and talking some more. So we go and get our tickets. And the way they did the system was it was completely randomized. And so he was right behind me in line, or right in front of me, but I ended up getting much better seats than he did. So basically, we made this deal that we would go to the concert together, and sell his pair, and split the money. Do you remember what exactly was attracting you to him? I was a teenage girl. And he was this really cute guy paying attention to me. What wouldn't have been attractive about him? So it's raining. We share a cab uptown. I'm going back to school. I've taken the morning off. I'm trying to catch my English class. And we start kissing in the back of the taxi. And the rain's hammering down. And it's just-- it's like the movies. It just couldn't be more romantic. I'm feeling so grown up at this point, just thrilled. So I go back to school, and I'm all excited. And I tell my friends. And one of my friends gives me this look like, "He's how old? He does what? He's an out-of-work actor? Like, ew." And I was like, "No, no, he's really great." I love how he's an out-of-work actor is a turnoff even if you're 13. Even if you're in junior high school, it just doesn't play. Like, oh, yeah, out-of-work actor. Out of here. So your friends are skeptical. Yes. Yes, they are. And it was weird because I wouldn't go to his house. I didn't really want him coming to my house. So we'd meet in public places, have these long, intense, involved conversations. Instead of making out. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Taking the place of, using the energy that could be devoted to-- Well, but I was very serious. I was very excited that he liked me for my mind, that we had this connection, that it wasn't about that. But finally, the sexual side got a little sticky. And my last encounter with him was just uncomfortable. The fact was he was 21. I was 14. I wasn't going to go to his house alone. And that was pretty much a deal breaker. OK. It's about 12 years later. I'm back in New York City for some family stuff. I'm wandering through Central Park. I don't really have anything to do that night. And suddenly, I get this flash. I'm like, it's summer. It's about 5 o'clock. Shakespeare in the Park. So I wander over to the Delacorte. And there's just this endless, endless line. It's just huge. And I get all the way on the end of it. And it's clear to me that I'm not going to get in. And so I come up with this scheme to cut to the front of the line. So I go from the end to fourth. And I see this really, really, really cute guy pull the exact same line-cutting ploy that I did. The exact same thing. And he's really cute. And so I catch his eye. And I walk over, and I say, "You know, I did the exact same thing." And he goes, "Yeah, I don't know why anybody waits in line. I always do this. It's great." So we start chatting. He's got a blanket. I've got some fruit. And we're chatting and eating away, perfectly comfortable conversation. He asked me my name. I tell him. He tells me his name. And then he tells me his last name. And I recognize it. I can't not recognize it. Because his name was always really uncomfortable for me. His name is a synonym for the male anatomy. But he pronounces it differently. And it just always made me really uncomfortable when I was 14. I pause, and my heart starts pounding. My mouth dries up. And I say, "Over 12 years ago, you and I picked each other up in line for Rolling Stones tickets." And he stares at me. And he totally knows who I am. His jaw drops. He completely remembers. He can't believe it. I can't believe it. And it's just so romantic. What could be more romantic? We're in Central Park. We're on a blanket. We're about to go see Shakespeare in the Park. It's like it's destiny. Oh my god, and the play? All's Well That Ends Well. So it's all symbolic. It's all coming together. It's all magical. And all forming around one thought. Oh, it just could not be more perfect. I'm thinking, this is the story you tell the grandchildren. I love romantic comedies. I write romantic comedies. It's just like this is what happens in the movies. I'm so excited. And we see the play. And we leave, and we walk back to his place. And then the sleaze factor of this 21-year-old who dated this 14-year-old starts to rear its head. What was this guy doing dating me when I was 14? That's not acceptable. The tip-offs, there were just so many little things. We go back to his apartment. His apartment was really this mess. Oh, it seemed like he was kind of a pot head. He was smoking out the whole time. He was growing weed on his balcony. He was constantly smoking out. Was he still an out-of-work actor? Yeah. He hadn't really done much with himself. That's interesting because when there's that kind of coincidence of running into somebody again, we think automatically that it should turn out to be romantic. But it could be that you just meet some people again, just have exactly the same experience over again. Yeah, yeah. In case you didn't learn that lesson once. So it just got yuckier. I left eventually. And he would call me randomly, drunk, at 11:30 at night, from some bar, like, "What are you doing?" And so this whole thing stayed in the "We didn't" stage. You just never went forward out of "We didn't." It was sort of like you were reunited to re-experience the "We didn't." Yeah. At first, it seemed like there was this big cosmic thing keeping us apart, age. There's so few things to actually keep couples apart anymore. You know what I mean? I write romantic comedies, and it's really hard to come up with a reason that people don't just jump into bed in the first 20 minutes. Oh, come. Are you serious? Yeah, it's hard. Sure. When you're doing the whole "It's kismet, and we know that they're meant to be," yeah, sure, that's hard to sustain dramatically. That's why most romantic comedies are so boring and predictable. Because there's not enough keeping them apart. It's like, oh, he's engaged to some other girl who's really stuck up and comes from this rich family. And we know that he's never going to end up with this stuck-up girl. Do you know what I mean? But they go through the motions of he has to figure it out that she's not right for him. And you know I mean? That's why most romantic comedies are so middling and why it's really hard to make a good one. So we had that. We had age. It was pretty dramatic. It was very real then. I'm surprised at what you're saying about romantic comedies. But I guess what I mean when I say it's hard now, compared to the heyday of Hollywood-- when you think of the classic romantic comedies, those were written under the Hays code. And you could not have two people going to bed together unless they were married. And so it was an obstacle in that very direct, obvious way. And you needed parent approval, and you needed to be of the same class, and all of that. And now, with sexual mores so changed, that's really the thing. It's like, well, what's stopping these two people from going to bed? But what you're saying somehow is that we, as a people, spend less time in the realm of "We didn't" than we used to two generations ago. Yeah, I think now we spend time in "I wish we didn't," "I wish we hadn't." In other words, people actually get involved, but then regret it. Yeah, sure. That's really the story now. Amanda Marks, a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Act Four, Saying No For 75 Years. For most of us, the stakes of not doing something on any given day are so low that as soon as the moment of decision passes, we never think of it again. It doesn't even linger as a memory. But sometimes, the stakes are so staggeringly high that we spend the rest of our lives in the shadow of that one decision, of one no. No, said at exactly the wrong moment to exactly the wrong person. Steve Bogira is a journalist who stumbled onto a story exactly like that about a guy named Vincent Bogan. I met Vincent 18 years ago when he was 15, when he was about to become a freshman at Bogan High School. Bogan is just a coincidence. It's the same as his name. Bogan is a high school on Chicago's Southwest side. At the time, it was all white, and Vincent was going to be one of the first black kids to go to this school. And I wanted to write a story for the Chicago Reader about what it'd be like for a black kid to come to that high school. So I rode the bus with him one September day in 1981 and followed him during his first day at Bogan. What kind of kid was he at 15? The previous spring, he had been voted "Most Dedicated Student" in his eighth grade class, won $50 for that. He wanted to be an architect. And he was just a nice kid. He had a father who worked as a welder. His mother had been killed in a car accident a couple of years before. And he was the kind of kid who cuts the grass and sprinkles the lawn, wasn't the greatest student, but he did graduate. So when did you hear of him next? How many years passed? I think it was in 1989. I saw a headline in the Tribune that caught my eye. It said something like, "An armed robber gets 75 years," which is a real long time for someone to do for armed robbery. And I read this story, and it said Vincent Bogan had been charged with 17 armed robberies committed in a six-week period in 1988. So I thought this is the Vincent who I wrote about. And I decided to find out what had happened. What had happened, he found out, is that while Vincent was in high school, his father was laid off from his job as a welder and started dealing cocaine out of the house. He taught Vincent the family business. Not long after that, he died. Vincent became addicted to cocaine, stole to support his habit, and was caught. He was offered a deal by the state's attorney, a typical kind of deal for American courts today. If he would admit that he was guilty on all 17 counts of armed robbery, which would make a full trial unnecessary, there would be no trial, then he would get a 25-year sentence. This is called-- as anybody who watches cop shows on TV knows-- copping a plea, taking a plea bargain. And this is where Vincent said, no, said, no in a way that changed his life forever, said, no against the advice of everybody in his life. He wanted to go to trial. His lawyer said it was a mistake. He tried to convince Vincent to take the deal, said, "Vincent, you're going to get hammered if you go to trial. You'll get much more than 25 years." He went to trial on 1 of the 17 counts of armed robbery. The judge gave him the maximum sentence, 30 years. He still had 16 counts left, 16 crimes. At some point, it may have been just before sentencing, the state came to Vincent again and said, "Plead guilty to all the rest of these, and we'll give you just a total of 30." Vincent, again, said, "No, I want to go to trial." So he went to trial a second time, got found guilty again by a jury, and got sentenced to another 30. After that, he went to trial again, got 15 years, bringing his total up to 75. Then he went to trial again, got 60 years. Though in one of those weird legal things that make very little sense to anybody outside of the court system, he serves the 60 at the same time as he serves the 75. Basically, the idea is that if he overturns one of his convictions, someday, on appeal, he still has to serve tons of time. This was an unusually long sentence for armed robbery. So much time that the state simply dropped the other 13 counts against him. Why bother? He'd be away 'til he was an old man. The day the judge gave Vincent the second 30 years, he also sentenced another defendant in his courtroom for murdering two people to 60 years. This defendant had strangled one person with a telephone cord and stabbed the other person 21 times. He got the same 60 years that Vincent had at that point. The difference was the murderer pled guilty. Vincent, at the time, had found Jesus in the jail. And I think he felt that Jesus might help him win some of his cases. And I also feel he didn't like the idea of pleading guilty to some crimes which we hadn't done. Even though he had done many of those crimes, he hadn't done them all. Right. Now you've written about this for the Alicia Patterson Reporter. And just a few weeks ago, you went down to Joliet where Vincent is in a maximum security prison. And you talked to him about why he said no to the plea bargains, why he said no to the deal for 25 years. How old were you at this time? At the time, I was 21. So what was going through your head? It was so many things going through my head, I can't really-- as far as the sentence was concerned, I was looking at 25 years. Half of that time would be 12 and 1/2 years. With day for day good time, 25 means you serve 12 and 1/2. Exactly. And I couldn't really see 12 and 1/2 years of my life going by without me putting up a fight. I'm fighting for my life, what I felt at that particular time. I was 21 years old. I couldn't remember back 12 and 1/2 years. I believe that the Lord had touched my heart and was directing me not to take this cop-out. And that was a strong conviction on my part. My family didn't understand. My attorney didn't understand. But I felt like that's the way I was being led at that time. And I still feel like that was the way that the Lord had led me to go as far as not copping out to these crimes. Why did you think that? You were guilty of some of these armed robberies, right? Right. So why do you think that Jesus wanted you to go to trial? Well, I don't think it was so much that he wanted me to go to trial. But I felt secure in whatever I did. Whatever decision I made, I felt that the Lord was going to be with me. And I don't believe that the Lord has put me here to leave me here. But I know this. That I learned a serious lesson, a serious life lesson about being in a maximum-security penitentiary. If I woulda took the cop-out, I woulda went straight to a medium-security penitentiary. I never woulda seen behind the walls of these type of penitentiaries. And I believe that, in my particular case, I needed that. I needed to know the crimes I did can call for this particular punishment and for a long period of time. Now in the courts here in Illinois, there's something called "the tax?" Well, it's not an official term, but it's one that everyone down at 26th Street in Cook County at the courthouse recognizes. And what it is is a penalty for asserting your right to trial. In other words, if you're offered a certain number of years, if you decide to take a trial and you get found guilty, most likely, you're going to get more time than you would have if you had pled. Seems to make sense on the surface at least. Because if you didn't have that kind of an incentive, everybody would be going to trial, taking a chance on getting found innocent. And with a huge number of cases to deal with, the courts could not possibly deal with that. They couldn't deal with everybody going to trial. They need people to take the plea. Well, last year in Cook County, just under 40,000 cases were disposed of by jury, by bench, and by plea. About 33,000 of those were disposed of by plea. I might add that the tax is usually greater if you insist on a jury trial instead of just a bench trial. In a bench trial, the judge decides whether you're guilty or innocent. A jury trial takes a lot longer because you have to pick a jury, you have to instruct the jury, and you have to make sure that certain evidence does not appear before the jury. So jury trials-- they're a nuisance for the system. They take up a lot of time. So if you go to trial and you insist on a jury trial, you're likely to get a little bit more time if you're convicted than if you just had a bench trial. So last year, as I said, 33,000 pleas. Of the other 7,000 cases, there were about 6,300 bench trials. And I believe there were just under 400 jury trials, less than 1% of the cases that were disposed of in Cook County were disposed of by a jury. And is this necessarily a bad thing? Well, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a bad thing. It depends on your philosophy. If you feel that the criminal justice system is a healthy way to deal with behavior that we don't condone, you'd probably be in favor of a tax. Because it allows the criminal justice system to work and to work even if it has rising caseloads. If you feel that society maybe should look for other ways to dissuade people from participating in activity that we don't condone, then you probably think that we should do the radical thing and abide by the Constitution, especially the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees everybody a right to a jury trial. And that's a right that's not supposed to be fettered by a tax or a punishment if you assert that right. And in Vincent's case, did he ask for a jury trial? Or did he get a bench trial? Jury trials. So all of these were jury trials? Right. He was a particular nuisance for the courts. His cases were taking up an awful lot of time. How many days are we talking about it? Well, it's not that many days. It's probably a day to pick the jury and a day or two of trial. But the judge in that courtroom could have disposed of many cases in the time that he had to pick juries for Vincent's cases. In that courtroom afterward, some of the regular lawyers, the lawyers assigned to the courtroom, talked about some of the prosecutors would talk to the public defenders and warn them that "You don't want your client to get Boganized, do you?" "Boganized," after Vince Bogan. That's right. Vincent was a poster boy for what happens if you assert your right to trial. When I really look back at, OK, you offered me 25 years. Vince, you shoulda took it. Then I say, OK, if I woulda took it, I don't know. God may have had even a better blessing in store for me to take that 25 years. I may have went down to a medium-security penitentiary. I may have been able to continue to do the things I'm doing here in this penitentiary. My faith may have been even stronger in the Lord from that point. But I don't know. I don't know. But I know that God know. And I know that all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord and called according to his purpose. And that's how I was looking at this situation. When Vincent talks about how perhaps God had him refuse the plea, it's like he's throwing himself on to a kind of a pure fatalism. Whatever will happen, will happen. Well, I think that's right. And I think the same kind of fatalism was evident in the run Vincent had been on, the armed robberies he was pulling. I'm convinced that he wanted to get caught. He did get caught the last day after pulling three armed robberies in a row several blocks apart in the afternoon. He wasn't wearing a mask or anything. It was not intelligent work as an armed robber if that's what he was trying to do. But I think that there was an element in Vincent that wanted to be caught. Without doing much psychologizing, I'm certain that the deaths of his mom and dad played a role in that. Exactly how it led him to be doing what he was doing, I'm not certain. In all of your talks with him, did he ever say that he felt like he wanted to be caught? Did he ever admit to that? No, I've asked him about that. He said it was a relief when he was caught. I thank God for the prosecutors and judges. Romans 13 says, "Submit yourself to those who have authority over you." I believe that. If I'm wrong, that wrong should be corrected. Just to get back to the way that he explains to himself what happened, if you think about somebody who made one decision at 21, who said, no, at 21 once essentially-- or in this case, four times in rapid succession-- and then has to live with that for the next 39 years, now that he's had a decade to think about it, it seems like there are only two ways that a person could think about it. One is, I made a terrible mistake and just be racked by that. Or the other, there was a reason, there must be a reason. In this case, God has a reason, and I will just accept that and move forward. And in a way, it's so much healthier or more life preserving for him to believe that there must be a reason that this worked out this way. Yeah, I think that Vincent is a remarkably healthy person now. And by healthy, I mean he's really adapted to his destiny. That doesn't mean that this is a success story by any means. I think it's tragic and it's mind boggling to think about someone spending the next three decades in prison who really doesn't need to be there. Vincent went into prison and very quickly started to do positive things. He's never been in any discipline problems at all in the prison since he's been incarcerated. He's worked as a photographer and the editor of The Pen News, the pentitentiary news, when he was in Pontiac. He worked jobs. He went to school. He's a painter. He does oil paintings mostly of classic cars, and he's very good at it. Vincent was back on the right track within probably a year or two. And I don't think it was because he had a 75-year sentence hanging over his head. If he had just 12 and 1/2 years ahead of him, probably the same thing, you're saying. It may have been regardless of what he had hanging over his head. He needed some time out. And most guys don't do positive time like Vincent has. There's no doubt in my mind that Vincent could have come out a few years ago and gotten a job and been a productive citizen. I was stubborn when they offered me that time really out of ignorance. I don't know why I didn't see the need to cop out for that 25 years. But I didn't. Now if I was offered that cop-out today, of course I'd take it. Even if it meant pleading guilty to 17? Of course. Even though that can never happen. Steve Bogira is working on a book about a year in a courtroom here in Chicago. Vince Bogan's 75-year sentence will probably last 37 and 1/2 years because of good behavior. He'll get out around the year 2025, nearly 60 years old. If he hadn't said no to his plea bargain, he'd be out next year. Well, our program was produced by Susan Burton and myself with Alex Blumberg, Julie Snyder, and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Starlee Kine, Todd Bachmann, Sylvia Lemus, and Jorge Just, who ends his internship with our program today and who we wish the very best for. To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you know, you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who struggles valiantly every day-- I've devoted more of my life to thoughts of giving up than anyone else I can think of. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Danger is all around us, in ways we do not even suspect. Crime blotter. The Athens Daily News, Athens, Georgia. Athens-Clarke police investigated several weekend burglaries, including one in which a burglar stopped to prepare a sandwich. A Cobb Street resident told police someone cut out the window screen between 10:00 AM and 10:45 PM Saturday. But nothing appeared to be missing inside, except enough bread and sandwich meat to make a sandwich, the resident told police. The incident is similar to several other break-ins in the past few days, including one Wednesday in which a burglar drank a bottle of beer, and another Tuesday, in which a burglar prepared a turkey sandwich. We think of crime as a kind of monolithic, menacing presence, a shadowy threat, lurking, faceless. But there are many kinds of crimes and many kinds of criminals. Take these crimes, ripped from today's headlines. Crime blotter. The Anacortes American, Anacortes, Washington. A woman's persistence rewarded her with a shoplifting citation after she attempted to steal four 40-ounce bottles of beer, one at a time, from the Old Salt's convenience store on Skyline Way. The owner of the store told police that the woman, who appeared intoxicated to begin with, entered the store and went to the beer cooler, where she selected a 40-ounce Lucky Lager and left without paying. The owner quickly followed the woman and brought her back in the store. Undaunted by her apprehension, the woman again returned to the cooler, selected another Lucky, and again walked out, closely followed by the owner, who once again returned her to the store. When the owner went to her phone to call police, the persistent woman again jumped to the beer cooler, this time selecting a 40-ounce bottle of Milwaukee's Best, and started drinking down the brew as she left the store. The owner followed and once again returned the shoplifter to her store to wait for police. Apparently still a little parched, the woman returned to the cooler for a fourth time, and grabbed a 40-ounce bottle of St. Ides. This time, however, she didn't bother leaving the store and chugged it down where she stood. The woman was cited for third degree theft, and then taken home and turned over to her husband. Stories about crime, no matter how simple, are a kind of snapshot of someone's life and their problems at a certain moment. Through our crimes, we express who we are. Crime blotter. The Anacortes American, Anacortes, Washington. Police arrested a 22-year-old Anacortes man Saturday morning, July 11, for causing a disturbance after he allegedly hurled potato salad at kids attending a festival, and, in the presence of a police officer, threatened to kill the operator of an inflatable obstacle course. The man told police he was upset because the festival, which started at 10:00 AM, was disrupting his sleep. The man was booked into Skagit County Jail on a charge of disorderly conduct. Today on our radio program, stories about crime and the many varying reasons for committing crimes. Each of the people on today's show chose a crime that is particular to him or her. And it's actually impossible to imagine any of them committing the crimes that the others committed. When we choose to break the law, we choose carefully. It's as much a Rorschach test as anything in our lives. Act One of our program today, Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad, the story of the kind of criminal who somehow believes, through all her crimes, that she's a good person with good intentions. Act Two, You'll Pay, a man who says that part of the thrill of robbing banks is the pleasure of scaring people. Act Three, Grandma Takes a Fall. Her kids don't know. Her grandkids don't know. But hanging around with a bunch of old people at the senior citizens center turns out to be much less interesting than going out and stealing. Stay with us. Act One, Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad. When she was 21, Julia Sweeney moved from Spokane, Washington, to Los Angeles to follow a dream, a dream so many people have, of landing a job in accounting. She had a fresh, new accounting degree from the University of Washington. But the dream accounting job that she had been promised at MGM Studios fell through. And she ended up working as an assistant bartender at a downtown hotel, meaning at various parties and events in the hotel, she sold tickets for drinks. And then customers would carry these tickets over to the real bartenders, who were all young, African American men, and not deemed trustworthy enough to handle cash themselves. Among other things, this turned out to be a bad piece of judgment on the part of hotel management. Julia estimates that she herself stole between $10,000 and $15,000 in cash in this job, though she started as an honest employee. I started out very conscientiously. And there was some accounting involved, because you would write down the number of the first ticket and the number of the last ticket. And then you had to have the amount of money for the amount of tickets you sold. And I had-- Did you actually think that at the time, well, there is some accounting involved in this? Was that a thought? Yeah, actually I did. I thought, well, I like numbers. Now, I'm such a different person than the person I was who liked numbers, that it's hard for me to even believe I ever had that thought. But yes, at the time, I was looking forward to the number part of it. So I had three different kinds of tickets. I had beer and wine tickets, I had soft drink tickets, and I had mixed drink tickets. And they were like $2.75 and $2.50 and $1.25 or something. And they were different colors. And so I started selling these tickets. And it was just many, many hours of sitting at a card table. And people would come up, and you'd just make change and sell tickets. And well, to me, what started it was that they wouldn't pay for my parking at the hotel while I worked. And I bet parking was really expensive. Well, it was $3.00. But still, it made me mad that they wouldn't pay the $3.00 for the parking. So I justified taking $3.00 every time I worked because I thought they should pay for parking. You felt like an injustice had been done. And you were just righting a wrong. Yes. And that set you on the path of crime. Yes, it did. So I discovered that if you sold a ticket from inside the roll, for example, at the beginning of the roll, like if you pulled out the little cardboard insert that started the roll of tickets and pulled the ticket out of that part of it, that number on that ticket wouldn't be part of the numbers that you would be reporting. So I would just take one ticket from the middle and sell it. So I'd just take $2.75. But it did require me having to pocket the $2.75 when I was in the room counting the money with all the other cashiers. So you're kind of in front of people. So you have to be able to get that money in your pocket without them seeing. So I had to learn how to do that, which actually was very easy. How do you do it? You just wait till no one's looking or just dumb things, like you cough or look the other way, and then you put $2.75 in your pocket. But then, I was working long shifts that were like eight hours. And I would get hungry. And I didn't have enough time to leave the hotel. And they didn't provide a meal. So I felt it was their responsibility to buy me lunch. So I thought, well, maybe I'll just take six more dollars' worth. OK, it's all a blur now, where it went from $6 to, oh, $500. But somehow, it just started increasing and increasing, because I started taking a little more and a little more. And then, things would happen like, oh, my car insurance would be due, and I was like $80 short. The thing that, looking back on it, is interesting to me is that I started getting really high from it. I would get a huge rush when I left the hotel and knew that I was safe with the money. And I can honestly say I've never really had that particular feeling of high again since I did that. And then I started doing really kind of nutty things where I would increase the danger, like I was flirting with getting caught or flirting with the danger of it. For example, I stopped parking at the hotel, and I purposely-- and this is like downtown LA, so it's a little scary and empty at night. And I would purposely park my car on the street under a tunnel, like seven blocks away with no streetlights. And then I would have like a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. And I would come out, and I would run as fast as I humanly could, for me, to my car. And I'd be drenched in sweat and as high as I've ever felt in my entire life. Was it just like, I'll do the riskiest possible thing I could do? I think it was that I got really high from feeling like I was in danger. And I kept putting myself in more danger because it was so exciting. The hairs on the back my neck would be sticking up as I would leave the hotel. And sweat would be running down my back, and I'd be shaking. But it was like getting away with it. You got away with it. Oh, and then I would drive home. And often, I'd drive home at 2:00 or 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. And there would be, oftentimes, policemen chasing people along the road. I would drive down Sixth Avenue home. And lots of times, like most of the time, someone would be getting arrested. And it all felt very intense and exciting to me. I was in the big city, and I was part of everything. And I had this money, and I'd taken it. And I was driving down the street, and there were cops right there. At its highest point, how much would you take a night? My biggest night was $1,000. And when you were taking that much, how would you pocket $1,000? Well, that doesn't take up that much room. But isn't it a big wad of $1 and $5 bills? No, no, I would take the bigger bills. Oh, my god. I'm in a confessional. And you're Father [? McGrann. But I'd know that I was getting reckless. I was taking too much. I would flirt with the moments that I could actually pocket it. I would push the envelope of when it was really-- like at the beginning, it would be $3, and I would make sure it was totally safe. And then 10 months later, it would be like $300. I remember thinking, I could pocket money while my supervisor's staring at me, and they'll never notice it. I'm that good. And did you do that? I don't know if I did it that blatantly. But I definitely was doing it in front of other people where they weren't noticing it. Then I started to realize that that's exactly when you do it. It's when people would never think anyone would do that. That's when you do it. You do it right in front of their eyes. You do it while you're talking to them and you're counting out money. But I justified it because I'd think, I'm not buying drugs. I'm not buying drugs. You know why other people steal? To buy drugs, which is disgusting. You know what I use this for? My rent and car insurance, and my student loan. To me, it meant that I was being honest and good with the money. It's not like I was paying some drug dealer for drugs. Like somehow, that made it OK. I don't know why, but somehow, I can imagine that at the height of this, you would be somebody who would actually find herself giving away some of her stolen money to charity. Did that happen? Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, I was going to mass every Sunday and making-- I think I was giving them $50 to $100, or something, a time. Oh, and I'm telling you, I would not miss mass one Sunday while I was doing this. It made you go to mass more, the fact that you were stealing? Oh, yeah. Well, because, for one, I got a high off of being able to put so much in the money container thing. I really felt good about it. That's sick. It's really sick. But then, I felt-- first of all, I liked being around God. And at that time, I felt like being around God meant being in church. And I didn't really-- OK. I'm almost as if I'm talking about someone who is so far away from me, they're not me. But I didn't really think of it as a sin at the time. I thought of it as an opportunity. Almost like God had given me this opportunity. And what was I going to do, not take the opportunity? I think it was really potent for me when I was in mass because here I was with God, and I was giving money. It was like, so see, God? Here, you get your own cut. It was that we were thrown in together. It was almost like, if the only person who knows I'm doing this is God and me, we have a pretty intimate relationship going on right now. And it's very, very intimate and personal. And it's between me and God. And that made me feel, at that time, in my 22-year-old brain, like I was having a close relationship with a deity, which now I think is insane. But at the time, that all made sense to me. I have to say, you saying this, it explains this thing that, when I've seen it in fiction, when I've seen it in the Godfather movies, I have never understood and I just assumed was a literary device or something, the notion that these mobsters would commit these crimes, but then consider themselves to be Catholic guys, and go to mass and this and that. I was never able to understand. And I always thought, oh, well, that's just made up, that part. No. Oh, I understand that completely. And also, if you had gotten into a discussion with me about the Catholic church at that time, I would defend it to the end. It was almost like, that's my family you're talking about. I had much more allegiance to the church while I was doing bad things. But you know what is really even more sick about my experience? I felt like God was a little bit of an accomplice with me. I didn't feel like I needed God to say it was OK. I almost felt like God was my pimp or something. I had to go pay God off. That was a weird thing I was doing in my head then. And see, the big night, that's when I took the $1,000-- I can't believe I'm saying-- well, I was in Spokane for Christmas, visiting my family. And I had to get back for New Year's Eve, because New Year's Eve was the biggest night of the year for alcohol sales. That would be my biggest chance to make the most money. There would be-- At the hotel, yeah. Yeah. We'd probably count $60,000 in cash, at night, at the hotel on a New Year's Eve. So there was so much chance for the money not to be noticed. And I was in Spokane, and there was this terrible storm. And the airport closed down. And it was frozen. And no one was able to get out of the city. And they didn't even want people on the roads. And my parents said, "Oh, well, I guess you're just going to have to stay with us for New Year's Eve." And I said, "No, I have to work on New Year's Eve." And they said, "Well, call the hotel and tell them you can't make it." And I said, "No, I've got to make it. I've got to make it." And they said, "Well, but you can't make it. The roads are bad. No planes are leaving the city." And I got on a Greyhound bus that took, I think, 15 hours to get from Spokane to Seattle, so I could get on a plane to get back to LA, so I could work on New year's Eve. And to me, that was when I realized it was out of control. Because my feeling of having to get there-- It wasn't even about the money that much then, because I didn't even need the money that much then. It was more like, the big score's going down. I've got to get there. I've got to get there. Damn it, get me on a-- I'll walk to Seattle, but I can not miss this night. And of course, I was getting paid minimum wage. So it seemed absurd to everyone I knew that I would go to those kinds of extremes to get back, so I could go to a job where I got paid $3.50 an hour or something. Julia Sweeney is a writer and actress, who says she stopped stealing in 1984, after the whole thing started to make her sick. Then she quit her job. She hasn't stolen since. She wants you to know that she understands that stealing is wrong. Under California law, the statute of limitations for her crime, grand larceny, ran out in 1987. The CD of her one-woman show, Letting Go of God, is out this month. Act Two, You'll Pay. Some criminals do not see themselves as basically good people getting away with something bad. Some people do not believe that God is on their side when they commit their crimes. They have a point they want to make about God, but that is not the precise point they are trying to make. We have this story from reporter Marilyn Snell about an ex-con who lives in Oakland, California. Joe Loya spent two years in prison for grand theft auto, strong arm robbery, and bounced checks. He did another seven for bank robbery. He robbed a lot of banks. The official number is 24. When I was arrested, they said, "This is a bank robber who robbed 24 banks." But I know I counted once and lost count at 30 or 32. I was not born with a criminal mind. I don't think anybody is born with a criminal mind. I was raised in a very religious environment. My father was eventually a minister. My parents got married when they were 16. My mother was pregnant. And my dad, real early, decided that he wanted to serve God. So he started teaching himself Greek and Hebrew. And he also learned Latin along the way, all these languages so that he could interpret the scriptures. We were a family of the text. Everything in our life, every morality, every decision had to somehow be validated by scripture. I read the Bible from cover to cover every year, because there was this program my dad had where every day, we read a little bit of the New Testament and Old Testament. And by the end of the year, the entire Bible was read. My parents loved God so much. My mother was this little Sunday school teacher at the church. So that in my baby book, my mother writes when I was-- I was born August 11, 1961. And three years and four months later, on November 3, 1964, my mother wrote that I "accepted Christ as his Savior." And she wrote, [? "Faith Gurlack ?] led him to the Lord." In the baby book again, when I'm four years old, the next year, 1965, October 10, on a Sunday, she said that, "Joey feels a call to the missionary field, to tell the parents and preach in India the Gospel. He is four years old," she wrote. Joe's mother died when he was nine. His brother Paul was seven. Their father was suddenly alone with two young sons, not much money, and zero coping skills. It was around this time that he began to get violent with his boys. My father, regular, when he would lose his temper, he would hit us severely and beat us. And then afterwards, he would cry-- like an alcoholic in a way, even though he wasn't-- but he would cry and beg our forgiveness. It would be this heavy emotional scene, where we'd cry and we'd forgive him. And we'd go to him, we love you Daddy. Don't cry. God forgives. And we'd pray. And everything would be-- supposed to be fine and dandy. And then it would happen again. When my dad finally got a church when I was about 12 years old, I couldn't understand how the people in those pews could believe in this man, when he was obviously, to me, such a fraud. And that's when I began to doubt. I began to doubt the flock, the wisdom of the flock. I was being raised by a deceptive person. So I became sort of deceptive. And when I was in eighth grade, I was able to jimmy the lock in a cabinet that he had in his bedroom. And I would pilfer dollars out of every offering envelope that-- they kept the offering in there. And I would take my friends to go eat at Foster's Freeze. I would take a bunch of friends over there. We'd get ice cream, chips, we'd get burgers and fries and-- Courtesy of the Lord? Courtesy of God. This picnic is on God. Thank you, God. Amen. And he started dating Susie. And the same pattern began, where she thought he was a spiritual man. I despised that. I despised that he could get away with it. And what I did is, I went to this woman, and said, "Hey, listen, my dad beats us. Run far and fast as you can." She took us out to dinner one Sunday evening. And in my bravado, I said, "You know what? Next time he does it, I swear, I'm going to stab him." And I held up a steak knife. And so a week later, within a week, he had sensed, picked up from Susie, that Susie was starting to pull away. And he assumed that maybe I had told her something. And so he called me into the kitchen. He says, "Hey, listen." He played this trick on me. He said, "Hey, I've got something to say. You told Susie that I've been a little violent with you guys and stuff. It's not a problem. I already know you told her. She told me you told her that. She was kind of concerned. So it's no big deal, but you did, didn't you? I just wanted to see if you'll admit to it." It was the first and last time I ever confessed to a crime. I see him saying that everything's fine, everything's going to be all right. And I want to believe that everything's going to be all right. I want to believe that he's going to take the high road. I want to believe in forgiveness, too. I want to believe that things can be all right. And as soon as I tell him, "Yeah, OK, I did," he throws a teapot at me, chases me around. And he proceeds to beat me, so that by that evening, in the hospital, they would X-ray me and find that I had a broken wrist, fractured elbow, and broken rib. At one point, he stops beating me. And he left the house. He went down to 7-Eleven. We didn't have a phone at the time. He went down to 7-Eleven down the block, about a mile away, calls Susie, breaks up with her, and comes back home. But it was during that time, in this state of concussion that I had-- what was later diagnosed as a massive concussion-- I'm sitting there in a daze. But I know enough to say, "Paul, go to the bathroom. Lock yourself in. Don't come out until I say." I walked to the kitchen. I pulled out a knife. I went back to the bedroom. I sat on my bed. And I put the knife underneath the pillow. And I waited for him, for my father to come home. And he did. He came in the front door, walked over to my room. And he had this maniacal look on his face when he walked to my door. He looked at me. Then he looked at the other side of the room. And he saw weights there. He looked at me again. And I could tell, something's going on in that demented mind of his. And sure enough, he walks over to the weights, and he begins to disassemble them. They were cement weights that had plastic around them. And I have no clue what he's going to do. This is a new level of improvised savagery even for him. But I wasn't about to find out what he was going to do with that, if he was going to hit me with the weights or with the bar. So what I did was, I pulled the knife out from underneath the pillow. I stood up. He said, "Put it away, put it away." And I continued to stay there. He started walking at me. And I could tell-- he started demanding that I put it down, like, "Put down the knife, put down the knife." And I lunged at him. And when I did, he put up his left arm. But I was able to stab him in the neck. And I came down hard. And I started twisting it, trying to break it off in his neck. And he screamed. And he grabbed his neck. And he said, "You killed me. You killed me." And he fell to the ground. And I remember that I stood over him. And I said something. I don't quite remember the verbatim. But it was essentially, "You did this to yourself," in the sense that you brought it on yourself. Almost like a biblical thing, this is what your sin hath wrought kind of idea. There's this great line from Auden, where he says, "I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn, those to whom evil is done do evil in return." This is the man I feared the most in the world. After him was God. And when I knocked him off his pedestal, there was nobody who could replace him. Not the police, not teachers, not politicians, nothing. The only person I had to fear after I knocked my dad off was the heavens. And that was God. And I couldn't see him. So that meant that I had primacy of my life on this planet. I became my own God here. I did not fear authority anymore. Joe's father survived the stabbing, but lost his sons to foster care for several months. After Joe graduated from high school, he attended Bible college for a semester, but dropped out. He didn't want to work, so he supported himself by stealing from his friends. After a while, he moved on to bigger targets. He stole cars, passed fraudulent checks, and finally began robbing banks. In 1988, after being released from a two-year prison sentence, he went on a 14-month-long bank robbing spree. Well, I'd wake up and say, "I don't know what I want to do today. I just know I want to look good, and I want to go spend a lot of money. And I want to have fun. Maybe I want to spend $10,000 today. I want to go to Vegas. I want to fly all my friends someplace, buy them all nice clothes, and eat. That's $10,000 I'm going to lose. Maybe I should go rob a bank or two tomorrow." So that was your notion of living from check to check? My idea of living check to check was, I have $40,000 here. That means it's going to be gone in three months. That was my idea, yeah. So where would you keep your money? Always under my bed in a gym bag. $40,000 of smelly dough. Money is very smelly. I was going to ask you this. Did you smell the money? Oh, yeah. Why? You can't not smell the money. Because you're intrigued by the fact that money is putrid. It's like-- I don't want to say it's disgusting-- It's like you smell the money, and you'll be like, "Is that you?" And you put your face in it. And you're like, "Oh, yeah, it is you. You stink." It's disgusting. On my way to a bank, I'd have this conversation with my body, where my body would start to rebel naturally because it was frightened. It knew I was putting itself into harm's way. I always had a gun. So I knew that there was a possibility of using the gun. My stomach would get knotted. I'd feel like I had the runs. I would start to shake. I'd violently shake sometimes. My hands almost want to bounce off the steering wheel. If that couldn't stop me, then this intense wave of fatigue would come over me. And if I pulled over to the side of the road and I wanted to, I'm sure I could've just gone to sleep right away. My body just wanted to shut down. And when I pushed through that with my will, then this incredible calm would come over me. And that's when I was in control. I would walk in there, wait in line, get up to a teller and lean forward, speak very clearly but low. And I would tell them that we have a bomb, I have a gun, and this is a bank robbery. Give me the money now. And even though it was only me, I wanted to give the impression that, listen, the all-seeing eye of horrors is out there, kind of thing. There's somebody behind me who sees you and sees me, and I have backup. And I came with that kind of confidence. Asian women and black women were the most difficult to rob. What I thought about Asian women was, these are women who just came over from Vietnam. And they saw bodies strewn all over the village. They are not afraid of a little guy like me coming up without a weapon. I thought that. And then, with the black women, I felt like, these are women who talk to black men a certain way. There is this certain aggression between them, this, "You don't have a gun. What are you going to do, reach across here and slap me? Uh-uh. I don't think so." I kind of got that feeling like, you're not going to do anything. And that's when I had to-- it took too much work. I had to pretend like I was ready-- I put my hand real fiercely on the counter. And I'd say, "I'm coming. Don't make me come over. I'll shoot you." It was just way too much work. Who I found were the easiest to rob were these middle class white women who looked like their daughter and son just went off to college, and now they finally get to go to work again. And they decided to work from 1:00 to 3:00 every day at the bank, get a little money in, so they could buy their stuff for ceramics or something. They would always greet me very cheerfully. And they were the easiest ones to rob. In fact, a couple times, I was embarrassed at the ease. I'd say, "This is a robbery," to one woman. And she just looked down, opened the drawer, and started giving me the big bills first. I didn't have to finish my spiel. And I almost felt like, "Hey lady, you do this any faster, they're going to think we were in cahoots." To the tellers, what I felt I was introducing them to was the same notion of hazard that I had known as a child, which is, I was going through life fine. Everything was going good for me. And all of a sudden, my mother's dead. Whoa, what happened here? All of a sudden, my dad can't deal with his anger, and he's beating us. Whoa, what's happening here? Life is not what we think it is. And there are these violent intersections where, when your life intersects with hazard or contingency, it's something profound. And that's what I felt I was introducing them to. It's like, now you know. Now I can live off of your terror. It's what I did to my father when I stabbed him and I heard him crying. I loved that. I said, "Now you know how I feel." Violence helped me recover a sense of my lost self. I could look at somebody else and say, "Ha ha, you see. Now you're a fool. You thought you could just go through life and everything was going to be nice if you behaved a certain way. And look at, now you've met me. And look at how frightened you are. And now look at how frightened you're going to be forever. And this experience is not-- you're never going to recover from it." It was validating. It made me feel like, this is the world I know. This is the way experience really is. And now all I'm doing is educating people. Joe Loya was released from prison in 1997. He's gone through big changes since his days as a bank robber. Now he's an editor at Pacific News Service. He's married. At the wedding ceremony, Joe's father, who he's reconciled with, recited from the book of Corinthians, chapter 13, "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing." Marilyn Snell is a reporter in San Francisco. Joe Loya has published a memoir called The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber. Coming up, they took Europe back from the Nazis. They raised the flag at Iwo Jima. And they'll be damned if they're going to spend their golden years sitting around playing Pinochle. Sticky fingers, wrinkled hands. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of people to take a whack at that theme with documentaries, interviews, performances, found tape, found documents, anything we can think of. Today's program, The Allure of Crime, how people express themselves and their personalities through the way they steal. Let us begin the second half of our show as we began the first, with a review of criminal activity from around the nation, in this case, from Colorado, Washington state, and Georgia. Crime blotter. The Athens Daily News, Athens, Georgia. A recent immigrant to Athens, whom police initially suspected of driving under the influence Wednesday, turned out to be merely unfamiliar with traffic laws, according to the Athens-Clarke county police report. A police officer spotted the man, 24, driving a white Pontiac Grand Prix on the Atlanta highway late Wednesday night, having trouble staying in one lane. The officer turned on his lights and siren, and pursued the man, who did not stop, according to the report. Police finally stopped the man on Epps Bridge Road, beside the Lowe's hardware store. The man explained to officers in broken English that he came to the US six months ago and had started driving a month ago. Officers noticed a card with written instructions on driving, explaining to put the key in the ignition, press the accelerator, and other basics, taped to the dashboard of the man's Pontiac. According to the report, the man told officers he did not know the light and siren of a police car signified that he was supposed to stop. The man was ticketed and released. Crime blotter. The Pueblo Chieftain, Pueblo, Colorado. Mike Baca 37, was eating at Phil's Diner, 2225 Lake Avenue, about 2:30 AM Thursday, when he told police he asked William Baros for a cigarette. And Baros became enraged. "You want a cigarette?" Baros reportedly said. "What kind of sucker do you think I am?" Baca said Baros then started to call him names and threw two sugar dispensers at him. They shattered when they hit a wall. Baros also threw a salt and pepper shaker set and an ashtray, according to police reports. Baros then tried to hit Baca with a chair. Baros was arrested and faces charges of third degree assault and criminal mischief. Crime blotter. The Athens Daily News, Athens, Georgia. Two juveniles mugged the Easter bunny at Georgia Square recently as he left the stage for a break. "They came up to me, gave me a hug, and knocked my head back," said the battered bunny, a 19-year-old drama student at the University of Georgia. "From what I was told, they were trying to take off the head," the bunny said. "I experienced disorientation and a severe headache, resulting in a contusion." Police took a dim view of the incident. They rounded up two suspects, ages 12 and 13, and booked them on charges of simple battery. "It's a sad day when the Easter bunny can't appear in public without a security escort," said police sergeant [? Mike Brenner ?]. Crime blotter reports written by local reporters John Bauer, Juan Espinosa, Ben Deck, Stephen Gurr, and Joan Stroer. Thanks also to Gail Mann and Duncan Frazier, Jim Thompson and Greg Martin. Our police blotter was read by actor Matt Malloy, who recently played a cop in the movie Cookie's Fortune and another authority figure, the vice principal, in the movie Election. Act Three, Grandma Takes a Fall. Let's start this act with something that a 19-year-old shoplifter from New York State said in an interview for today's show. I really don't think-- I can't imagine myself at 28 or 30, or definitely not like 40 or like 60 years old, and stealing something, just because I think I'll be at a place in my life where I'll be maybe more comfortable with the boredom. I won't be as restless. I'm just a really restless person. Well, meet Stanley Rosenthal. I want to tell you, this golden years is not that great. Ask, "Tell me." I'll tell you about it. When you're a senior, every day is something else. You get an ear ache, you go to sleep, it's fine, you'll get up with a toothache. When the toothache disappears, the next day, you get up with a toe ache, or the arthritis gets to you. These are things that happen to you as a senior. And sometimes, people get aggravated with the world. And that's why they go out and steal. They're just pissed off. They don't care. "What the heck? Why did God do this to me?" Why can't-- They'll get revenge. It's revenge. It's a way of getting revenge. Stanley Rosenthal runs a program in Broward County, Florida. There are programs like it all over Florida, and in fact, all over the country. If you're over 60 and arrested for shoplifting in Broward County, the judge sends your case to Stanley. Stanley sees an average of 600 senior citizens a year. He spoke with Jeanne Finley and Doug DuBois. Nobody knows how much theft is committed each year by senior citizens. One study found that seniors comprised 15% of people apprehended for shoplifting. Seniors, of course, tend to be poorer than other Americans. But counselors who work with senior shoplifters say that many of them are not stealing out of need. About half of senior shoplifters, they say, have stolen all their lives. Stanley sends offenders to do community service. He does a healthy business. Stan Rosenthal, can I help you? Listen, Jane. I've got you. You're in the program. Listen, you do something. You've got to go into your church or something and do 20 hours of community service-- Yeah, well, yes and send a-- I'm going to tell you, be careful, be good. Because we get arrested the next time, honey, you're coming with your pajamas and your toothbrush, because you're going to go to jail. So I'm just telling you, that's what. A second time, they don't stand for second offenders. OK, dear? All right, give me a call in a couple weeks. Bye-bye. When they first come in, when they come in here, their head down to the floor. They're miserable. They have no hope. They're terribly concerned that the kids, their grandchildren, are going to find out. And then I encourage them. I tell them what the program is all-- "Nobody's going to know. Keep your mouth shut. Don't tell anybody. The worst thing to do is tell your friends. Your sympathy, looking for sympathy. First thing you know, your friend is telling 68 people. And the first thing you know, 900 people know about you. You go over to a restaurant, say, 'Oh, you got arrested for shoplifting the other day, didn't you?'" This way, I tell them, "Don't even tell your mother. Don't tell your kids. Don't tell anybody. That's right. Keep your mouth shut. Never open up your mouth because people stink." The place was very crowded because they had a sale on. And when I went to the door, I started to go out the door, and then a woman came and grabbed my arm, and took me by the elbow, and turned me around, and began to take me into the store again. And she said I had taken something that wasn't mine and without paying for it. And I said, no I hadn't. This woman asks that we not give her name over the radio because, you know, people stink. We can say that she lives in another big state that is far from Florida. She talked with Jeanne Finley. Oh, I wanted to run away. I couldn't believe it. I tried to run away, as a matter of fact. But she had such a tight hold on my arm, she steered me back into the store. And it was very embarrassing with all the people watching. And I felt terrible. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I thought I was going to faint. And I was so upset that when I got into the little room, they gave me a glass of water to drink because I was so upset. And when the police came, what happened? When the police came, I had to empty my pocketbook. And I had to show them what I had in it. And they immediately pounced on the aspirin and said that this was what I had stolen and taken away without paying for it. And I said, "No." And finally, I had to admit that I had done it. I offered to pay for the aspirin, but they said, no, it doesn't work that way, that I had taken it. And so I had to suffer from the consequences of having taken the aspirin. And I said, "What's going to happen to me now?" And they said, "Well, you have a choice. You can go to jail, or you can take a course to stop you from shoplifting." It was a program specifically for senior shoplifters. And we were supposed to look into ourselves and find out what made us shoplift. What did you come up with? What did you learn from it? Well, I learned that I enjoyed the shoplifting beforehand. But I don't know why. I didn't really learn that much from the sessions. I always enjoyed shoplifting. I always enjoyed taking things. But we were told that that wasn't the way we should feel, that we should feel guilty and ashamed of what we had done. This is a drugstore similar to the one where I was caught shoplifting. But I can't go back to that one, because they don't allow you to go in once you've been caught shoplifting. Well, this is the candy aisle. But I don't ever go down the candy aisle. It's too open and too many people in this area. I like to go down an aisle where there are not many people. I've shoplifted most of my life. I started when I was quite young. And it was a way of getting back at my parents because they were so strict to me. And I would take things. They didn't allow me to have candy, so I took candy. They didn't allow me to wear my hair in a fancy style, so I took bobby pins. They didn't allow me to dress in a certain way. I couldn't have earrings. It was so easy to just go to the store, and whatever I wanted, I would just slip into a bag that I had with me. And then it began to be a question of I felt I could pull something off that other people couldn't do. And I felt very good about that. And then I began to be happy that I could get something for nothing. And that was great. I didn't shoplift so much when my children were young, because I was busy and very involved with the family and getting meals and things like that. But once in a while, when I would be in the store after the children were in school and everything, I would go and pick up a thing or two. But it was much less frequent when I had my children. Did your husband or your children know? Oh, they never knew. I wouldn't have told them for anything. I would be afraid to tell them. Have you told anybody about the fact that you were caught recently? I haven't told anybody but you. And you said you wouldn't tell anybody. I held the basket on my arm just like this. And then I had my purse on my other shoulder. And as I went down the aisle, I had stopped and looked around to make sure nobody was watching me. But there are so many mirrors in this store. There are mirrors over there, there are mirrors over there. And I imagine there are a lot of TV cameras that I can't even see. Well, actually, I shoplift whenever the mood strikes me, whenever I feel sad or depressed in any way. I can't tell you exactly how many times, because I guess I don't keep that careful track. But I would guess at least once a month, if not more often. And I do it because it gives me such a lift to be out among people and to be pulling this off on them. You know, when my husband died, I got very lonely. And I didn't like to be so lonely. I wanted to get out and do things. But I couldn't get out because I didn't know anybody. See, he worked and I didn't. And he went out and had a lot of friends. And I didn't have many friends because I stayed home. Only the neighbors. And sometimes, the neighbors were younger than I was, and they were all busy and involved. And after my children grew up, I didn't have much chance to meet people. I feel quite lonely as a senior because my children moved away. And then, they weren't nearby. And they were all involved in their own doings and lives. And I felt very sad and lonely. And when I get out and go to the store and go to the sales and look at the merchandise, it gives me a great deal of happiness to do this. Well, I held my purse in this manner and opened it up. And I was looking things over, taking them off the shelf and looking them over. And I got my Kleenex out of my purse. And I would, a-choo. And then, I took the Kleenex to wipe my nose and slipped the aspirin in my purse so they couldn't see it. That's the trouble with those senior centers. They're all seniors, and they've all got the same problems and the same difficulties. I like to be out shoplifting or going to the market or going to the store and looking at the sales and doing things like that, being among all types of people, all ages and all kinds. And in the senior center, another thing. All they do is to play bridge. And I don't know how to play bridge. I started taking lessons. But the lessons were kind of difficult. And you had to keep your attention on them, and you had to keep playing. And I didn't always want to go to the senior center, because I have arthritis, and my arthritis began to hurt. And I didn't want to go there and play bridge with a bunch of people that I didn't know very well. It was much more fun to go shoplifting. I need to get some bandages today. But I'm not sure I want to do it here. I feel very open and exposed here. When I was young, I took things that a young girl would take. I took things like makeup and things like that, that would make me prettier and more attractive to other people. But as I grew older, I began to take things that I needed more, like the aspirin. I needed the aspirin. And I began to take that sort of thing, rather than the makeup and the things like that. And did you ever try to stop? Oh, I have tried. But you can't stop something that-- I guess it's kind of like drinking. You can't stop drinking because you enjoy it. Well, I couldn't stop shoplifting because I enjoy it. Why do you think the program is not effective? Was it not effective because the things that make you want to shoplift, the program couldn't change? Yes, that's really why. I couldn't get my children to come and be with me more. I couldn't get other people to come. My arthritis keeps hurting, and nobody seems to be able to stop that from hurting. So I wanted something that would take my mind off my hurt. And I could shoplift and be very clever doing that. And it would take my mind off my pain. In the program in your senior center, did you make friends with any of the other people in the class? You mean when I was in the-- In the program. --recovery program? Yeah. No, I didn't. Who wants to get friendly with people who are thieves? But you're not a thief? Well, I don't consider myself a thief. I guess, technically, I am. But you don't feel like a thief? No, I don't feel like a thief. I feel as though I deserve what I get. I've worked hard all my life. And I deserve to have a little something extra. But I guess society doesn't look at it that way. That interview by Jeanne Finley, a documentary filmmaker in New York. Our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors for this show, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Seth Lind, and Thea Chaloner. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Musical help today from Marika Partridge. You know you can listen to our programs for absolutely free on our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. Or you know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who wants you to know just one thing. Really, just one little thing. One, and one thing only. You know why other people steal? To buy drugs, which is disgusting. You know what I use this for? My rent and car insurance. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. I didn't really think of it as a sin at the time. I thought of it as an opportunity. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Amy McGuiness flies people to the North Pole, tourists who pay thousands of dollars for the privilege. It's a six-hour flight in a prop jet. And for most of that time, if you look out the window, all you see is ice. When you get to the Pole, it looks exactly like all the other ice you've been staring at for hours. So the tourists climb out of the plane. They're only given half an hour at the Pole. And what do most of them do with the time? Take pictures. And most of them have brought these little global positioning devices, GPSs. And they spend their time looking at the devices which tell them that yes, this is, in fact, the North Pole. Here's Amy McGuiness. Getting out of the plane and looking around, there'd be nothing to tell you that you're at the North Pole. They can usually verify it by just powering up the GPS. I realize, actually, as we talk, I have no picture in my head of what would be at the North Pole except what you would see in a kid's cartoon, which is a barber pole sticking out of the ground. But there's no such a thing, right? No, and it seems ridiculous, and I laugh, but I've had passengers ask, "Where's the barber pole?" Oh really? Yeah. But we usually, with the groups, we take up some kind of a fake barber pole and stick it in the ice somewhere, just for pictures' sake. Oh my. Yeah. There are the people who always want to know where they are in the world. They move through the world checking their position. And there's a kind of travel that we all do sometimes that's all about that moment of "You are here." You check where you are. You check your position on the map. You take a snapshot. You move on. The North Pole is just an extreme example. Because, of course, there's nothing there, no one to meet, you're only there for half an hour. It costs $30,000 per person. And, until recently, a regular civilian would have no way to confirm that they were at the North Pole since normal compasses, like the one on the airplane that Amy McGuiness flies-- Because we're so close to the magnetic North Pole that it basically tips in the jar it's sitting in and is unreliable. It'll be 60 degrees off the proper heading. It tips as if to say, "Oh, forget it." Yeah, exactly. And then there's this sort of person who kind of enjoys the moment when the compass stops working, the moment when there's no way to tell exactly where you are, and no global positioning system to help you figure it out. The good and bad thing now that everyone has GPS-- because in a way, it's certainly nice to know where you are. And it takes away a bit of the panic factor. It doesn't matter what part of the world you're in. But there is something lost there in always knowing exactly where you are. Well, in a way, it's the opposite of adventure. Sure, sure. And adventure, it becomes sort of an art when it comes to finding out or thinking of where you are and where you want to end up. On today's radio program, three stories, three people, three sets of maps. And what it's like to be lost, how we all struggle in that moment not to give ourselves over to fear, and, hopefully, try to enjoy it. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our program today, Ishtar Days, Arabian Nights. A man tries to lose himself completely, leave the places charted on maps. And what happens to you, and what you find when you try to leave the known world like this and succeed. Act Two, The Game. Writer David Sedaris finds himself in a room full of people in a foreign city. He doesn't speak the language. He doesn't know anyone. And he has one simple, simple mission, a mission that you, yourself, may be capable of. Act Three, When You Can Snatch The Pebble From My Hand, Grasshopper, Then You Can Leave. One low-paid office worker tries to operate a global positioning apparatus on the map of her entire life. Stay with us, my friend. Act One, Ishtar Days, Arabian Nights. Back when he was 21, John Bowe decided to visit a friend of his who was in the Peace Corps in Mali, in Africa. But he chose, I have to say, the most difficult possible route to get there. He decided to hitchhike across the Sahara Desert. And not just hitchhike, but hitchhike using a remote route 1,000 miles long that most hitchhikers avoid. He brought no special gear, carried a small bag filled mostly with books, one change of clothes. He wanted to go to places on the map with fewer and fewer roads. And I don't know. When you travel a lot, when you're traveling and just sort of drifting around, you spend a lot of time looking at the map. And you exoticize it. And you get this weird relationship to it, where you start just thinking, "Well, god, this was cool getting to this remote area. I bet you it would be cooler to get to that area because it's that much more remote." You want to go off the map. You want to go off the map? You want to go off the map, meaning you want to go off the area where the roads are on the map? Right. But you want to go off the map in a more metaphorical sense, too. You want to get off of the grid of American life, the grid of the modern world. You want to get totally away from white people and American techno living that's defined world culture. How easy or how hard was it to get off the map? Well, that's one of the really interesting things. You can hop on a plane from anywhere to anywhere, hop on another little plane or train or something else, and then walk 20 feet and be in the middle of nowhere, which is one of the weirdest things about the modern world. You could take a plane probably from New York to Manaus in Brazil, and take a boat, and immediately be lost in the middle of the rainforest. And it would take you all of a day to get there. So the idea was to hitchhike across the Sahara Desert. And at first, I had had this idea because of my trusty Michelin map. They indicated that there was still a camel caravan that goes back and forth between southern Morocco and Timbuktu. And I kept asking people around, "Is there still a camel caravan that does this thing?" And people were kind of saying, yes, but only the people who were trying to sell me stuff, like, "Yeah, well, but you're going to need a lot of stuff for the journey. Why don't you buy this $300 worth of stuff?" So it's like, "Well, let me just make sure there's a caravan first." And then it's funny because, later, I found out about some German kid who had actually bought $1,000 worth of gear. And they said, "Oh yeah, just be here." They sold him a camel. And just wait here. Right. Be here on the second Sunday of every month, and the guys all come. You can start your journey then. So that seemed like it wasn't going to happen. So then I went to Algeria, down to Tamanrasset, which is about a third of the way across the desert. And then the plan was to hitchhike from there for the rest of the way. And it's weird flying over the desert because, at least this day, there were no clouds. You just see what it is you're getting into. It's just sand. And maybe 30 miles over to the right of the plane, there might be a little oasis with just this little cluster of trees around it. And maybe 50 miles over to the left, there might be another one. But on the ground, that's 80 miles step by step in this 130 degree environment. So it's frightening. It's completely frightening. At that point, when you're still in the safety of an airplane, you're still on the map. You're still on the grid. But you definitely got the sense of the place that this is sort of the last stop on the grid. So I get to the outskirts of town. And of course, on the Michelin map-- Now you're looking at the map. I'm foraging. OK, here we go. Now the way the Michelin map marks roads is sort of arbitrary. In fact, you might even say capricious if your life depended on it, which, pretty soon, mine was going to. Because they make these things look like roads. But you don't realize until you get there, all they are are tracks in the sand. Will the sand just blow over them, and then there's just nothing? Right. And there are dust storms frequently in this area. Tamanrasset is located in this place called the Hoggar, which they filmed a lot of commercials there. Whenever they're doing those commercials where someone says, "We went to the harshest environment on Earth to test--" whatever, DieHard batteries or whatever, that's where they go. So anyway, so I got to the outer part of town. And I'm looking for what appears on the map to be a road. I've got my Michelin map, and I've got this faulty compass that it just would spin around and never be consistent. Really? Yeah, it was a really bad thing in a compass, right? Describe the compass, please. I can't remember much about it. It was a little cheap, $2 or $3 compass. This was the whole problem with the trip in so many ways is I just deliberately outfitted myself as poorly as possible. Anyway, so you're there. OK. So I'm there, and my compass is spinning around, not even wildly. It's just lazily spinning around. And I couldn't find any paved road. There were just these tire tracks radiating out in all directions from the town. There's no sense. There's no such thing as signs, saying, Denver, this way, Amarillo, that way. I don't stop for a minute to think, "Well, this is kind of stupid." I have a liter of water, no provisions of any kind, and I'm talking about heading across 1,000 miles of desert. It just didn't enter my head the degree of stupidity of what I was doing. What was in your head? What were you thinking? You think you're being plucky rather than stupid. You're just looking at the goal of trying to get lost. Well, this is cool, but there's a city here. And you can always go further and further off the map. Oh, I bet you no one's ever done this. And in fact, there's something prideful about this is so stupid that no one else would dare to do this. You know what I mean? I bet you no one else has ever set off to cover 1,000 miles of desert with a quart of water in their pocket. So I start walking. And again, it's 120 degrees, 125. It's heat waves everywhere. And you start walking down the road. And after a mile or two, a truck came along. So I hop in with this guy who turned out to be named Kurumi. And we're cruising along. It's so incredibly desolate. Every once in a while, a lizard would scurry across the road. But you got the sense that if you were out here in this heat, lost, you would be gone in a second. On my route, in the end, I found out stuff like if your car broke down from the heat, you were dead. You were just dead. Because there were so many days in a row when cars didn't go by at all. And the nomads would eventually come and pick your car clean. And you'd just be screwed. So I woke up in the morning, and we drove the rest of the way and got to this town, Timiawin, in the afternoon. And I walked over to what was the border post. And it was just the only place in town with a flag flying over it. And there was this guy who seemed to be the head official who was just loafing around on a mattress, on a bed stand, in the street, outside the border post, just sitting around in the shadows, picking his nails. And I said, "Hi." I'm all bright and shiny still, like, "Hi, can I get my passport stamped?" And he said, "Well, why don't you sit down?" So I said, "OK." So he was just sort of-- he was talking. And finally, after a while, I said, "So do you think you could stamp my passport?" Or no, he said, actually, "OK, well, I'm ready to stamp your passport now. Will you hand it to me." And I looked around, and I looked around, and I couldn't find it. And I said, "Well, I think I must have given it to you, right? Didn't I give it to you before?" And he said, "Yeah, but I gave it back to you." And I looked through my stuff again. And I said, "No, it must be somewhere. I think you have it because I don't have it." And he said, "Well, you better check again because if you don't find the damn thing, I can't stamp it, and you're going to be stuck here in Timiawin. And so I check one more time. And I'm getting completely sweaty. And then he just starts smiling, and he lifts his leg. And it's been hiding under his leg the whole time. And he goes, "Ah, got you." That's your usual border post official behavior. It's so interesting that if you are a border guard, there's one joke that you can enact on every customer. And that is the ancient joke. That joke dates back centuries. As long as there were people and borders, there could be that joke. It's been passed down from a long line of prankster border guards. So he tells the joke, and then he says, "Ha, ha, ha." And we're good friends by then. And this Peugeot pickup truck arrives at the border post. And it's these Tuareg nomads, maybe six, seven, eight of them. Now explain a little bit about the Tuareg nomads. OK, the Tuareg are really, really, really interesting. They call them "l'homme bleu" in French, which means "the blue men." And that's because they have these veils dyed of indigo. And the indigo gets into the pores of their skin. So even when they take off their veils, their skin has this purple tone. Some of the women tattoo their gums with some indigo thing, so that they have these weird purple gums. It's actually really cool looking. And they've been in the desert for centuries. Yeah, they were controlling the whole salt trade back during the Medieval ages when Europe was getting their salt from Africa and stuff like that. And they made a hell of a lot of money. They lived very well. And they have this very regal bearing. They used to have their very own slave tribe called the Bella. And my friend, the friendly border post guy, started mumbling to them and pointing over to me. And then he came over to me, and he said, "Oh good, they're going to take you. I did you a favor. Get in the car." And so before I knew it, I was bounding out of town in the back of this pickup truck. Some of them were sitting in the back of it. They had a few big bags of figs or something back there. So we go taking off. And after about 10 or 15 minutes, they stop the truck. And they whip out these mats, and they face Mecca, and they start praying. So you hang back and shut up. And then they finished up after a few minutes. Then they piled back into the truck. And they realize, oh yeah, the truck doesn't start. We need to push truck to start. So they said, "Oh, will you help?" And I helped. So we push start the truck, and we get going again. And then after another few minutes, they stopped the truck again. And I'm thinking, "I really wish that we would just haul ass and get to the next place." And they stop the truck, and they explain to me, "Oh yeah, this truck isn't so good." I'm like, "Oh, OK, well, that's no problem. It's just the Sahara Desert. It's no big deal." So they get out their tools to fix the truck. And what they have is a beaten-up screwdriver and pliers. And they get under the truck, and I can hear this smashing around and grunting and swearing. At one point, they asked me to come down and help look underneath the car to see if I can help fix it. So I get underneath the car with them. And I realize that they don't have any more idea than I do what they're doing. They're just taking this screwdriver and this rusty, old pliers and fussing around with stuff. So it started dawning on me, wow, this is a really bad place to be haphazard about this kind of stuff. And I didn't want to be a pain in the ass and start saying to them, "Gee, guys, this is scary." Here it is, it's about 170,000 degrees. And are you worried? That's what makes them be them. They don't worry. And so you're kind of boiling over inside, but you don't want to be a baby about it. And I also just thought, it's not their business to look after me. Meanwhile, I'm trying like hell. I want to guzzle my water. I want to have a sip of water every minute. But I'm already 2/3 of the way through my water. So I have 1/3 of a liter left. So we start up the truck again. And we go. And this is going on just for hours now. It gets into the afternoon. Again, this whole routine continues of just stopping the car every few minutes. We stop to pray, stop to fix the car, and I'm starting to go crazy. And I realize it really doesn't take long to go from a stressful situation to outright insanity. It only takes a little while. Because I start running out of water. Oh, OK, I also should mention they had a baby with them. And the baby that they have is just sitting there, getting more and more and more sickly. And I start just focusing on this baby, as I'm watching it die. It looks like, for sure, this baby's within a day or two of death. And the baby is all wrapped up, so it can't move its hands or feet. And its poor face is just sitting there, sticking out its mom's back, looking at me. And its eyes are getting all crusty with all this goo. And all these flies are coming around and circling around its eyes, sucking at the goo. And these flies are just sucking and sucking. You just realize any available moisture in this environment gets sucked out. And that's what the nature of a desert is. And it just starts making you think any tenderness just gets sucked out. And you just start getting completely crazy, just thinking, that's what life is all about. So one time we stop, and we're sitting there for half an hour fussing around. And these other nomads arrive seemingly out of nowhere on camel-back. And they say, "Hey guys, are you in trouble? Because for some money, we could probably help you out." And our guys yelled at them. And you could tell they were swearing, and they were getting into a fight. And then the new nomads, the new arrivals came up to me and said, "These guys look like losers. Where are you going?" I said, "Oh, I'm going to Aguel'hoc." And they said, "Well, for--" I don't know how many dollars, I think it was like $70-- "we'll give you a ride there." I guess I was tied-- I wanted to get the hell out of there and maybe live, for example. But I also felt tied to these guys, and I didn't want to ditch out on them. So I said, "No, no, thanks." And they said, "Well, OK, good luck." And they rode off, and I was just killing myself for not-- I just thought, "Oh god, you really should have gone with these guys because these Beverly Hillbillies Tuareg that you're with are really not happening." So we just keep having these breakdowns literally every 10 minutes. They say, "Well, I think we better just put up for the night here." So we break camp. And they whip all this stuff out of the back of the truck. And they have all these blankets. And they make a fire. And how are you feeling at this point? Because, after all, at this point, you have gotten your wish. You're off the grid. You're off of every kind of grid. You have left the map completely. Right. It all came to a head right in this night. Because they all go to bed. And they're clustered up in this big ball together. And I'm all alone out there. And the second they're asleep and I'm all alone-- as I just sat there staring at the fire, and the wind is picking up and making all this noise. And you're incredibly lonely and incredibly alone, wandering around there, picking up the stuff, I realize there is not a sentient being, if you exclude these people who are asleep a few hundred yards over there, there is not a sentient being for hundreds of miles probably. I am the only one wandering around here. And it's just incredibly lonely. And that's around the time I heard this click. I don't know how well I can put this. It was just finally, I all of a sudden got the sense of yeah, you are really off the map. You are so far off the map. You've never been this far off the map. And I started imagining, for example, what would happen if you died out here? You would just be gone forever. You would be swallowed up. There'd be no memory, no record whatsoever of whatever had happened to you. No one who ever knew you would be able to find you. You wanted to lose control, and now you've lost control. But you just catch this little click that the whole universe makes. It's this silent, little chick that says, "Oh, you've passed the point of no return." There are no words you could use to describe what that feeling is like of, oh, I'm so naive, oh, the world is so cruel, oh my god, this is what you wanted, this is what you've got. Oh, I could die here. I could die here. I could die today, now. It could happen right now. And so it's just that feeling of you played yourself. You did it. You kept going further and further out on a limb, and now it just broke. And you're like Wile E. Coyote. You're above the two-mile-deep chasm, just waiting to fall. I don't know. I think there just was this very arrogant taunt of saying, "Well, dear world, you have to kill me or tell me what's interesting about you." Or something. Yeah, give me something to believe in, or kill me. Right. Dear God, give me what I want, or I'm going to go shop elsewhere. And you don't do that. That's really arrogant. You don't demand answers like that and just get them. And I think the answer that I got was, "No, thanks. We're just going to make you profoundly unpleasant. I'm just going to scare the hell out of you, and then we'll let you live." John Bowe is now a writer in New York. After a day with the Tuareg nomads, a truck came by, which put him in motion toward Mali and, much later, towards home. Coming up, David Sedaris plays a game pretending he's lost, plays it over and over, plays, and plays, and plays. Until one day, he experiences the real thing and does not much like it. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of people to bring you stories on that theme. Today's program, You Are Here, stories of people getting lost and how people react to getting lost. Some people seek it. Some people are scared by it. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Game. Yes, it can be frightening to get lost. But what if you could adapt the thrill of getting lost, the pleasure of getting lost to safe parameters? Confine it, just get a little, tiny bit lost? Is that even possible? Or is that playing with fire, and you're sure to get burned? Well, writer David Sedaris has made the attempt himself. And so, of course, you don't have to. Whenever I find myself in a strange or unusual situation, I like to play this little game. To begin with, I have to pretend that a part of my brain has been asleep for exactly one year, while the rest of my body has been answering the phone and carrying on as usual. Now I've suddenly woken up, and I can't leave this spot until I gathered clues and figured out exactly where I am. The game is generally played during those moments when people tend to pinch themselves as a reminder of the dramatic turn their life has taken. An example from a trip given as a reward for my college graduation. I'm standing in a grim cinder block building, looking out over rows of porcelain toilets arranged across the concrete floor much like the seats in a movie theater. Men are sitting on these toilets, some of them talking or reading the newspaper and others just staring ahead. There's a 1/2 inch of water on the floor, and a bottle cap floats by followed by a plastic spoon. I probably came in to use the urinal, but rather than get my shoes wet, I'm deciding that maybe I'll just hold it and try someplace else. I turn to leave, but I can't. The game has begun. And now, according to the rules, I'll have to stay in this bathroom until I either hear or read the name of this particular town. At this point, the exercise becomes more of an obsession than a game. It's not particularly fun to stand on your toes in an unventilated public toilet. But I'm powerless to leave until the person I was one year ago has figured out where he is. "OK," I think, "let's break this down." The people in the bathroom are speaking Spanish. They appear to be Mexican, but that's not good enough. They could be-- I don't know-- on vacation or something. In the far corner of the room, a teenage boy is playing a radio, and that's probably my best bet. I'm hoping that sooner or later the announcer might mention the call letters, adding that his is the number one station in wherever it is I happen to be. Unfortunately, the radio is currently broadcasting what appears to be the Spanish equivalent of "American Pie." I'm waiting and waiting for the song to end when a man enters the bathroom carrying a shopping bag. I read the name of the store followed by the words "Mexico City." And only then am I free to rush outdoors, where my traveling companion says, "Jesus, what took you so long?" I take pleasure in the game partly because my life so rarely takes a dramatic turn. To put it mildly, I am a reluctant traveler, my preferred phrase being, "You go ahead. Someone needs to stay behind and take care of the cat." My hatred of travel is partially what makes the game so rewarding. I like the dreamlike quality of waking up in a strange place and the clinical way in which I'm forced to view my surroundings. The game is never arranged in advance. It just kicks in on its own, usually prompted by a combination of visual elements I can only define as astonishing. When played in pleasant circumstances, the effect is narcotic. Another example. I come to, and I find myself sitting in a cafe, admiring a corkscrew made out of a deer's foot. Something suggests that it probably belongs to me. I've always loved functional taxidermy, as it downplays the sportier aspects of hunting and makes shooting animals seem comically practical. I imagine someone rising at dawn and buttoning up his camouflaged vest. His corkscrew has broken, so now he'll have to go out and kill a deer. The object sits before me on a table alongside a shaver made from an antler. A waitress appears, saying, "You must have been over to Terry's place down by the river. Oh, he makes such lovely things." The woman speaks English in an accent I can't quite identify except to say that she probably recognizes the authority of a queen. She sets down the cup of tea I had apparently ordered, and I thank her. At the next table, an infant is crying, and I watch as a young mother fills the baby's bottle with Coca-Cola. In looking from one person to the next, I realize that I have the best teeth in the room. I have never in my life been in such a situation, and I proceed to take full advantage of it. I'm grinning like an idiot when my boyfriend, Hugh, enters the room and takes a seat beside me. He's not in on the game. But even if he were, it wouldn't do me any good. It's against the rules to ask anyone where I am or to lead the conversation in that general direction. It's times like this when I notice the difference between the way people talk in real life and the way they speak in the sorts of movies that heap on the exposition in order to cut to the chase. The movie version-- "Christ, BW, we've been waiting on the corner of 8th Avenue and 51st Street in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York City for over an hour and 45 minutes." Real-life version-- "I'm tired." Hugh mentions a pair of taxidermied owls he's seen in a little shop down the street. This eliminates any doubt that we might possibly be in the United States, a country which forbids the mounting of its owls regardless of the circumstances. Even if one drops dead of a heart attack, you're not allowed to stuff it with straw or turn it into something useful like a desk clock. "You can buy owls here in Scotland," he says. "The only problem would be getting it back home." He lifts his tea cup, adding, "Is there something wrong with your mouth?" My smile fades. He said the magic word, "Scotland," though I wish he hadn't because now the game is half over. I'm enjoying this little cafe with its views of the darkening street. And although Hugh's presence has ended my brief reign as holder of the room's finest teeth, I want to take my time and play at a leisurely pace. We sit for a few minutes before the waitress swoops in and formally ends the game. "So," she says, "are you enjoying yourself here in Pitlochry?" It's a conspiracy. She and Hugh get to talking and within two minutes, she's mentioned the street, the country, everything, but the compass points. Check, please. I've played the game since my first trip to summer camp. And in all that time, I never acknowledged its inherent safety net. While the David I pretended to be was shocked to find himself in Rome, Valencia, or Gastonia, the David I was at the time knew very well that he was in Italy, or Spain, or spending two weeks at Camp Cheerio. It's basically just a simulation exercise like one of those emergency procedure drills enacted by astronauts in training. I never realized what a joke it was until recently, when I found myself playing the game for real, and I panicked. It went like this. I'm in a grocery store, but aside from the plastic wrapped meats and vegetables, I'm not finding much that I can hold onto. It isn't that they're selling anything remarkably exotic. It's just that I can't read the labels. Here, each word includes no less than 15 letters. And every box and can seems to picture a strapping family unit, smiling broadly for no apparent reason. It's 6 o'clock in the evening, and the store is crowded with well-dressed professionals on their way home from work. I'm standing in what smells to be the soap and shampoo section when a young woman approaches, pushing her shopping cart with her chin. Her shiny, chestnut-colored hair hangs in front of her face until she flicks her head, and the hair resettles about her shoulders. The woman wears a knee-length skirt and a knit, sleeveless blouse and has no arms whatsoever. She stands beside me, and then she slips off one of her loafers and reaches for a plastic bottle with her bare foot. There is no awkwardness to this moment. Her leg moves gracefully, and her foot works no differently than a hand. It's even decorated like a hand. Her nails are painted, and there's a gold bracelet around her ankle. And she's wearing a wedding band on one of her toes. I'm curious as to how she might pay for her groceries, but we get separated at the registers. I realize then that the more important question is how I will pay for my groceries. I understand neither the currency nor the language, so my best bet will be to hand the cashier the largest bill I've got and hope that's enough to cover it. There are only a few items in my basket, a tube of what is hopefully toothpaste, but possibly a vaginal lubricant, a cigarette lighter in the shape of a genie, and five tins of cat food. I've emptied my items onto the belt when I notice that everyone around me is caring an empty canvas sack in which to pack their groceries. I, myself, have no sack. The cashier offers me no plastic bag. And so after paying with my large bill, I stuff the lighter, cat food, and toothpaste into my pockets, pretending that this is the way I prefer to carry my groceries home from the store. It's difficult to walk properly with both my front and back pockets stuffed tight with cat food. I'm ready to return to my hotel, but then I notice the armless woman walk out with a bag held between her teeth. And then the game begins in earnest. I'm looking up and down the busy street, hoping to read the name of this city on a shop window, when I suddenly realize, I have absolutely no idea where I am. I'd recognize the name if I saw it written down. But other than that, I haven't got a clue. My first instinct is to throw up my hands and scream like a girl. And it is only with great effort that I manage to silence myself. I know for a fact that I am in Germany, but I honestly can't remember where in Germany. I'm here on a promotional tour, eight cities over the course of a week. Monday was Berlin. Tuesday was Stuttgart, followed by Mannheim. But where am I today? It's a half-hour walk back to my hotel, but that doesn't worry me. I can locate the hotel. I just can't locate myself. Neither can I leave this block and return to the hotel before the game is finished. And this presents a problem as my hosts will be picking me up in a little less than an hour. Yes, it's just a game. And yes, it's just a rule. But if, like me, you're just a compulsive maniac, you know that games and rules are everything. I'm thinking I might return to the grocery store and see if they've got a magazine rack. But no, I can't walk in because my pockets are full of cat food, and they might very reasonably mistake me for a shoplifter. A shoe store, a bakery, a record shop. One stand selling flowers and another selling sausages. Through their windows, I see nothing that can help me. I tell myself that sooner or later, a bus will come along, bearing the city's name in bright, easy-to-read letters. 20 minutes pass before I'm able to narrow things down a bit and deduce that wherever I am, it is definitely not on a bus route. I'm racing up and down the block, desperate for evidence, when I suddenly start thinking about Hugh Downs. I'd seen him once when we shared a flight from Phoenix to New York. He moved through the airport minding his own business, and I'd followed along behind him, watching as people rushed forward to say, "Hey, you're Hugh Downs. What are you doing in Phoenix, Arizona?" He did nothing to provoke this response and was courteous even when the goons at the x-ray scanner stopped him for an autograph, saying, "Well, if it isn't Hugh Downs, host of 20/20. What are you doing here in Phoenix?" For him, the game would be a snap. Should he develop Alzheimer's disease, all he'd have to do is walk out the door and willing strangers would tell him everything he needed to know. "You used to host The Today Show." "You're Hugh Downs. What are you doing here in--" fill in the blank. Due to his television celebrity, he benefits from what I now refer to as The Downs Syndrome. The man couldn't get lost if his life depended on it. In my mind, it was now me against him. And he had it easy. This sense of competition spurred me on, and, within minutes, I was rifling through the corner trash can, cursing Hugh Downs' name with every used Kleenex and disposable diaper. Eventually, amidst the crumpled flyers and crushed paper cups, I came across a discarded ATM receipt. And there it was. There I was, safe and victorious. I retracted all the mean things I'd thought about Hugh Downs, took a moment to gloat, and then, arm in arm with the person I used to be, I walked back to my hotel room in the German city of Cologne. Writer David Sedaris. Act Three, Snatch The Pebble From My Hand, Grasshopper, And Then You Can Leave. There's a class of people in certain professional fields called assistant. I had a friend who was the assistant for NPR's Daniel Schorr, then the assistant for NPR's Nina Totenberg, then for a New Yorker magazine writer, then for a New Yorker editor. And in all of those years, as this went by, as she watched her 20s ebb away, it seemed impossible to her to ever break the yoke of assistant-hood. The skills to do the job of assistant-- answering phones, faxing beautifully, were entirely different than the skills needed for the jobs that all assistants really want, that is, those of the people that they assist. It's a trap. Nicole Graev is an assistant to an editor at a publishing house at Simon & Schuster. She finds herself lacking a map to her own life because of her very assistant-hood. She needs a map to where she's going. She's lost. She does not know where she is, and she is not happy about all this. And she set out to find some map to give her a sense, a sense of "You are here." When I was in school, I majored in what is arguably the least useful subject in the English-speaking world, English. And yet, I always saw my future as this vast, sunny stretch of infinite possibilities. And the night before I started my first job as an editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster, I couldn't fall asleep. In just hours, I'd be hitting it, that glorious horizon I'd been speeding towards my entire life. The thing about the wide and limitless future that no one warns you about, once you get there, it ceases to be wide and limitless. The millions of possibilities suddenly crystallize into one choice, one present, one single five-by-five cubicle. With one swift move, I'd narrowed a world of options down to four foam-core walls and a file cabinet, though I often get to leave to visit the photocopier. In school it's always clear how to succeed. As long as you work hard, get good grades, you move ahead. But in this job, I felt like I'd hit a dead end. The gap between assistants and editors seemed unbridgeable. We never saw them cut deals, never watched them make decisions, never heard them talking to their authors. On my one-year anniversary at Simon & Schuster, I received a commemorative pen which I used the next day to clear a paper jam. I decided to track down some of the people who'd started off right where I am now, in the same job, the same company, same building, same floor, to see if anything became of them, if this job actually leads anywhere. They could show me where I was headed and give me the map I wanted to get myself there. I began just 20 steps from my own desk. Michael Korda, Simon & Schuster's editor-in-chief, started here as an editorial assistant in 1958, just 41 short years ago. Well, I'm not sure that I'm the very best example of what you're talking about. I came into book publishing without any particular impulse to be in book publishing. I'd fought in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, having left Oxford to do so. Michael went on to list the multitude of ways in which I'm nothing like him. His father won Academy Awards. His mother and aunt were famous actresses in Europe. His uncle directed his first feature film at the age of 20. At 20, my dad was pumping gas on the outskirts of Syracuse. Fortunately for me, there were a number of things that were in my favor. I am a stupendously fast reader and always have been. I can read in at least three languages fluently and two languages with a little bit more difficulty. Where exactly did foreign languages fit into my position anyway? As Michael talked more about his time as an assistant, it dawned on me. His job hadn't been the same one as mine at all. He was an assistant back in the days when American companies still had a job called "secretary." Now in publishing, as in so many businesses, there aren't many secretaries. Instead, they hire college grads like me, pay us less money, wave vague promises in front of us, and trick us by calling us assistants, a misleading title that makes it seem like we're actually on the map, heading somewhere. I pressed Michael for advice, and he gave me a few of the usual suggestions. Work hard, read a lot, maintain a sense of purpose. "But the most important thing I could do as an assistant," he told me, "was to find some way to make myself stand out." In my experience, with very few exceptions-- I am, as it happens, one of the exceptions-- the one thing that most editors don't want to do is edit. It's not nearly as conducive to a successful career as having lunch out with important agents or going to meetings where you get noticed. So my guess is that almost any editor would just as soon leave the editing to somebody else if he or she were certain that the editing would be done in a way not to cause problems. That, to me, is the way ahead for any editorial assistant. I took his advice and dropped in on my boss, Geoff Kloske, while he was editing a manuscript. Hey. Hey. How's it going? It looks like there's a lot there, huh? Yeah. If you want, I can take that over later. I mean, if you want to get out of here at some point, I can stay late and-- I don't know-- do a few pages, edit a few pages. If that's-- I mean-- Huh? I'm not going anywhere. Oh. OK, well, if you change your mind-- Yeah. Well, it was a surprise to me how much secretarial things I was doing-- typing, and fetching and carrying. From 1984 to 1988, Jenny Blum worked as the assistant to an editor who sits just two offices down from me. I thought her experience would be closer to mine. And it was. Like me, she'd lived in a small Manhattan apartment that she shared with roaches. She'd answered someone else's phone. She knew what a fax machine was. But then her life turned around. Well, I married an author from Simon & Schuster. So I met him in the lobby at Simon & Schuster, where I went to get him to bring him in. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] traded the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] I got. Tony, you cannot do trades with Anna because she's much younger than you. Their kids are now four, five, and seven, Danny, Anna, and Tony, the oldest. When I went to Jenny's house in Connecticut, the three of them and a playmate were running around a large sunny breakfast room about to be picked up for a swimming lesson. It seemed wonderful. I wanted to stay for dinner. My early 20s were like rungs on a ladder, editorial assistant, assistant editor, associate editor, editor, senior editor, just like that, dot, dot, dot, dot. I assumed I would be able to have it all. I was gonna have the job, and I was gonna have the kids, and I was gonna make it all work. When I just had Tony, when I just delivered him, I literally made calls to the office from the hospital. I didn't want to be disconnected from working. I think there is such a thing as maternal instinct. And I think it kicks in. Even more than wanting to be at the office, I really wanted to be with this little baby. I don't know, Nicole. I think I'm really lucky with who I am and what I've done. And I don't think professionally I'm completely happy. If I died like John F. Kennedy when I'm 38, am I going to say, "Started a career, bagged it?" I hope not. I hope I'll have something else. I think that's something you're going to have to grapple with. So do you think of me somewhat as doomed? It's almost like I'm on a path only by virtue of being a woman. And I can't change that path. Yes. You are doomed by your biology if you're gonna do, to my mind, the greatest thing you can do as a woman and have a child. You are doomed in a certain way. I think that's true. And I didn't understand it. And I still have a hard time with it. I do feel that it's unfair. I wish I could have my job back. Doomed? Not exactly the word I'd wanted to hear. The whole idea of preparing for a family somehow seems so distant and unreal. I'm 22. A family hurt my head to think about. A family thew my map off the map. As I stood over the copying machine the next day, I tried to forget everything Jenny told me. I spoke with a few more former assistants. Laurie Chittenden, who became an editor at 25 when she discovered a book that became a New York Times best seller. She told me to stay 'til midnight every night. Brooke Newman, who left Simon & Schuster in the late '60s to fly to Europe with a man she'd met the day before, told me, "Carpe diem." None of this helped me see a map for my own life. In fact, one former assistant, who seemed to have it made, Saul Anton, he's now a freelance magazine writer with a sunny duplex apartment in the West Village. He told me he's looking for the exact same thing I am. I really want somebody to give me a map. Usually, this person is my shrink. And twice a week, I go in there, I say, "Look, can I just have the map, please?" And my shrink says, "I don't have a map to give you. You have to write that map." I say, "But I don't want to write the map. If I'm going to have to write the map, I'm going to have to make the map, then I don't need a map." At Simon & Schuster, it was all exciting. I end my story with Phyllis Levy, who had everything I ever wanted out of Simon & Schuster. She started there in 1955. She had the storybook publishing experience, what English majors all across this great nation have always dreamed it could be. There were people who first published D.H. Lawrence. There were people who started sentences with, "As my old friend Clarence Darrow used to say--" It was quite a world to be put in. Everyone was involved. You could come into Jack's office at the end of the day. Nobody chose to go home because it was much more fun to be there. He had a bar in his office. Everyone came in, sat down, had a drink, and just sat, and talked about books and things. It was nothing to do with publishing today, absolutely nothing. It was total fun. Allow me to provide some context. Editorial assistants these days don't even get to attend editorial meetings, so you can imagine my surprise when Phyllis told me this little story. One day, Malcolm Cowley, who was a consulting editor and who taught writing at the University of California, appeared in my doorway. He had come to visit. And he handed me a manuscript and said, "What do you think of this?" He gave it to me because I was only person under 60 in the editorial staff. And I took it home that night. And it was Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Well, I came in the next day and went to the editorial meeting. I'd sat through all the previous editorial meetings in total silence, not daring to say a word. And I just said, "I've read the great American novel, and I don't care what any of you say. We have to publish this book." The way a kid would do. It was given to me, and I was the editor of that book then, just as an assistant editor. Quick. Reality check. My real job this week-- Yeah. Do we have any light bulbs? Light bulbs? It's kind of dark in here. I don't-- I can check the supply closet, I guess. Can you go get some light bulbs? So there was Phyllis, schmoozing with literary icons, editing the great American novel. But the most amazing thing about her? She didn't even want the fate she ended up with. We're talking 1950s. I was programmed really-- we all were then-- to think of work as not very important and something you did to have a good time for a while until Mr. Perfect came along. So what happened with the Mr. Perfect? Never mind. I'm not going to get into that. There were actually two Mr. Perfects, and both of them broke my heart. And that's that story. Phyllis became a magazine editor. She worked in Hollywood for a while, jetting across the country, reading manuscripts. Now she's the books editor for Good Housekeeping. I looked at her, composed, elegant, sparkling, and thought about how much she'd been through, how much more she'd been through than me. My whole life up until this point has been school. And in school, you always know that you're in the right place because when you're 15 years old, there's nowhere else you're supposed to be except high school. And you always feel like you're on this motorcycle, and you see the horizon in front of you, and it's the future. I always felt like hitting that horizon, like hitting that future was going to be like flying, like soaring. And I guess-- Life is not like that. That's a very young person's idea of life. It's just not like that. There's not an epiphany. There's not something you know at the beginning that's your pa-- not at all. You take each step where it leads you. And if you follow your heart with as much practicality as you have to have-- you have to have that. But I've always been someone who followed my heart. And probably if I've said, well, if you had it ever to do over again, would you change this, would you change that? And the thing is, to quote Hemingway, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" I've even said to myself about the two great loves of my life, who, if I'd only chosen other people, I could've had families and children, blah, blah, blah. If I were given those same choices again, even knowing, even knowing that they ended badly, I would make those same choices again. Because I believe in following your heart, and that's what I do. And it's worked out just fine. I've had an awfully good time. I thought over Phyllis's words later on, at the copier. The problem with following your heart is that the heart is not a compass. It spins around and around, sometimes pausing, wobbly, landing nowhere in particular for very long. My heart swept half-circles to California, swung back to going to grad school, and plunked down in front of the TV, not wanting to bother with either. My heart once landed on a guy named John, whose heart landed on a woman in Belize. And then my heart didn't do much of anything for a while. But then it started back up again. It always does. Nicole Graev, professional assistant. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Susan Burton, Julie Snyder, and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Paul Tough, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Starlee Kine, and Sylvia Lemus. Musical help from Marika Partridge. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you know you can listen to most of our programs for absolutely free. Free, free, free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. That's thislife, one word, no space. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who wanders every day through WBEZ's hallways, saying, There is not a sentient being for hundreds of miles probably. I am the only one wandering around here. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Dear God, give me what I want, or I'm going to go shop elsewhere. PRI, Public Radio International.
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When she was seven, when she would visit her grandmother, Alexa would look through the books that her grandfathered had owned back when he was alive. What she liked especially was finding the books where he'd made little notes in the margins. So that was the part that was really compelling. Because they were hints about who he was. Exactly. And a lot of times they were really critical. He would write, I steadfastly disagree. Or something like that. Or he would write, Ah!, if he really liked something. As a kid, over the course of about a year, she systematically divided the books into two piles, the ones with markings, and the ones without. And then she tried to read all the ones with markings. Her grandfather was a playwright and a teacher, and the books were creaky old books from the 1930s about theater and about how to write plays. It was thrilling. And when she was 11, she wrote her very first play, using the rules in the books, rules from another generation. These were archaic rules, like start your play with lots of exposition, which was really in vogue at the time. So I started mine with a butler, whose name I believe was Manson, picking up a phone, saying stuff like, no, the lady and gentleman are not home right now. Why, at a fancy charity ball. Yes, he's still drinking too much, and she's having an affair with a gardener. Whom shall I say is calling? I'm not kidding. You were 11. By the time I got to college and I started to actually take writing classes, it was brought to my attention that stage directions shouldn't be things like, there follows a mighty howling of wind. And one of the things my teacher-- who was not a young man, by any means-- said was, he was like, sweetheart, we don't use sotto voce anymore to mean he whispers. We just write, whispers. But of all the books on her grandfather's shelves, there was one book that affected her more than the others. It had lots of her grandfather's writing in the margins. And he was very critical, so it was very rare that he would write, Ah!, exclamation point. And there were more Ahs! in Moss Hart's autobiography, which is called Act One, then I think almost any of the other books that he had. Moss Hart was a Broadway playwright, the man who directed My Fair Lady with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, who was married to another then-luminary named Kitty Carlisle, who people these days mostly remember as a game show panelist back in the 1960s. The book details how he started as a kid in the Bronx, found something he just loved to do, which was to make plays. Reading it as a child, Alexa had that experience that you have sometimes as a kid. She did not understand everything in the book, but she understood enough to know that she really, really liked it. Like, I knew what was going on and this book was fun. It drove him so powerfully, and it seemed to make him so happy. She read Act One by Moss Hart over and over. She memorized long stretches. She tried to memorize the entire book. Even today, she recalls where specific Ahs! were penciled into her grandfather's copy. Because it felt like I was recognizing an old friend. It felt like a familiarity of, oh, I found a home. This guy likes the same home I want. So-- These are my people. Yeah, yeah. You don't meet many people who tell you that a book changed their lives. It's an appealing notion, I think, because it's nice to think that our lives could be changed just by an idea, by the vision of the world that happens in a book, instead of what our lives are often changed by-- you know, dumb luck, tragedies, coincidences. Today on our radio program, stories of people whose lives were changed by books. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four acts. Act One is called, well, Act One, getting clues about how to live your life from notes scribbled by your dead grandfather in the margins of a book. Act Two, The Family That Reads Together. In this act, the story of how when David Sedaris was a boy, he stumbled upon a dirty book in the woods. It made his sisters view all adults with newfound suspicion. It sent him to the dictionary. Act Three, Roger and Me, and Lewis and Clark, the story of a construction worker, and this question, can your life be changed by a book that you have never seen and have not read? Act Four, Little Sod Houses For You and Me. It is the old, old story, my friend. New York girl leaves big city, heads out to a small town on the prairie with a dream and a bonnet. Stay with us. Act One, Act One. So Alexa Junge says that she never meant for Moss Hart's autobiography to be a blueprint for her life, but looking back on the events of the past two decades, that seems to have been the case. Basically, what I did was, like he did in his life story, I moved to New York. I think I kind of followed him there. Really? You consciously followed him there. You thought-- I don't think it was conscious, but there are so many things that I did that he did. I wasn't as good a-- I mean, he was more sort of-- He could fake it better than I can. But you know, he had to get money at a certain point. He was like, I need money. So he thought, who's the richest person I know? And he wrote a letter to this woman, I think, and then showed up on her doorstep and said, I'm Moss Hart and I have a play, and if you give me money, we'll put it on. And she did. Wow. Isn't that amazing? And I wrote letters to strangers and said, I'm Alexa and I have a play, and if you fund my play, you can be part of the theater. And did that work? It did one time. Yeah. At some point, did you start to get a crush on him? Yeah. It definitely turned from kind of a mentor, a make-believe mentor, to a pretend husband-to-be kind of situation. Yeah, somehow I think I decided that time had completely screwed up and sent Moss to Kitty Carlisle, and that if he just hadn't died two years before I was born, then me and Moss might really have had a chance. How would this thought manifest itself in daily life? Like, would you be out on dates and just think, hmm, not Moss. He's not Moss. Yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah. Well, it would be like, there'd be something missing. It just wasn't quite what you'd want. And it was like, why can't I find some guy and we'll work on this play together and we'll be, like, in out-of-town tryouts in Philadelphia, and we'll be up for 48 hours trying to fix our play, and then we'll crack it, and then we'll order room service? So how far did the whole thing go? Well, I think, maybe right before the end of college, Kitty Carlisle spoke one evening. At your college? That's right. She was very active in the New York arts scene, and she was extremely a huge advocate of the arts in our country. And so she was talking about that, I think. And I stood in line after she spoke to meet her. And there were all these people around me, and they were like, you were really good on that game show. And I was just, like, disgusted, like, oh please, she was in A Night at the Opera. She's like a singer. She's not just a game show lady. But by the time I got to the front of the line, and I went up to talk to her, I said what I wanted to say, sort of, which was, you know, Moss changed my life and I moved to New York to be a playwright like him. And I think I said something along the lines of, your husband meant so much to me. And she just looked at me, and she was so elegant and so classy, and she just said, I don't understand, darling. Did you know him? She was just terrified. Like, really? She looked terrified? Yeah. I think she probably heard some kind of ownership or possessiveness in the way I said your husband meant so much to me, as if I knew him. So I think it was confusing, since she probably could figure out that he probably was dead before I was born. But it was disturbing, and I felt terrible. And it made me realize how just far from reality this thing had taken me. And it was just scary to scare her, because she's the person that he loved. But my friend that was with me was really nice, because we walked home afterward, and he was like, eh, don't worry about her. You're much better for Moss than she was. He knew the whole story, too. Eh, Moss was just spending time with her because she happened to be alive. You know, you talked about how you felt fated for him in some way, and drawn to him in some way. Have you thought about what is the line that divides that kind of dreamy, healthy feeling, I think, from a scary, stalky feeling? Yeah sure, because the truth is, really, the way he functioned in my life was like as a comfort. And I knew. I mean, it wasn't a break from reality, but it was the sense that, when you read a book and something speaks to you and you feel understood, and so it makes the world a less lonely place. Alexa, how much of your feeling about Moss is connected to your feeling about your grandfather, who you didn't really know? I think they're intimately connected. I really do. I think that, because I didn't know my grandfather, I couldn't talk to him about what his life in the theater was like. And so this book gave me 444 pages of what it would be like to want to be in the theater and how you might try to make that happen. And so it was like he was the sort of stand-in for my grandfather in a lot of ways. And the other part about it is that the way people talk about him-- because I then, of course, went and read every single book I could get my hands on about him, or that even had any mention of him in it-- is with such love and appreciation and affection. It's just staggering. I think that that was how people spoke about my grandfather. And I recognized it, that same enthusiasm and sort of the way their eyes would light up. Today, before our interview, you faxed over to our offices here at WBEZ a-- I'm going to pull it out here-- a letter that your grandfather wrote in 1969, obviously as he was quite ill. And it does have this quality of just-- It's one of the most beautifully written things I've ever read. Isn't it? It's really something. He spends, I should say most of this thing, he starts off-- this is to his students, right? Mmm-hmm. yep. "Dear friends"-- and he says, "I've asked Donald Davis"-- who I would assume was one of his students. One of his coworkers. Yeah. Coworkers, OK. --"to read this to you. It's intended to tell you as much as I know about my present situation, and thereby, of course, to let you know what the prospects are for the future of the work we've begun together. In planning this letter in my mind, I've been pulled this way and that by very conflicting impulses. I prefer to consider any of my own sickness, any deep trouble, as a very personal matter, possibly to be shared with close members of our family, but never to be inflicted on anyone else. At the same time, I detest mysteries. And those of you who have called have, I hope, been told the truth, insofar as we knew it. But the truth has been shifting, sometimes very swiftly. And what you may have heard a few weeks back is now untrue." And then he has this really pretty paragraph. He says, "Besides, though some of you are relatively recent friends, some of our common ties go years back. And old friends or new, the depth of my feeling for you obliges me to be entirely honest with you. And so I'm going to put the next several paragraphs in parentheses, and I'm masking Donald not to read them aloud. Each of you who wishes to can read it for himself. Anyone who dislikes these semi-clinical details can avoid them." And then there are couple paragraphs that basically describe the state of his illness. And then he talks about the prognosis, which is not very good, in through another few paragraphs, and then into this last paragraph. Why don't you read that. Sure. "Doubtless, all of that sounds very gloomy. I do admit I could think of happier matters. For one thing, I don't at all approve of my own extinction. I don't like the idea of it one bit. Though reason assures me that the world can get along very nicely without me, I can't quite believe that it will. Still, there are a few small compensations. For one thing, I had always hoped that I could face my own death with some equanimity, but it's a bit of a satisfaction to find that I can." And then he talks about my mom and my grandmother. And it says, "And that's really what I'm finally wanting to say. I think you're a great bunch. And in case there isn't a chance to say it again, thanks for your concern, your calls, your notes, but above all for your love. You've had my love and I've had yours, and I'm a damn fortunate man. So thanks and good luck. Marvin Borowsky." And so this to you feels very much like Hart, too, Moss Hart. Yeah. Like, guys who said, I'm a damn fortunate man, you're a swell kid. Yeah. After a few years in New York, Alexa Junge moved to Los Angeles, as her grandfather did, to write screenplays for Hollywood. Most recently, she was one of the executive producers for the TV show Friends. Act Two, The Family That Reads Together. Sometimes a book can change your life, but just in a small, temporary way, and not for the better. We have this cautionary tale about how a book infected an entire family from writer David Sedaris. A quick warning to listeners before we begin, some of the content of this story might not be suitable for every listener, though there is no graphic language, no nasty words, no graphic scenes, nothing, in fact, we even had to bleep. I found the book hidden in the woods beneath a sheet of plywood, its cover torn away and the pages damp with mildew. I read, "Brock and Bonnie Rivers stood in their driveway, waving goodbye to the Reverend Hassleback. 'Goodbye,' they said, waving. 'Goodbye,' the reverend responded. 'Tell those two teens of yours, Josh and Sandi, that they'll make an excellent addition to our young persons' ministry. They're fine kids,' he said with a wink. 'Almost as fine and foxy as their parents.' The Rivers chuckled, raising their hands in another wave. When the reverend's car finally left the driveway, they stood for a moment in the bright sunshine before descending into the basement dungeon to unshackle the children." The theme of the book was that people are not always what they seem. Highly respected in their upper-middleclass community, the Rivers family practiced a literal interpretation of the phrase "Love thy neighbor." Limber as gymnasts, these people were both shameless and insatiable. Father and daughter, brother and sister, mother and son, after exhausting every possible combination, they widened their circle to include horny sea captains and door-to-door knife salesmen. Yes, these people were naughty, but at the age of 13, I couldn't help but admire their infectious energy and spirited enjoyment of life. The first few times I read the book, I came away shocked, not by the characters' behavior, but by the innumerable typos. Had nobody bothered to proofread this book before sending it to print? In the opening chapter, the daughter is caught fondling her brother's ceck in the dining room. On page 33, the son has sex with his mother, who we are told possesses a fond par of tots. I showed the book to my sister Lisa, who tore it from my hands, saying, let me hold on to this for a while. She and I often swapped babysitting jobs and considered ourselves fairly well read in the field of literary pornography. "Look in the parents' bedroom beneath the sweaters in the second drawer of the white dresser," she'd say. We'd each read The Story of O and the collected writings of the Marquis de Sade with one eye on the front door, fearful that the homeowners might walk in and torture us with barbed whips and hot oils. We know you, our looks would say as the parents checked on their sleeping children. We know all about you. The book went from Lisa to our 11-year-old sister, Gretchen, who interpreted it as a startling nonfiction expose on the American middle class. "I'm pretty sure this exact same thing is going on right here in North Hills," she whispered, tucking the book beneath the artificial grass of her Easter basket. "Take the Sherman family, for example. Just last week, I saw Heidi sticking her hands down Steve Junior's pants." "The guy has two broken arms," I said. "She was probably just tucking in his shirt." "Would you ask one of us to tuck in your shirt?" she asked. She had a point. A careful study suggested that the Shermans were not the people they pretended to be. The father was often seen tugging at his crotch, and the wife had a disturbing habit of looking you straight in the eye while sniffing her fingers. A veil had been lifted, especially for Gretchen, who now saw the world as a steaming pit of unbridled sexuality. Seated on a lounge chair at the country club, she would narrow her eyes, speculating on the children crowding the shallow end of the pool. "I have a sneaking suspicion Christina Youngblood might be our half sister," she said. "She's got her father's chin, but the eyes and mouth are pure Mom." I felt uneasy implicating our parents, but Gretchen provided a wealth of frightening evidence. She noted the way our mother applied lipstick at the approach of the potato chip delivery man, whom she addressed by first name and often invited in to use the bathroom. Our father referred to the bank tellers as "doll" and "sweetheart," and their responses suggested that he had taken advantage of them one time too many. The Greek Orthodox church, the gaily dressed couples at the country club, even our elderly collie, Duchess, they were all in on it according to Gretchen, who took to piling furniture against her bedroom door before going to sleep at night. The book wound up in the hands of our 10-year-old sister, Amy, who used it as a textbook in the make-believe class she held after school each day. Dressed in a wig and high heels, she passed her late afternoons standing before a blackboard and imitating her teachers. "I'm very sorry, Candice, but I'm going to have to fail you," she'd say, addressing one of the empty folding chairs arranged before her. "The problem is not that you don't try. The problem is that you're stupid, very, very stupid. Isn't Candice stupid, class? She's ugly, too. Am I wrong? Very well, Candice, you can sit back down now. And for god's sakes, please stop crying. OK, class. Now I'm going to read to you from this week's new book. It's a story about a California family and it's called Next of Kin." If Amy had read the book, then surely it had been seen by eight-year-old Tiffany, who shared her bedroom, and possibly by our brother, Paul, who at the age of two might have sucked on the binding, which was even more dangerous than reading it. Clearly, this had to stop before it got out of hand. Even our ancient Greek grandmother was arriving at the breakfast table with suspicious-looking circles beneath her eyes. Gretchen took the book and hid it under the carpet of her bedroom, where it was discovered by our housekeeper, Lena, who eventually handed it over to our mother. "I'll make sure this is properly disposed of," my mother said, hurrying down the hallway to her bedroom. "Panetration," she laughed, reading out loud from a randomly selected page. "Oh, this ought to be good." Weeks later, Gretchen and I found the book hidden between the mattress and box springs of my parents' bed, the pages stained with coffee rings and cigarette ash. The discovery seemed to validate all of Gretchen's suspicions. "They'll be coming for us any day now," she warned. "Be prepared, my friend, because this time they'll be playing for keeps." We waited. I'd always made it a point to kiss my mother before going to bed, but not anymore. The feel of her hand on my shoulder now made my flesh crawl. She was hemming a pair of my pants one afternoon when, standing before her on a kitchen chair, I felt her hands grace my butt. "I-- I just want to be friends," I stammered. "Nothing more, nothing less." She took the pins out of her mouth and studied me for a moment before sighing. "Damn, and here you've been leading me on all this time." I read the book once more, hoping to recapture my earlier pleasure, but it was too late now. I couldn't read the phrase, "He paunched his daughter's rock-hard nopples," without thinking of Gretchen barricading herself in the bedroom. I thought I might throw the book away, or maybe even burn it, but like a perfectly good outgrown sweater, it seemed a shame to destroy it when the world was full of people who might get some use out of it. With this in mind, I carried the book to the grocery store parking lot, and tossed it into the back of a shiny new pickup truck. I then took up my post beside the store's outdoor vending machines, waiting until the truck's owner returned, pushing a cart full of groceries. He was a wiry man, with fashionable mutton-chop sideburns and a half-cast on his arm. As he placed his bags into the back of the truck, his eyes narrowed upon the book. I watched as he picked it up and leafed through the first few pages, before raising his head to search the parking lot. He took a cigarette from his pocket and tapped it against the roof of the truck before lighting it. Then he slipped the book into his pocket and drove away. David Sedaris is the author of several books, including Naked, in which this story appears. Coming up, the frontier then and then. That's in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, The Book That Changed My Life. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Roger and Me, Lewis and Clark. There's book as literature, there's book as filth, and then there's book as pure physical object. This is the story of somebody for whom a book changed his life, though it is almost random that it happened at all, that he got to know this book in the first place. Jeremy Goldstein tells the story. Roger was 34, working in construction and looking for things to do in his spare time. And one day, he noticed this plate he'd been given by his grandmother, a plate from a 1905 fair celebrating the centennial of Lewis and Clark's expedition to explore the Western frontier. He looked at the plate and wondered if there was anything else left from the fair still around. It turned out there was a lot, and he started buying it up. It was a fun hobby, collecting the various memorabilia from that fair. But when you reach a point where I had about 1,100 items, one of the larger collections known, it was the end of the treasure hunt. And I couldn't find anything I didn't have. And somebody mentioned, well, why don't you collect books about Lewis and Clark? I thought, well, that might be kind of fun to do. So in 1984, he went to a book dealer in Vancouver, and picked out an 80-year-old set of books that chronicled Lewis and Clark's expedition. The price? $695. I had a difficult time writing out that check, because at that time, in fact, I really didn't know much about books. I proceeded to take that set of books downtown in Portland, to an established book dealer whose name was Preston McMann. And I showed him the set. I said, well, that's it, isn't it? That's all the journals. And he kind of chuckled. He said, no, there's a lot more publications than that about the journals of Lewis and Clark. And so I went ahead and said, well, I tell you what. I said, you give me about five years, I'm going to have every book published about Lewis and Clark. And he laughed so hard, he about laughed himself out of his chair. He was a heavyset gentleman in his late 60s at the time. And he said, there's people that have spent lifetimes looking for every book of Lewis and Clark and have never succeeded. Well, I told him, well, maybe I won't have every book, but I'll have the best library of anybody in the United States. And he laughed harder. Strange as it may sound, this is all it took to send Roger on his path of amassing, in just 14 years, what did become the largest-known private collection of Lewis and Clark books in the United States. And all this time, he kept working in construction, excavating landscapes, laying pipes for sewers and paving roads, a decent living, but it was never enough. Anything after house payment and basic expenses for living would go toward buying books. I would have to work 10 to 12 hours a day, normally six days a week, some summers I wouldn't take a day off, just so that I could work and have a little better check so maybe I could get that next book, or make that other credit card payment, because I was now beyond my means. At one point, Roger had 12 credit cards. And then, of course, I had a house I could refinance, which I did three times. I don't know how to explain it, exactly. But if there was a book out there that I didn't have, I would find the means to acquire it. When you get something of the 18th, 19th century, you open up the book, and you look at the discoloration of the pages, and the smell, and that's when you really feel the true energy of history, not what you would read, but you've got more senses than just your eyes. You can smell. You can feel. You can touch. This actually points to one of the strangest things about Roger's relationship with his collection. He knew all about the different Lewis and Clark books, marbled and papers, obscure hand-tinted plates, and the value of original boards. But Roger never became an expert on what was inside the books. He didn't collect books to read them. He just wanted to own them. It turns out that your life can be changed by books you didn't even read. In fact, Roger had never been a reader of books. He didn't read books as a kid. He didn't go to college. And his reading habits didn't change as an adult, when his house was full of books. As a collector, Roger was undeterred and he was methodical. But after 10 years, one book still eluded him. It's the cornerstone of any serious Lewis and Clark collection, a first edition copy of the first official account of the expedition. It's a two-volume set published in 1814. Fewer than 1,500 copies were ever printed. But the price tag, often around $10,000, had always scared Roger off. Then in 1994, he took a $49 flight to Los Angeles for the LA book fair. That particular day, I got there early. And then there was somewhat of a race when they opened up the gate. They would actually have to stand, slow down, slow down, don't run. It was like kids running for the opening of a carnival. I sauntered just casually, I didn't run, to William Reese's booth, and introduced myself. Oh yeah, Hi Roger. And I says, did you bring anything about Lewis and Clark with you? And he turned and looked toward the glass case, and there sits a two-volume set of 1814 Lewis and Clark journals. And this set was beautiful. And I was just shaking. I wanted the set so bad. And I looked at him and I says, what's the price? Bill said, $12,500. I was crushed. I knew it was beyond me. So as I kind of backed away and started to walk away from the booth, just knowing, shaking my head to myself, I can't afford them, there's no way I can get-- I've got to have this set of books, somehow I've gotta-- I can't afford these books, I can't, there's no way, I gotta have this set of books, how the hell can I do it, geez, I better go to the bar. I walked to the bar, got a shot of scotch. I walked back to the booth with my scotch in hand, and I says, can I look at those again? And Bill, yeah, sure. Took them off the shelf, set them on the counter. He says, well, Roger, what can you afford? I says, I don't know. I says, we're not working. This is a slow time of the year. I might be able to do $1,000 a month. But ah, Bill, you know, we're not working now. I don't know, maybe in May or June. You know, when we start working overtime. And he said, well, do you want them? And I said, yeah, but, gosh, I can't-- And before I could finish the conversation, Mr. Reese had turned around and took these books, put them in the bag, wrapped them up, turned around, put out his hand and shook my hand and said, that sounds good enough to me. The 1814 became Roger's calling card. It established him as an expert in all things written about Lewis and Clark. And then something happened. Roger started to read his books. Before this, he'd occasionally pull out a book and read a random passage, but now he started to plow through whole books front to back. Now it's my time to study the books. Let's look at this book that's in front of me. I've got it open to-- just by chance-- a passage that brings a lot of pleasure to me, is the fact that-- The passage comes about halfway through the expedition. After 18 months of looking for a route to the ocean, they finally reach the Pacific. And here they finally-- "We are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific ocean, which we have so long anxious to see. The roaring and the noise made by the waves breaking on the rocky shores may be heard distinctly. Ocean in view! O! The joy!" So in this passage, place yourself on the banks of the Columbia River, looking out toward the ocean. I mean, I'd be jumping up and down screaming, where is that gill of whiskey? Which they didn't have at that time, unfortunately. I mean, they would have taken a gallon and all chugged it, and they'd have just been sloshed on the banks and just partyin' forever. I mean, it's great. What a feeling of success. It just brings a great pleasure myself. "Ocean in view! O! The joy!" Last week, Roger made a pilgrimage of sorts to see, for the first time, the original handwritten journals that Lewis and Clark kept during their expedition. They're the books that everything Roger ever bought are descended from. Most of the journals are stored at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. They're in remarkable condition. As a librarian turned the books crisp pages for Roger, flipping past detailed maps and intricate drawings of animals, Roger barely moved or spoke. Lewis and Clark's map of Great Falls of the Columbia. And you're seeing it upside-down, the Columbia. At one point, Roger asked, could he touch them? He was told no. And after less than an hour with the journals, we wandered back into the library's main reading room. The book has altered my life from being a manual labor to being a scholar of knowledge from the interior of the book. Stephen Beckham, a professor at Lewis & Clark, once said, well, Roger, you can't put yourself down for being a construction foreman. He said, that's a school of another type. He says, I love school and I love education. And he says, and now that you're entering that field with us, I have great respect for what you've done and what you know. And it makes me feel great. In the years since Roger began collecting, the value of all things Lewis and Clark has soared. Stephen Ambrose wrote a popular book, Undaunted Courage. Ken Burns did a documentary. These fueled the fire. And last fall, Roger arranged for a Lewis & Clark College in Portland to purchase his entire collection for what amounts to a small fortune. He promptly retired from construction at the age of 54. I just smiled. I just smiled. And I walked in, sat down, leaned back in the chair, and thought, wow, a whole new life. I don't have an alarm clock now. I mean, I've got one, but it's not in use. When my body says to get up in the morning, I get up. I stretch, do some light exercises, have a nice relaxing breakfast. Any of those in construction industry now listening to this, eat your hearts out. Most of Roger's days are now spent in the library of Lewis & Clark college, where Doug Erickson is the chief archivist. Roger's known him for years. You know, Roger would oftentimes get off of work when he was still working construction, and not even clean up and come over to Lewis and Clark and spend time with me. And we'd chat and talk about books. But he was tired. He was very tired, and he looked like he'd just gone through a hard day of labor on a construction site. Now you see Roger, he strolls in sometime in the morning, whenever he feels like it. He walks in feeling like a king. And then I usually go up to the Heritage Room, and I just sit there and immerse myself into that. And of course, I'm surrounded by the books. It's a wonderful feeling being in there. And he goes up there and he works. And every couple of-- oh, every hour or two, he'll come down all excited, Doug, you gotta come up here and see this. And I'll come upstairs, and he'll show me something and we'll get excited about it. And as I see him in the Heritage Room for many years to come, writing books and having people coming and talk to him, and just enjoying the rest of his life. That story by Jeremy Goldstein, a television producer in New York City. Act Four, Little Sod houses For You and Me. When you really love a book, what exactly are you supposed to do with that feeling after you finish reading the book, and then perhaps finish reading about the book? If you feel strongly enough about the book, I think there is this impulse to somehow get closer to the book, to somehow try and conjure the world of the book right here in the real world somehow. So if you read about a Broadway playwright, maybe you move to New York City and start writing plays. Or if you already live in New York City, but the book takes place somewhere else, you head out there. Meghan Daum has this story. I'm moving to Nebraska. No one understands why. I've lived in New York City for seven years, which is essentially all of my adult life. And a few months ago, I started making plans to head out west, not all the way west to California or Oregon, which people from around here might understand, but to the Great Plains. I wanted to move someplace flat and treeless, some place that gives off a sense of how big this country used to be before automobiles and the jet age, before you could be cavalier about traveling from one place to another. There are a lot of reasons behind my move, but one of the reasons has to do with a book, with nine books, as a matter of fact. They're the books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her childhood as a pioneer girl on the vast Midwestern prairie in the late 1800s. When I was a little girl growing up nearly 100 years later in the 1970s, I wanted to be like Laura so much that I made my mother sew me a sunbonnet, which I wore constantly. Like Laura, I wore my hair in braids. Before I knew how to write, I drew picture books featuring the entire Ingalls family. It was always a variation on the same theme, a family moves to a new home, encounters hardships, and through a particular combination of self-reliance and hard work, makes a life for themselves in the new place, a place so remote, so unsettled, so cold, that no civilization, not even most Indians, had ever dared to live there. To me, this kind of uncharted life was the best kind to have. And it was even better that it required a sunbonnet. She taught at three schools. The first one was the Brewster School, and that's where Almanzo would take her down and pick her up. It was about 12 miles to the southwest. I'm in De Smet, South Dakota, riding a horse-drawn wagon around the actual land that the Ingalls lived on. Our tour guide is Tim Sullivan. Tim and his wife Joan own the 154 acres of land that Laura's father, Charles Ingalls, claimed in 1880 is part of the Homestead Act. This is an old trapper's cabin that we're going to fix up. We haven't gotten it done, but that's the only thing we haven't gotten done. A lot of people think the Ingalls are from Walnut Grove, Minnesota, because that's where the television series was set. But in fact, they only lived there for a few years. Laura came to De Smet in 1879, when she was 12. It was where she grew up, became a school teacher, and met and married Almanzo Wilder. Six of her books are set there. For those who remember, it's the place where Laura and her sister, Mary, who was blind, got lost in the tall, wet grasses known as the Big Slough. It's the place where the family survived the long winter, and it was the place she always considered home. So when she talks about walking through the cool ground, just walking to prairie school, if you see when we're going home, it's wet there, that's why it would have been cool. There's a certain kind of town that is defined solely by one industry, like steel towns, where at least one member of every family works in the mill. De Smet is sort of like that, too, except the industry is a series of books. Every year for the past 29 years, the townspeople have put on a pageant based on Laura's life. Just about everyone in this town of 1,200 has participated in the pageant, or at least had one family member who has put on 1889-style clothing at one time or another and given tours at the museum, or given some hapless tourist directions to the cemetery, where caravans of family cars wind around the grounds looking for the burial sites of Charles, Caroline, Mary, Carrie, and Grace Ingalls. Almost every establishment in De Smet, even the local bar, has restrooms labeled Ma and Pa. But even though De Smet is, for all intents and purposes, a tourist town, it doesn't feel like one. Instead, it feels like a town with a hobby, a place where a lot of people devote a lot of time to one particular idea. The tourists, though they're greeted in that typically warm Midwestern way, feel almost incidental to the larger cause of celebrating Laura. I talked to a man who had acted in the pageant for 27 years, missing only two performances the whole time, one of them because of a combine accident in which he lost his finger, and his son was impaled and almost died. He was back on stage the next night. His wife, Eldina, had driven them to the hospital and witnessed a pretty gory series of medical procedures performed, by the way, without anesthesia. The night of the accident, her husband had one request of her. He says, honey, you have to go on. I was playing Ma at the time. And so I did perform that night. And I think I was probably in shock myself, because it went fairly well. But it was on Sunday night is where I kind of fell apart. I forgot a few lines, but we made it. Laura's books have a lot to do with the notion of rising to the occasion. And the pageant demands countless hours of volunteer effort, cooperation, and manual labor done without complaint. In a way, this kind of idyllic, romantic work ethic is not what I expected when I came to De Smet. Or I should say it is what I expected, and that's what took me by surprise. Traditionally in a story like this, the writer goes to the place she's dreamt of and finds that it's not like what she imagined at all. But the remarkable thing about De Smet that is that it really is the little town on the prairie. The people are a bit like the people in Laura's books. They're proud of the land they live on. And in a strange way, it's as if Laura's powers of description have affected the way they talk about the place. And it's beautiful out here on the prairie this evening, looking at the Big Slough. Herd of cattle over there. I think it looks just like it did in Laura's day. Now the building's on the other side, but the Big Slough is the same. I like the way the blackbirds swing in the reeds, the way the cattails bloom, the puddles of water. Sometimes ducks and geese come in and land. Marian Cramer is the author of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant. We're sitting at a picnic table on the Ingalls Homestead. A busy day of tourism is winding down. Visitors are getting back in their minivans. Tim Sullivan's eight-year-old son, Brian, is assembling his costume for the pageant dress rehearsal. Marian is 65. So how much different was your life from Laura's when you were reading these books? Well, I guess my childhood was before electricity, before running water. And I lived on a working farm, and there were chores, there was responsibility. A lot of the same. That's why I like the Laura books so well, because Laura had to do the same things I had to do. We had cattle and hogs and sheep, and we grew wheat and corn. It was a wonderful time. Family was very important. And life seemed simpler then, because we didn't do so many things and go so much. But I'm not sure that it was. Do you remember when you first got electricity and water? Oh yes. And what was that like? It was just lovely. Electricity came in '48. And they had been working for a long time putting the lines in. And finally the lines were all in, and they were all hooked up. They were just waiting for the major flow of energy. And then the electricity was on. And it was the first time. And that night, as it got dark, I remember my father and my mother and my sister and one of my older brothers, we stood there and looked, because suddenly it wasn't a black country anymore. We could see our neighbors' lights. It made it seem a lot less lonesome, a lot less isolated. Marian was a music teacher for many years before becoming a pioneer school teacher on the Ingalls Homestead. Every day, she hangs out in the one-room schoolhouse, which looks exactly the way Laura describes her classroom at to Brewster School in her book, These Happy Golden Years. Marian gives brief music and math lessons to the tourists, and then has the class read a quote from Laura off the blackboard. The quote goes something like, "It's best to be truthful and honest and make the best of what we have." Somehow it sounds revelatory. The prairie is the only place I've been to in my life where you can make the simplest, sweetest, even, I dare say, most cliched statement about the virtues of a simple life, and it sounds like anything but a cliche. It's as if the wind, which barrels through here like a wild animal, just knocks the irony out of everything. After a long day working at the Ingalls Homestead, Joan Sullivan, Tim's wife, walks me down to the edge of the Big Slough. The grass is taller than we are, and it's easy to see how Mary and Laura could have gotten lost here. You know, there's still some honesty in the world. And that's what Laura talked about, it's good to be truthful and honest and to do what's right. And that's, I guess, what being-- being here isn't always easy. It's a lot of hard work, and you wonder, will the whole thing work out, to be able to keep it running? But there's something about taking those morals and passing that on to a family. Do you think that has to do with farming? Or do you think it's something about the time that Laura was living in? Or a combination of those? Probably a combination of those, trying to make an honest dollar. A farmer works hard. They feed the world. Why, hello. I'm glad so many of you have come to our little town on the prairie in De Smet. This is especially fine country, this prairie. At this time of the year, this is the hour that daylight softens and twilight falls. Oh, please forgive me. Sometimes I get a little carried away. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant runs for three weekends each summer. Admission is $5. About 700 people come each night. It's held right in the middle of the prairie, on land adjacent to the Ingalls Homestead. From the pageant site, you can see the five cottonwood trees that Pa planted. "One for each of my girls," he said, meaning Ma and his four daughters. The dialogue in the pageant has been prerecorded. When the pageant is actually performed, the cast members lip sync the words and pantomime the action. This technique has its benefits and its perils. During the first performance this year, the actor playing Pa missed his cue, and his words came booming down onto the stage even though he wasn't there. The actors playing Mary and Laura and Ma carried on, talking to an invisible Pa like he was the voice of God. Pa, is it on Indian land, or land we'll have to move from? Not on Indian land, my pretty girl. This is surveyed land, just waiting for us to call it home. I want a place that's open, where I can run with the wind. Lots of room, Laura. It'll be the Ingalls Homestead. Doesn't that sound fine? I am completely charmed by this pageant. Yes, there are mistakes. Yes, you can hear places on the soundtrack where the tape been edited. But all I can think as I watch these people on stage, many of them farmers, retired farmers, and their wives and kids of farmers, is how effectively they capture the feeling of the book. They're not selling anything. There's no agenda other than to celebrate Laura, and the fact that she cared enough about this town to write these books about it. It's dusk on the prairie, literally. That doesn't sound like something you'd say in earnest. It sounds like a lyric in some cowboy folk song, or a particularly bad line in a romance novel. But it's not. It is simply dusk on the prairie. Little girls in sweaters and pants from the Gap are wearing sunbonnets and standing on the benches to get a better look. Fathers with fussy babies stroll around the fields so their wives can watch the pageant undisturbed. An eight-year-old girl in sneakers and jeans runs through the grass, the wind whipping through her hair, her sunbonnet flying out behind her. The pageant is a huge hit. When the show's over, the audience storms the stage to get the autographs of cast members. People are saying it's the best thing they've ever seen, that this trip to De Smet is the best vacation they've ever had. It's remarkable, really, that in a time when families can take vacations to Disney World, or visit Great Adventure, or even just stay home and watch TV, people will travel all the way to South Dakota to see a world that's described in a series of books. The Ingalls family managed to make homes for themselves in some of the most unforgiving conditions imaginable, in a cabin in the deep woods, in the banks of a creek, in a shanty surrounded by hundreds of flat, empty acres. But no matter where they lived, Pa played his fiddle, Ma did her sewing, and Laura managed to find delight in the world around her. Maybe that ability to merge the indoors and the outdoors, the familiar and the unfamiliar, is what all these people are responding to. Maybe that's why there's so much romance in the whole notion of a cabin stuck out in the middle of nowhere. People want to find comfort in an inherently uncomfortable place. They want to see if they can make it through the long winter and still see the beauty in the snow. Meghan Daum leaves New York City in two weeks to move to Nebraska. Well, our program was produced today but Julie Snyder and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachman, Starlee Kine, and Sylvia Lemus. Musical help from Marika Partridge and Terry Hecker. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Of you know, you can listen to most of our programs for free, on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who wanders into our workspace looking at all the new stuff we've bought and asks, What-- What d-- What-- How-- What's the price? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. O! The joy! PRI, Public Radio International.
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Jug Burkett is a businessman in Dallas, a Vietnam vet. And about 10 years ago, he was in charge of a campaign that was trying to build a memorial to honor Vietnam vets from Texas. It wasn't easy. The immediate public reaction was, why should we give money for those bums? So Mr. Burkett started doing research so he could prove to people that most Vietnam vets are not bums. They have jobs. They didn't go crazy in the war. They're leading utterly normal lives. Then, right in the middle of doing that, there was a murder here in Dallas. A vagrant killed a policeman at a traffic stop. And the headlines basically said, Vietnam veteran goes berserk. And for a week, there were follow-up stories about how Vietnam made him do it. You were in the situation where this was going to hurt your fundraising efforts. Well, it was hurting my fundraising. Every time a bad story like that appeared, I would get heckled by the people that I was trying to get money out of. Hey Burkett, I saw another one of your boys went crazy last night, kind of thing. Mr. Burkett is not the kind of man who sits by and idly watches things go to hell. He took action. Anyway, I checked this particular fellow's individual military record, and it turned out he never served in Vietnam. He'd only been in the Navy three months and he got kicked out on a psychological charge. We live in a world full of people faking this thing and that. And it turns out that spotting a fake Vietnam vet is one of the easier lies to get to the bottom of. Mr. Burkett started routinely checking the bona fides of anybody in the news who claimed to have served in the war. He claims that he's found hundreds of fakers. He discovered some famous people fibbing about their service records to buff up their public images, like actor Brian Dennehy. He found defendants in murder cases claiming to be war heroes hoping to beat the rap, or alternately, claiming that war made them crazy and they can't be held responsible. He found big public events misreported. Do you remember the killing up in Edmond, Oklahoma? It was one of the first mass killings in the post office. 14 postal workers killed. Well again, Vietnam veteran goes berserk story. I checked the man's military record. He never served in Vietnam. And often, what's amazing about these cases is the outrageousness of the lies. VA officials and career officers who fabricated and exaggerated among people who could easily catch them out. A soldier who is quoted extensively in the book, We Were Soldiers Once... and Young, a history of the battle of Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley. There's a man in there named Kreischer who is right in the middle of the battle. And of course, that thing is an oral history type thing. It skips around. And they're talking about being on the tree line and all this thing. And Kreischer after the war actually founded their alumni group, started that. He then became a big fixture in the 1st Cav Division organization, ultimately became its president. And somebody gave me a tip that this may not all quite be on the up and up. And I got his military record. The guy had been discharged four months before that battle. He wasn't in the battle and yet had convinced everybody who was in the battle that he was with them shoulder to shoulder. He convinced the people in the same squad, the same platoon. He convinced the company commanders. And not only did he convince them, they all elected him their president. That's because the person who has to convince people that he is the real thing is going to do a much more aggressive job of being the real thing than the person who actually is the real thing. You are going to know more about that battle than the people that were there. You're going to consume everything written about it. You're going to send off for things. You're going to watch the documentaries. The guy who was there-- this was an episode that flashed by, and he went on to the next thing. Well, today on our program, The Real Thing, stories of people drawn to some idea, some picture, some thing that they just want to be. Some people doing it innocently, some less innocently, and how easy it is to slip from one to the other. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our program today, My Life With the Thrill Kill Cult, in which a woman, as part of her job, starts hanging around with some gang members and slowly finds herself changing the way she dresses, changing the way she talks, changing her cigarette brand to theirs. Act Two, Black Like Me, a story of hockey and basketball and what it means to be really black. Act Three, Drawl, what's it mean to talk like a real southerner, and why one multimillion dollar industry can't seem to figure it out. Act Four, Real Love, an illustration from Sandra Loh of the rule that if it seems too good to be true, well, maybe it isn't. Stay with us. Act One. Act One of our show today is the story of somebody who tried to get closer to the real thing and tried, and why in the end it did not go too well. Kelly McEvers was a newspaper writer here in Chicago and started to get interested in stories that she was hearing about girl gang members. Now, she was somebody who did not know much about the gang world. But she got an assignment and tried to get closer to the real thing. I bought a $50 car. It was a beat-up 1983 Dodge Shadow. And I started just sort of riding around the neighborhood. I'd had a couple social workers through friends who'd said, if you stop by this one corner and ask for so-and-so, maybe he'll help you meet so-and-so. So that's how I did it. I'd go in the afternoons in my $50 car and just sort of drive around and ask for people. And my first good connection was two twins, a set of twins, over in the Humboldt Park area. I drove up in my car and they thought I was a custy. A custy meaning? Meaning someone who wants to purchase drugs. Custy, short for customer, I guess. So they came running up to my car. And they're like, you straight? You straight? What you need? What you want? And I was like, well, that's not really what I'm doing here. I'm a friend of so-and-so's and I'm a reporter and I want to know about girls. And they said, oh, you want to know about girls? And they jumped in my car and we went riding around. And that's how it got started. And so at first when you were hanging around with them, you kept a little glossary for yourself? Yeah. It was pretty academic. I tried to write down all of the strange words that they said that I didn't understand, and then, of course, use them in a sentence as well. Wow. How very 11th grade of you. I know. What would you do when you would just hang out with them? Hanging out is a lot of driving around and seeing who's where and who's doing what with whom, and then going to the next spot and gossiping about what you saw at the last spot. They're 17 years old. There's really not that much going on. They don't go to school. They don't work. There's just not a lot to talk about except each other. And there was always someone fighting with someone. There was always some sort of drama going on. At any given time in the day, some girl was mad at somebody else. And it was more that it was different than anything I'd ever known than it being really this criminally exciting experience that I thought it was going to be. Well, it sounds like the excitement was simply the excitement of being in high school, even though they weren't in high school. But basically, it was the excitement of being 17. Slowly-- and I don't know when this started to happen, because I really wasn't conscious of it. The only reason I know it happened is because my friends tell me now. I started to dress a little bit differently. I started wearing lots of sports T-shirts and jeans and sweatpants and platform shoes, and pulling my hair back, and wearing darker lipstick, and just starting to fit in-- trying to fit in-- all for the sake of the story of course, in my mind at the time. How were you talking? Just a little bit with an edge. "Hey, Kelly. Whassup? How you doin' Pista? Oh, what's goin' on?" You know, just a little bit. Maybe that sounds like a lot. But if you're standing around with a group of people, you want to sort of fit in. A little bit of that, a little bit of "damn," you know. "Oh, look at him. He's fine." You know, maybe not "foyne." I wouldn't say it like that. But just a little, "fine." You know, something. And definitely sort of a little more head movement and gesturing that I wouldn't do before. At one point, you took them to this restaurant Leo's? Yeah. OK, this is this sort of hipster restaurant here in Chicago. And so what happens? I'm sort of doing an interview with them. But it just turns into very funny conversation. They're very loud and opinionated. And at one point, a young woman who looks like a rock star says to Linda, this girl that I'm interviewing, "Is anyone using that chair?" And she's like, "Yeah, my foot." And she's just kidding really. But this girl's very upset and sort of offended. And she's like, "No, no, no, you can have my chair. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding, honey." And she's like, "Yeah, whatever. It's OK," or something. Like, "I don't need your chair anyway." And it was so funny to me. Because I got to be on their side of it. I was with them as they were fighting with someone who normally would be me, I guess. So how far did it go? I was working with a photographer. And she had just come on as a photographer from another city and was really trying to make a good impression and was trying to be very professional about the whole thing. And I feel so bad because I think I sucked her into this whole thing. And so one night we were driving around with a bunch of people on our way to the beach. And we had two carloads of people and she was driving. And all of a sudden, the other car full of mostly gang guys-- we were with some gang guys too-- started racing us. They took off from the light and started to fool around. We were going down Fullerton Avenue, a very busy street, going eastbound toward the lake. And so the guys in our car were like, "Come on, Heather. Come on, you can do it. Just bust through these lights." And she's like, "No. I can't do that. No. I can't do that." So I'm behind her going, "Come on, Heather. Come on. We really got to do this. I mean, they'll really think we're cool." That wasn't what I was saying, but that was what I was thinking. Like, you've got to do this, Heather. You have to do it. And she didn't want to do it. And she did. She did? She ran the lights? She ran the lights. She drag raced up Fullerton Avenue? She drove 75 miles an hour on Fullerton Avenue. And she won. And so were you right? Did they respect you after that? I don't think they respected us. For the night, yes. Did it last throughout these months where I thought I was going to get this great story? Probably not. That night, yeah. "Oh Heather, you're so cool." We got back to the neighborhood. She was very popular that night. "You shoulda seen her go. We didn't think a white chick could do that, but--" You know, that sort of thing. Did it occur to you at any point during that-- I have crossed a line? No. Not then. There was a point, and I don't know when it was, that I just sort of stopped taking notes, stopped interviewing people, and just started living with them and not being someone who was documenting them. And when you think about it, what happened? I guess I just thought everything was becoming a means to an end, that the more time I spent with them, I would eventually have that one experience that then I would take notes. I think that's how I explained it to myself. You kept expecting that there might be some other deeper gang experience than the one you were having? Right. It's interesting, because in a way what you're saying is that you expected that this just sort of hanging around-- well, this isn't the real gang life. The real gang life is still those fights and shootings which are about to happen. So you were expecting that at some point, I'm going to be so inside, they're going to take me to that, not realizing that the actual gang life is actually just hanging around on the street gossiping about who is whose girlfriend. And selling drugs. And fighting about who should have the drugs and who owes who $10 and who slept with whose boyfriend. Before you got into this situation, what did you think the appeal of that life would be, gang life? I thought it would be, like I said, much more criminal. I thought I would see big gang fights. Not like the Jets or anything in West Side Story, but I really thought that I would see groups of people fighting each other. And I've heard numerous stories about these types of fights. But I never saw them. So even from my initial interviews, the stories that I was hearing about what was going on in these neighborhoods, I thought I would see that. I never saw anyone get hurt. I saw a drive-by shooting blocks away, a car driving by and shooting at someone. They weren't hurt. I'm saying this like I'm disappointed. I didn't see this overly criminal life that I thought I was going to see. And is that because it wasn't actually going on? Well, yes. At least in this particular gang, it's about business. It's about making money and selling drugs. But selling drugs is a criminal activity. And seeing them sell drugs is witnessing a criminal business. That's true. Mm-hmm. I guess I became as blase about it as everyone else in the neighborhood. Did you worry at any point that you were fetishizing, that it's easy to fetishize what these lives were like? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Tell me about that. Yeah. It made really great anecdotes. And people thought it was very funny. I mean, it is funny. But it's also very serious, what their lives are like. Even though they just sort of hang out and sell a couple drugs here and there, they still know what it's like to find your boyfriend dead in a car. Death is always sort of present. Is it your impression that the fantasy is spinning through their heads as well? Yeah, absolutely. How do they see it? I believed their perception of themselves. They see it as very-- the life, the world. You have to live the life to know the life, this very, very hard place to be. Yet they wouldn't be anywhere else. In their minds, is it this glamorous, criminal, outsider life? Oh, yeah. Yeah. But is the life that you're leading the life that you're actually leading or the life that you tell yourself you're leading? For me at the time, it was the one I was telling myself I was leading. Well, and for them. Yeah. But I mean, I think it's easy to make that sound sort of silly. But I have to say, there are a lot of people who are going through life with a little movie in their head that's different than what's actually happening. So maybe I shouldn't be so upset about doing this. I thought, and still do think, that I had the greatest job in the world when I did this story. If I can do this, if I can hang out, if I can become somebody else for a summer, that's a great job. Kelly McEvers. Act Two, Black Like Me. Well, our program today is about what happens when you try to turn yourself into the real thing, some notion of the real thing, an idea which is always a kind of fiction, a kind of cliche. Glenn Loury is a professor at Boston University. He's written a fair amount about black people trying to define what it is to be a real black person. He does not like the idea of cultural uniformity. I remember him once actually defending the notion that if a black person likes Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, then that is still a black thing to do, because a black person is doing it. He rejects a kind of rigid cultural conformity, as I say. But recently he had this experience with his son. Oh, this was in South Suburban Boston. We were walking in one of the forest preserves around here-- a Sunday, mid-afternoon, it was in the winter time-- just to get out and find something to do. So we'd driven into the forest and parked and were just walking along. And yeah, we stumbled on this frozen lake. And there were guys out there playing hockey. And my son, who at the time was probably three or four years old, was really interested in what was going on and started squealing and straining to get away from me. He would have run out on the ice and joined them if I'd have let him. And all I could think about was, all of these guys are white. They were all New England guys who liked to play hockey. And I didn't want my son out there doing that. I wanted him to play basketball or something respectable. Some of those things die hard. And even when I had this intellectual position rejecting that kind of imposition of cultural uniformity in the name of blackness, still, when it came down to my kid and what his enthusiasms would be, I had rather hoped they'd be closer to something that I could recognize from my growing up on the South Side of Chicago. Sadly, my kid is growing up on the South Side of Boston. John Simpkins grew up in Lexington, South Carolina, a small town in a segregated black neighborhood. It was tightly knit. On his block, six of the houses were relatives. But when he went away to college at Harvard, he found that other black students had a very different picture of what it meant to be black in America. The students who weren't from small towns had this very definite image of blackness and what it meant to be an African American. And in most cases, that image was rooted more in Western Africa, or in Africa in general, instead of the South. And I thought the ironic thing was that students who weren't from the South tended to look down upon the South if you weren't from Miami or Atlanta or one of the huge Southern cities. Anyone who wasn't from any of those areas was viewed as being kind of backward. In their view, was it almost an inauthentic black experience? I think they viewed it as being a powerless black experience. There was an embrace of this sort of radical black nationalism, at least the words of radical black nationalism, with very little of the actions of radical black nationalism. What did their backgrounds tend to be? Where were they from? Most of them tended to be from cities, mostly Northern cities. A lot of them were from, at least in my mind, fairly well-off or at least middle-class families. And as far as you were concerned, was it that the sense of identity and group identity that they wanted, that's something you felt like you just had when you were growing up in the South in a small town? Right. We do live in a community where we're the only black family on this block. Now, the school that our boys go to is a thoroughly integrated school. 25% of the student body is Japanese-speaking. But the kind of close-knit and all-encompassing experience of a black community, which both my wife and I knew growing up, is not something that they're ever going to have. And yet, we think the issue of race is sufficiently important. We want them to be able to feel comfortable with their racial identity, to be able to not have to get to be 18 years old and then go off to college and all of a sudden determine that they're going to have to find out what this blackness is about. That was one of the more disturbing aspects of it. And that there was this attitude of hip radicalism embraced by people who really hadn't experienced what it meant to be on the other side of that coin. The other side being? Being growing up either-- whether in the city or even in a small town-- in a lower-middle-class or lower-class family. And did you view a lot of this as just posing? I viewed a lot of it as posing. And I thought that there was little opportunity to discuss the range of what it meant to be a black person in America. I mean, one of the things that my wife and I live most in fear of is that having neglected attention to this question earlier in the children's life, they will then rebel later on and lapse into some kind of formulaic blackness that is stilted and narrow. We want them to think you can learn the Japanese language, or the Arabic language, for that matter, or you can learn to play the cello and still be black. There's nothing un-black or uncool about any of those activities. Is there a part of you where you feel like your kids are missing something by not growing up in a segregated black community? Yeah. They're missing something. But it's OK. This is the way of the world. There are benefits and there are costs. And I think the costs outweigh the benefits of living in that kind of society. Our kids take a lot of stuff for granted. They just assume that the world is their oyster. They don't have to overcome some barriers or to make some discovery that they can do anything. They take it for granted that everything is possible for them. And I don't think that kind of sensibility can be fostered when you're living in a ghetto. It's very clear that everything is not possible for you. That's why it's a ghetto. A lot of them grew up in integrated environments. And in a few cases, there were even kids who had gone to the best schools and had the best educations, from Exeter or Andover, schools of that sort, who came to college. And it became their political awakening. But what I found interesting was that once college was over, they returned to this lifestyle that they had led before they left to go to college. Explain that a little more. What do you mean? This is where a lot of the comparisons between the black middle class, or the black student population at Harvard, and the white middle-class students really comes into play. Especially during the '60s, when a lot of white students went away to school and engaged in experimental activity, they left and took jobs in the corporate world. Or a lot of people would say that they sold out. And I don't even think that that's necessarily the case. But the same things happened with the black students at Harvard, in that there was a lot of posturing. It was a heavily politicized environment. But really once the rubber met the road, those were the same students who took jobs on Wall Street or who went to law school or who went to business school. So their college activism was just a little pleasurable hiatus from the identities that they had had before and the identities they were going to have after? Right. Right. I know that my boys will be black in a way so very different from that which characterized my own life. And my thinking now is that the best thing is that they wear that racial identity lightly. Not that they'd be indifferent to their blackness or ashamed of it, or look at it as an irrelevancy, but that I'd hope that they would be able to be black in a way that leaves them flexible and adaptable and open and not parochial and narrow. Glenn Loury and John Simpkins. Coming up, a man calls Robert De Niro chicken to his face. Well, not really to his face, but it's still kind of interesting. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of different kinds of people to tackle that theme with a variety of different kinds of stories. Today's program, The Real Thing, stories of people trying to live up to some ideal, or refusing to. We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Drawl. There are tens of millions of real Southerners in this country. They shop. They live among us. They look just like you and me, my friend. But one industry does not seem to notice the reality. Writer Mark Schone is a Southern expatriate who has noticed. My wife and I, since we'd been in lock-down with each other, oh, these past nine years, have developed a bit of shorthand. If one of us says something the other has heard so many times before that tears of boredom flow, the victim has a right to protest. The victim says, "That's on the tape." As in, that's on your tape-- the list of stories and obsessions you've rewound so often I could sing along with them in my sleep. But if we're lying in the queen size at night watching TV and chance on some misbegotten soup of dropped R's and fake I's that's supposed to be a Southern accent, my tape starts jumping. It must be heard. I must blurt, "Foghorn Leghorn. Foghorn Leghorn." My wife says, "Tape," and we change the channel. For me, all that is cornball about movie Southern accents, all that is fake, is embodied by that would-be mac daddy of the barnyard, the animated chicken known as Foghorn Leghorn. He was conceived as a parody of the genteel Old South cliches from movies like Gone With the Wind. He was a preening dandy and a fool for the ladies. Go away, boy. You bother me. I got work to do. The late, legendary Mel Blanc didn't try and do an actual Southern accent. You better, I say, you better keep a sharp eye on us chickens. He was spread thin being a martian and a putty tat and a tweety bird. And this was a satire starring a big white rooster. It wasn't about sounding real. 60 years later, though, actors are still speaking Foghorn, and they think it is real. I'm an authority on Southern accents because I'm a typical, rootless, modern Southerner, meaning I was born outside the South, just like Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, and moved as a kid with my Midwestern parents to a brand new subdivision chopped out of the swamp in Southeastern Virginia. A babysitter taught me what y'all meant when I was seven years old. In high school, my rebellion against my liberal college professor dad was to hang out with drug-dealing rednecks. I whimpered in the backseat with a beer clenched between my thighs as they drove the back roads at 100 miles per hour, swerving through the swamp fog, their eyes closed and giggling. But as long as they looked and talked like Allen Collins of Lynyrd Skynyrd, as long as they had that mean, feral glamour, I thought they were cool. I talked like them on purpose. It thrilled me when a guy on my school bus grunted, "Groundhog? My mama don't eat it but my daddy do." I went to college 1,000 miles away in Nashville and heard a stronger, twangier accent than the coastal burr I grew up with. And I moved to Georgia for a few more years of seasoning. By the time I left the South, I had a pretty good grasp of the range of regional dialects. And I knew that the movies had them all comically wrong. I would argue that nearly every vowel that comes out of nearly every actor's mouth is wrong. But for outsiders, here are the easiest problems to spot. Let's take Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate. Is it your testimony, Ms. Black, that between the hours of 6:10 and 9:40, you were engaged in sexual congress with the defendant? Well, maybe that's too easy. How about someone who has never actually turned down a script, like Dan Aykroyd. He played the son in Driving Miss Daisy. I'm afraid that my loss up here and my gain down here have given me an air of competence I don't really possess. Leaving aside all the other things wrong with this way-Foghorn soundbite, very few white people in the South still drop their R's. They say "Here," not "Heeya." A linguist at the University of Georgia told me, "If you want to find somebody with that old plantation accent, you're talking about people 75 years old." A friend in Atlanta was more emphatic. "Those people are dead. Before they died, they were rich. Or they lived in the coastal or Piedmont areas of the South. Up in the hills, they always said their R's. And now, in the age of seven hours of TV a day and the air conditioner and the massive influx of interlopers like me and Newt and Dick, nearly every white devil in the South has followed suit, especially white devils under 50. We say R. Lesson two. My name's Forrest. Forrest Gump. My mama always said that life was like a box of chocolates. There are two kinds of I's. The I sound in a word like "life," or "like," or "night," or "nice," is different from the I in "five," or "ride," or "time." Real Southerners make a distinction between the I's. My experience in three states over 20 years was that they said "life," and they said "time." "Lifetime," not "laff-tahm." Not many people said, "laff," or "lahck." If they did, they were considered hillbillies. And in fact, they almost always really did hail from Appalachia or maybe a piney wood town in East Texas. But in the movies, even a kid from a fine, old, big-columned Alabama home-- like Forrest Gump-- says, "Laff is lack a box of chocolates." Life was like a box of chocolates. Lesson three, the South is really big. People from Savannah and the coal fields and the Bayou don't talk the same. And they're not usually in the same room, unless they're on vacation in Florida, which is another part of the South. But in the movies, people with radically different accents turn out to be mother and daughter or lifelong neighbors. Listen to the way Dolly Parton, Sally Fields, and Julia Roberts pronounce "color" in Steel Magnolias. Fields is supposed to be Roberts' mother. What are your colors, Shelby? Her colors are pink and pink. My colors are blush and bashful, Mama. Once upon a time, I couldn't figure out why the actors and directors in LA and New York couldn't spend any time listening to actual Southerners talk. Because if they did, they'd learn very quickly how far the film dialect had drifted from reality. But after I moved to New York, I realized that I was just living amid hicks again. This time they were urban hicks, and the world outside their hollow was one big movie set. The South was a movie. If you went there, you spoke a language invented by a British woman named Vivien Leigh, also known as Scarlett or Blanche, with an assist by New Jersey's Rod Steiger as the racist sheriff, and San Francisco's Mel Blanc as that uppity chicken. The South was a cartoon. I admit, the natives played along. They scammed the hicks by selling more and more preposterous stories about white columns and crazy aunts in the attic. They cooked up as much Gothic kitsch as the market would bear. A guy from St. Louis renamed himself Tennessee and made a mint. It was a great racket, but it meant that Southerners never really saw themselves on screen. They still don't. Counselor, is that you? It was the remake of Cape Fear that gave me my moment of clarity. I hunkered in a Manhattan multiplex awestruck. Robert De Niro was trying to impersonate a dirt-eating psycho. And yes, it was nuts. But not the way De Niro intended. Come out, come out, wherever you are. New York mook was bumping uglies with Cajun and Carolina. It was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I rolled in it like a happy doggy with something dead. It's going to take a hell of a lot more than that, counselor, to prove you're better than me. When it was over and the credits drifted past, I locked onto the one that read Dialect Coach. Now I knew. After that, every time Foghorn turned up in a movie, I'd check to see who his dialect coach was. Every Southern ex-pat I knew came out of Cape Fear going, "Huh?" But the man who taught De Niro to sound like an Appalachian Springsteen was so proud he bragged about it. I would see his ads in the showbiz trade papers and get all twitchy. "To Robert De Niro, congratulations, Sam Chwat." Well, my name is Sam Chwat. I'm Director of New York Speech Improvement Services. We're the largest company of licensed speech therapists in this country to, uh-- tsk. We're the largest company of licensed speech therapists in the United States, specializing in accent acquisition and accent elimination. I dropped in on Chwat at his Manhattan offices, where boxes of celebrity junk spilled onto the floor. He was born and raised in Brooklyn speaking Yiddish, and he's never lived more than an hour from Grand Central. But he has a Masters in speech and 20 years of experience in accents. At first, he specialized in removing them. Then he started doing implants. I trained Robert De Niro to do an Appalachian accent for Cape Fear. Leonardo DiCaprio, a New York accent for Basketball Diaries. Julia Roberts and Andie MacDowell lost their Southern accents with me before their film careers began. Elle Macpherson, Kathleen Turner, Benjamin Bratt, a wide variety of people. What would you say you're best at amongst the accents that you know? I suppose my Italian is all right, you know? My Italian itself is not so good, you know? But I do a pretty good Italian. His Southern accent was every bit as convincing. He told me he had a whole posse of relatives down in Savannah who taught him the local lingo. He demonstrated. It depends on the sort of Southern accent you're talkin' about. If it's an Appalachian sort of accent, it's one that I've taught many, many times. There's a kind of broad-based one, more indicative of, say, the deep South, where the R's disappear after the vowel, let's say. Which is Hollywood Southern in a nutshell. It's the way people in movies talk, not people in real life. I told Chwat I'd never met anyone who spoke with the thing he was calling a Southern accent. I pointed out that the people who drop their R's were not the same people as the ones who said, "Lack," and now the R-less people were almost extinct anyway. He defended himself. He backpedaled. And often, he stayed silent. He told me I had a sensitive ear. But it doesn't take a sensitive ear. Listen to this clip from one of his star clients. If my daddy catches you in here, the question of whether or not I can carry your children will not matter. He will cut your thing off. That's Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias. A linguist will tell you that a middle-class 20-something in that town, in that recent year, would say her R's. She'd say, "whether" and "your," and "matter." A linguist told me that. But Chwat has bought into the cartoon so completely, he thinks Roberts herself used to talk that way when she was growing up in suburban Atlanta. He claims that back before she was a star, when he helped her get rid of her Southern accent, here were the things he had to fix. Pretty garden-variety Southern substitutions. "Tin," instead of "ten." The "ah" for "I." Dropping an R after a vowel-- "heeya," "theya," "moh," instead of "here," "there," or "more." Except, of course, she didn't talk that way. If you want confirmation, all you have to do is ask someone who knew her then. I've been a guidance counselor at Campbell High School for 21 years. I asked Richard Epps, a guidance counselor at her Smyrna, Georgia high school, who doesn't talk that way either. She was a student here. And she was a student aide in our office. So you had daily contact with her? Yes. Surely did. Now, this'll be your 21st year. Yes, sir. In the 21 years that you've been at Campbell High School, have you had any white students who dropped their R's? I don't recall any of that at all. I don't recall any, to tell you the truth. How about Julia? Did Julia ever drop her R's? Absolutely not. And that's why Roberts sounds so fake when she drops them in Steel Magnolias. Because she's never done it before. I guess what happened is that when she showed up on set with her own real, suburban drawl, it wasn't close enough to the cartoon for the powers that be, and they sent for Chwat. It's like something out of the movie Hollywood Shuffle, some white guy telling a black actor, "Um, can you make that blacker?" One reason Hollywood can't get Southern right is that Southern won't hold still. The real South is changing. Real Southerners go to malls and eat at The Olive Garden. The media tells them that the way they speak is either quaint or a symptom of Gomer-dom. So if they're the slightest bit upwardly mobile, they try not to sound too you-know-what. Sometimes Hollywood does make a semi-honest effort to keep it real. Robert De Niro listened to real people speak for his role in Cape Fear. He sent his personal assistant into a Southern prison to tape interviews with inmates of the same age, criminal record, and hillbilly bona fides as his character in the script. He picked a tape he liked and labored with Sam Chwat for weeks to perfect his imitation. Sometimes, however, the will, the intent, the technique is flawless, and the flesh still fails. I am like God, and God like me. I am as large as God. He is as small as I. He cannot above me nor I beneath him be. Some actors just can't do accents. Counselor? Writer Mark Schone is a reporter living among the Yankees in New York City, hoping not to run into a certain actor. Act Four, Real Love. There's the real thing when it comes to your idea of what job you want, what house you want, what person you want to fall in love with. And until you find the real thing that you seek, life is the same story over and over and over again, either played as comedy or as tragedy. A story of missing the real thing yet again. In one of our live shows, Los Angeles writer and performer Sandra Tsing Loh tells what happened to her when she signed up for a computer dating service. A folder arrived with a name and some vital stats. Robert Blair, 37, single. I look in his folder and I can't believe it. My mouth goes dry. For one thing, unlike what you'd expect from a dating service, Robert Blair is really, really attractive. No, I mean really. Straight nose, clean jaw line, smoldering blue eyes. We are talking Ralph Fiennes. Ralph Fiennes has basically donned a crew neck sweater and is living among us in the Southland. I turn the page. Robert Blair is an architect by profession. Time has been spent in Italy. Interests include opera, foreign movies, badminton. Marital status-- never. My heart is pounding. My eyes are tearing up. Oh my god, I'm thinking. Oh my god. And this panic is starting to seize me. Not just the primary panic of having found the perfect man, but the secondary panic of knowing that other women are looking at this perfect man, and then the tertiary panic of realizing that I'm feeling this panic. And when you feel panic, dates don't tend to go well. Somehow the panic invades your face causing these contortions to happen in the middle of some casual comment like, would you like some half-and-half? Equal? Your face will split open and this demon, this [DEMON VOICE], will come out. And in that instant, you have done it, that terrible, unthinkable thing. You have pierced the dating membrane, that is, the membrane that covers all dating people and keeps them safe from each other. As illustration, take Phillip, a perfect Los Feliz bachelor I was privileged to date a few times. You know the type-- successful 36-year-old film editor, or something. Great haircut, zippy Hugo Boss jacket. You know, one of those smart, funny, presentable men who form that eerie, hollow-eyed, Children of the Corn phalanx across our fair city. Any-hoo, like others of his ilk, the perfect Phillip package was coated with this impenetrable dating membrane. To wit, you were supposed to see Phillip once a week at most, twice a month more typically. But you were never to contact him in between as though he were some sort of undercover spy. To phone him at work was to trigger that bomb thing. Any-hoo, Phillip kept trying to train me in the new system. And I knew that I should get with it. I knew that it was the law of Dating-land and that if I didn't follow it, I would lose my all-important Dating-land citizenship. I wouldn't be allowed to go out on any more meaningless, un-fun dates such as these. So Phillip would smile suavely the next morning, handing me my delicious, warm, fresh, pumpkin muffin to-go. "Call you in 10 days or so?" "10 days? That's almost two weeks," I'd stab at in alarm, eyes wide. Picture last night's mascara gone spookily raccoon-y. "I'm out of town," he'd enunciate, as you do when telling a large, wattled, eager Labrador to sit but she cannot quite remember how. He repeated the command, "I'm out of town. Out of town. In 10 days or so, I will call you. OK? I'll call you. Really." Oh, I remember the drill. Dutifully, I repeated the phrases he had taught me, unnatural as Arabic. "Well, have a great time. Jeez, I've got a busy week too. Call me whenever. It is no problem at all." But once I got going, I just couldn't stop, so, "there's a phone. You call me. I won't call. No, no, no." Delivery became so broad, so garish, so Jo Anne Worley-like that like a rare stag in the woods, my perfect bachelor would be spooked. And after 10 days or so, Phillip did not call again. But I'm not going to make that mistake tonight, oh no. For once in my life, things are going to be different. For once in my life, I'm going to be silent. The forest green door opens and there stands Robert Blair. Crisp white linen, pressed khakis, tortoise-shell rims. Oh my god, I think, feeling the force of gravity buckling my knees. "Hello," is all I say, "Robert." With perfect manners, Robert Blair shows me around his perfect place. We are talking coved ceilings, Mexican Paver tile, totally redone hardwood floors, muted track lighting, Sub-Zero fridge, even a utility sunroom with a pull-out ironing board. You can almost hear a choir of angels singing. "Sandra," Robert says behind me, "would you like some champagne?" [SQUEAK] And there stands Robert Blair with two gleaming flutes of champagne and an Italian, hand-painted, ceramic plate upon which he's arranged Gorgonzola cheese, grapes, and English water crackers in a perfect fan. I am home, I find myself thinking. I am home. The bistro Robert takes me to is a delightful, intimate place aglow with little candles. "You like opera," I say. "Yes," he says, "I do." "I've heard Madame Butterfly is coming to the music center. I saw something about it in the Los Angeles Times." "Really," he says, "Did you?" "Maybe we could--" no. Too early. Retract. "It's just such a great opera is all. I love it. I love opera." "Butterfly is alright," he says, "for a warhorse. Americans certainly insist on their favorites. I sometimes think if I'm forced to sit through another Boheme, I'll scream." "Yes, I know what you mean. The opera world is all so exhausting, isn't it?" His smoldering blue eyes meet mine, lock. "Yes, my dear," he says. "Exhausting." What does that mean? I think, wait a minute. Whoa, relax, breathe. The guy works a 10-hour day. He went to the trouble of laying out English water crackers for you in that perfect fan. It's not that he's not having fun. It's just that he's really, really tired. And now I remember this happy thing. OK, this is really good. In Robert's kitchen was this really, really fancy cappuccino maker, because cappuccino was his habit. That's what he called it. "My habit." And I think, that's what Robert Blair needs after dinner. Some caffeine, a lift. But the thing is, we can't have it here. We can't have it in this restaurant, even though it's an Italian restaurant and espresso machines keep whirring, whirring, whirring around us. Because to prolong the date, to kick things to that higher level, we need to move to a new venue to do a new activity. My god, it's barely 8:20 and the guy is all yawning and looking at his watch and going-- "Cappuccino," I say brightly. "I guess you make a mean cup of it, huh?" "Well," he says, but then that slightly closed expression crosses his face. He pushes up his glasses. "Well, no." "But your machine," I say, "in your kitchen." "It doesn't work," he says abruptly. "It doesn't work?" "No, it is not that it does not work. It is just that it needs a new filter, a new water filter." "You don't just use the filtered water from the white Brita jug thing in your Sub-Zero fridge?" "Well, you could. But it is just not good." "Well, I could go for some cappuccino," I forge on, hacking through the dense, rubbery foliage with my scimitar. "And you must be missing it if you can't make it at home. I know I miss things when I can't make them at home. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] I've got a great idea. Why don't we go to a great cappuccino bar I know just a short walk from here on La Brea?" Clutching his arm, my hand like a pinion, I see myself reflected in Robert Blair's perfect tortoise-shell glasses. My mascara is raccoony, hair a fright wig. I have come to my date dressed like a hyena, and I cannot stop talking. "It was fun," Robert Blair says, giving me a quick peck on the cheek at the door. "Sorry about having to bail early. It's just that I'm really, really tired. But thank you." The forest green door shuts behind him, locks. There are footfalls. A moment later, a light goes on upstairs. That moment, I realize that Robert Blair is completely happy behind that curtain, alone in the perfect palace he took such great pains in showing me. He is probably leaping about in boyish stockinged feet on his perfectly appointed couches, loveseats, and pillows, throwing his arms up, jubilant, free of the burden of me. It makes me furious. I begin to shake at the iron rods of the locked gate, shake them with all my might. "I am not done with this evening," I yell. "I am not done. You don't even have to talk to me. We don't even have to see each other again. But I want that cup of cappuccino. And I want it, uh, frothy!" But there was no answer. After a moment, ever so distantly behind double panes of glass, I hear it-- the rattle of a paper, pop open of a cork, and inevitably, the gentle murmurings of CNN. Writer Sandra Tsing Loh. Her one-woman show, Aliens in America, runs at the Tiffany Theatre in Los Angeles through October. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Starlee Kine, and Sylvia Lemus. Today we say a temporary goodbye to Sylvia Lemus, who talked her way into a position here not long after she first appeared on our program in January of 1998 on her 18th birthday, talking about her Mexican mother's expectations of her and her expectations of herself. She's now off to college to pursue the life that she talked about pursuing back then. We wish her the best. We send her off with love. We expect to hear from her soon on these airwaves. If you would like to buy a cassette of this program, or that one, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. You know, you can listen to most of our programs for free on the Internet, www.thisamericanlife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who may have sidled up to you on a school bus years ago and said-- Groundhog? My mama don't eat it, but my daddy do. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. It's good with gravy. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Well election season is upon us again. We've all already endured the news of the first Iowa straw poll. Ahead of us, 14 months of pondering the choice of presidential candidates who seem to excite nobody who you ever meet. And it feels like, once again, all of us are left in a position where we want to feel inspired, we want to believe in something, and nobody is showing up to do the job. And I find myself thinking about a candidate I met during the last presidential election. This wasn't anybody who made it big. His name was Chuck Wojslaw. He was a retired professor of electronics engineering running for office as a Republican in a mostly Democratic district of East San Jose. I met him at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, standing in the afternoon sun, wearing a red, white, and blue bicentennial tie. He'd never run for office before this. And talking to him, you could tell. I mean, he was so much more emotionally present than any normal political candidate you meet. He looked you in the eye. When you asked him a question, he actually answered it. And he had none of that robotic, not quite human, pod people affect that so many candidates end up having. I retired a tenured professorship to run for office. So I could have been secure in academia as a tenured professor. Then why are you doing this? I love my country. I come from a really humble background. And my country, it has given me opportunity that all I had to do was take advantage of it. I'm the son of a coal miner. Are you somebody who's always wanted to run for office? You've always toyed with it in the back of your mind? No. When did the idea come into your head? Well, I had a family meeting. My daughter and a son, they're grown, college educated, off on their own. My wife and I got together and to my kids I says, it looks like I might want to take an early retirement. And so my daughter says, why don't you run for office? And I says, you got to be kidding. And I says, do you know what is involved with running for office? The mudslinging, and the long hours, and whatever. Then, all of a sudden, my daughter came up to me, and this is what turned my mind, she says, this is our country. We love it. If not you, who then? If not you, who then? And that's when you decided? Yeah. He was spending $60,000 of his own retirement money to do this. And like a lot of people I met at the Republican Convention, what was most striking about Chuck Wojslaw was his idealism. He seemed completely sincere about what he was doing. This is the puzzle of the American political system. It's filled with lots of profoundly idealistic people working at all levels. And yet, it does not seem to produce idealistic candidates. I mean, what's the most inspiring thing you've ever heard Al Gore say, or George Bush junior, or Elizabeth Dole? Well, today on our radio program, as we head into another election season, to keep us all from feeling dispirited by the staged media events, the negative ads, the issues that have all been pretested in focus groups, we bring you stories of political idealists, stories to make us all feel some small sense of hope about politics in America. All of these stories taken from election coverage we did four years ago, here on This American Life. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. Act one of our show today, Upside Down World. We have a campaign diary from Michael Lewis from four years ago about a politician you'll be hearing a lot about in the next few weeks and months. And the story of a moment when the opposite of normal politics became normal politics. Act Two, Kiss And Tell. A Walter Mondale voting, gay rights supporting, unrepentant liberal signs up as a Republican Party member and ends up a party functionary, a delegate to the state Republican convention, where he wreaks havoc. Act Three, Pete and Repeat. How California Governor Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant policies found some supporters among immigrants themselves. We hear an explanation of the profoundly idealistic notion of self-deportation. Act Four, Throwing Money at the Problem. You may recall a bestselling book from a few years ago called, There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in Chicago's Henry Horner public housing projects. Well those projects where across the street from the site of the 1996 Democratic Convention here in Chicago. And when the convention came to town, money poured in for a makeover of the neighborhood. One of the kids from the book, now grown up, gave us a tour showing us what got fixed up, and how the real improvements in the neighborhood all happened beneath the normal political radar. Stay with us. Act One, Upside Down World. We begin our program with this story of national politics as it is almost never practiced. To Michael Lewis, his campaign diaries from the last presidential race, were some of the most evocative and original reporting anybody did. His stories were novelistic, often very funny. This next story, which was first published in the New Republic magazine put Arizona Senator John McCain on the map for a lot of people in a way that he had never been before. It coincided with and it boosted a rise to national notoriety for McCain, who of course has now become a Republican presidential candidate himself. Here's Michael's dispatch. April the 19th, I leave my hotel earlier than I need to and walk down from the Washington Monument to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Even at 7:30 in the morning, the mall is nearly deserted, the Lincoln Memorial empty. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on the other hand, is teeming with people who appear to have up for hours, walking slowly along the length of the black marble slab bearing the names of the dead. For the next 20 minutes, I sit on a bench dodging bird droppings and waiting for Senator John McCain, who has agreed to meet me here. In my attempts to spot him at a distance, I can't help but notice how differently ordinary people behave from politicians. Maybe 50 likely candidates pass through my line of vision, and not one of them could pass for a US senator at 100 paces. They comb their hair in public, scratch themselves, hold hands. At 8:00 on the button, McCain appears at my side, looking very senatorial except for a pair of outrageously wide, black aviator sunglasses with some undignified name, hobby, hippo stenciled on the earpiece. McCain is the Dole surrogate most in demand as a speaker around the country, and it's not hard to see why. What matters most to the people who wish to see McCain speak for Dole is the formative experience that the two senators ostensible share. Both nearly died in a war. Both endured indescribable pain and suffering. Dole's ordeal is at the center of his national campaign. To some extent, it is his campaign. McCain's trials are less known. On October 26, 1967, when he ejected out of his navy jet and into a North Vietnamese mob, McCain suffered two broken arms, a shattered knee and shoulder, and bayonet wounds in his ankle and groin. Robert Timberg's gripping book, The Nightingale's Song, depicts McCain, two months later, in his first prison cell. McCain weighed less than 100 pounds. His hair, flecked with gray since high school, was nearly snow white. Clots of food clung to his face, neck, hair, and beard. His cheeks were sunken, his neck chicken like, his legs atrophied. McCain survived in captivity without medical treatment for the next five years, enduring torture so exquisite that even to read about it causes sweat to pop out on your brow. His captors would hang him by his broken arms from dangling ropes for hours on end, for instance. But the astonishing part of McCain's experience was its voluntary aspect. McCain is the third generation of a distinguished military family. His father was an admiral during the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese hoped that this famous prisoner of war would violate US military policy, which dictated that prisoners be returned in the order they arrived. If he accepted their offer of freedom, McCain would testify to the demoralization of the American troops. For five and a half years, his captors tried torture him into going home. For five and a half years, he refused to go. We walk alongside the black granite slab against the oncoming traffic, then back again. The Park Service says that the memorial has become the second most frequently visited site in Washington, after the Capitol. McCain admits that at first he found it depressing and even faintly antagonistic. But one day, he was passing through on his own-- he visits often by himself-- and discovered a couple of veterans running their hands across the inscribed names. Clearly the two men had never met before, but they had fallen into conversation, swapped war stories, and in a few minutes we're clutching each other and weeping. If that kind of healing goes on, says McCain, well, then it's a good thing. Someone once said that an explanation is where the mind comes to rest. There's a feeling about McCain, one that seems lacking in Dole, that he has somehow explained his own experience to himself. He has assimilated his trauma differently than the candidate he's behind. He says, this is the McCain theory, and I think it's valid. I was an adult when I was shot down, 31 years old. I'd had a whole life. He was 19. What were you like when you were 19? I believe that everything Bob Dole has done since the war was dictated by that experience. The Vietnam veteran has achieved a kind of equanimity that is supposed to be reserved only for veterans of good wars. When Clinton arrived at the White House, for instance, McCain sent him a note saying that any time the President wished to walk down to the Vietnam's Veteran Memorial, the Senator from Arizona would be glad to walk alongside him. Clinton sent back a nice note. Recalling this exchange causes McCain to break his rhythm. We were walking back towards the bench, and McCain is limping slightly, like a high school football star. He's remembering something else. I don't know if you want to write about this, he begins. Back in the mid-'80s, a guy who protested the war came into my office. He said his name was David Ifshin. In December 1970, David Ifshin had led a group of American students to Hanoi, where he delivered an anti-war radio address to American soldiers engaged in attacks on North Vietnam. Like other anti-American propaganda, this program was piped into McCain's prison cell from 6:00 in the morning until 9:00 at night. But McCain, who can generate anger in a heartbeat, shows not the faintest trace of resentment. He explains, Ifshin stood in my office and he says, I came here to tell you, I made a mistake. I was wrong. And I'm sorry. And I said to him, look, I accept your apology. We'll be friends. But, more importantly, I want you to forget it, go on with your life. You cannot look back. Here he pauses, and I figure he's finished. But he's groping behind his aviator sunglasses for the point of his anecdote. That forgiveness is ultimately less self-destructive than the bitter desire for revenge, or perhaps that there's no such thing as revenge. Five months ago, David Ifshin was diagnosed with cancer. The cancer has proved untreatable and has spread rapidly. David Ifshin is now dying. He's 47 years old and has a wife and three young children. Says McCain, when I heard about it, it did pass through my mind. Suppose I had told David Ifshin to get the hell out of my office? How would I feel about myself now? April 23rd, I'm walking out the door of my Washington apartment, on my way to find David Ifshin, when John McCain calls. I made the mistake of telling his press secretary what I'm up to, and she's passed it along to the senator, who is seriously concerned. He says, look, I don't mean to insult you but be careful with this. If you wrote anything that hurt David, or Gail, or the kids, I'd never forgive myself. I'd forgive you, but I wouldn't forgive myself. It's a half hour drive out of Washington to the Ifshin's house in the Maryland suburbs, where I find a gaunt, bearded man stretched out on a patio lounge chair, attended by his wife Gail. This afternoon, he's tired, and his voice is barely audible as he sketches his political career. The cover of Life Magazine of April 23, 1971 shows David Ifshin, age 22, at a war rally wearing a collegiate goatee. He's standing directly behind Jane Fonda, who has her fist raised. After his war protest, he worked on a kibbutz. But when he returned to America, he also returned in national politics. He went on to work on the Mondale campaign and, to a storm of protest, was even tapped to head the Dukakis transition team. He spent 10 years as general counsel to AIPAC, the Israeli lobby. He'd met Clinton briefly in 1972. 20 years later, when Clinton ran for President, Ifshin became general counsel for his campaign. Before he accepted the job however, he told Clinton he'd been attacked for his war record each time he'd joined a presidential campaign. He says, I brought it up with Clinton deliberately. And he said, he knew what I'd done, and he admired it then, and that he still admired it now. These days, Clinton calls Ifshin two or three times each week, even when he's traveling. A few months ago, the Ifshin family spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. In pictures of Clinton playing with the Ifshin children, the President's ruddy good health seems almost obscene besides Ifshin's drawn face. Yet, when I called him , David Ifshin did not hesitate to rise to the occasion. He says, I'm very proud of this story, and it's never been written. I ask him about his feelings towards McCain. He says, one of our true, political heroes. He's a giant. Ifshin's version of their story differs from McCain's in its important details and in its spirit. The way McCain tells it, Ifshin is the hero. He decided he made a mistake and bravely took responsibility for his actions. The way Ifshin tells is, McCain is the hero. As I listen to him, I realize that this is the reverse of the usual Washington investigation, in which the reporter visits each interested party to collect the dirt on the adversary. Here is a case where each is needed to explain the other's nobility of spirit. I've never heard two political allies, much less two political opponents, cast each other in a more flattering light. Ifshin begins, I'd always wanted to apologize but didn't know who to apologize to. His moment to act, he decided, came at an AIPAC meeting around 1986 at the Washington Hilton. Ifshin spotted Senator John McCain at a distance and decided that he was the man who deserved the apology. Ifshin says, I hoisted up my courage and went over to him. And before I could get a word out, McCain says, I owe you an apology. A couple of years earlier, during the 1984 presidential campaign, McCain had given a speech in which he attacked the Ifshin's war record. Basically, someone had handed him a script, says Ifshin, and he read it. He was sorry he did it and said, he wouldn't do that kind of thing again. Then he asked me to stop by his office, which I did. And normally wouldn't do. It was blind fate, I told him at that time. I said, I showed you an apology, and you robbed me of the chance to make it. And he was characteristically modest and humble about it. Later that year, McCain and Ifshin, together with a Vietnamese emigre named Doan Van Toai, established The Institute for Democracy in Vietnam. Ifshin shifts painfully in his chair and stops to catch his breath. It was at the Vietnam's Veteran Memorial that, what he calls, the second half of the story with McCain began. On Memorial Day of 1993, Bill Clinton spoke at the site. Both McCain and Ifshin were present. Clinton was cheered loudly. He was also heckled. And one of the hecklers waved a sign that said, tell us about Ifshin. Four weeks later, Ifshin found himself on a flight to Washington with McCain, who motioned for him to take the seat beside him. Ifshin says, he asked why I hadn't taken a job in the administration. I said this and that. We played 20 questions until, finally, he said, it's because of that stupid sign isn't it? And I said, yes, partly it was. And he said, come to my office tomorrow morning, and we'll settle this thing, once and for all. The next day, June 30th, 1993, David Ifshin turned up in John McCain's office in the Russell Senate Office Building to find that the senator had drafted a letter, which he entered later that day in the Congressional Record. It began by praising Clinton's Memorial Day address on behalf of Vietnam's veterans. The veterans, McCain wrote, were very impressed by Clinton's determination to offer an eloquent tribute to their service, when it would have been far easier for him to avoided the event altogether. McCain decried the behavior of the protesters. Then he moved on. Among the demonstrators that day, one individual held a sign, which asked the President to explain his association with the person known to many of our colleagues, Mr. David Ifshin. Tell us about Ifshin, it read. My other purpose in speaking today is to do just that. I want to talk about David Ifshin. David Ifshin is my friend. This declaration may come as a shock to those people whose perception of David was-- [AUDIO TRAILS OFF] Well, in the weeks after that was published, David Ifshin died, and John McCain became a leading Vice Presidential contender, after Jack Kemp. It was John McCain who nominated Bob Dole, gave the speech for that at the Republican National Convention. And Michael Lewis ran into McCain on election day. It was funny, at the Dole campaign, everywhere you went with the Dole campaign, senators and governors would come out of the woodwork, because they wanted to have their picture taken, show support, all the rest until the final day. And they all cleared out. No senators or governors were traveling with them. There was one person at his side, and it was John McCain. And I was in Russell, Kansas when the Dole campaign came through. I noticed this. I saw McCain off to one side. He'd been with Dole all day. And I went up to talk to him. And he said to me, almost apologetically, he said, you know I wouldn't be here if I thought he was going to win. And I knew that. I mean, he was there, because he knew that it was Dole's time of need. And it was time for someone to step up. And this is what's so curious about McCain. I mean, I think that he continually, as I cover this campaign-- I was new to politics when I came into this campaign. I had never written about politics. I found that McCain restored my faith in the process again and again. It was something about his-- how should I put it-- it was his willingness to stick his neck out for a losing or an unpopular cause that was so different from most of the people who do what he does for a living. So different from the ordinary political attitude that it was refreshing and inspiring. Michael Lewis, his campaign diaries from the 1996 race are collected in his book, Trail Fever. John McCain is now running for the Republican presidential nomination. Act Two, Kiss and Tell. Now this story of political idealism, political activism, and political deceit. Hello, my name is Dan Savage, and I am the Republican Party in my neighborhood. I am the Republican Precinct Committee Officer, PCO, for precinct 1846 in the 43rd district in Seattle, Washington. If you have any questions about the Republican Party, our platform, or any of our candidates, feel free to give me a call. Now, I should point out here that Dan Savage is not just a Republican precinct committee officer, he's also a gay sex columnist, a drag queen, and someone who agrees with none of the principles of the Republican Party. Now you're probably wondering how a commie-pinko, drag-fag, sex advice columnist found a home in the hate mongering, gay bashing, neo-fascist Republican Party. Well, let me tell you something pal. The Republican Party is a big tent, a huge tent. There were no ideological litmus tests at the Republican Party caucuses or conventions that I attended. I didn't have to produce a voter registration card or a picture ID even in my very first caucus. A measure, I believe, of the respect the Republican Party has for the rights of the individual. I just walked through the door, signed on the dotted line. Dan Savage certifies that he she considers himself herself a Republican, and that was it. Who knew that going over to the dark side could be so a simple. OK, here's the story. Back when Pat Buchanan was posting first and second place showings in Republican primaries this year, Dan Savage got it into his head that the only way to change a political party, that he not only disagreed with but also hated and feared, was to sign up and change it from the inside. So he showed up at his local Republican caucus, which in the 43rd is a small group of Republican holdovers in a big gay neighborhood. And at this point his story took a surprising turn. Once he arrived, he found out that because he was the only person from the little precinct that he lives in, each caucus is divided up into a lot of little precincts, because of that he was automatically made a precinct committee officer. And then automatically won a seat at the county Republican convention. Well, he wrote up the experience that he had at the caucus in the most damning, partisan tone humanly possible and published it in the paper. But, as he found out, his adventure had barely begun. A couple of weeks after I'd traveled over to the dark side, Daniel Mead Smith, Chairman of the 43rd Republican Party, wrote me a letter. I think you'll be surprised that the hate mongering, gay bashing, neo-fascist, Republican Party does not exist in the 43rd, Smith wrote. I invite you to come to one of our meetings and see for yourself. So I went to one of Smith's meetings to see for myself, the 43rd district Republican caucus. I arrived at the Montlake Community Center for the 1996, 43rd district, Republican caucuses at 8:00 AM. I paid my $5, signed in, grabbed a seat, and waited for the work to begin. We were there to elect delegates to the state Republican convention coming up Memorial Day weekend and vote on non-binding resolutions. The caucus began with a prayer. We ask God to guide us in selecting delegates. And then we were ready to pledge allegiance to the Flag. Only trouble was, no one brought a flag. I thought about suggesting we pledge allegiance to the fag, hey that's me, but I didn't want to be disruptive. Someone found some red, white, and blue bunting in the back room, tossed it over an easel, and we pledged allegiance to that. The easel was needed post-pledge, so the red, white, and blue bunting, to which we had just pledged our allegiance, was tossed on the floor. We had to elect delegates, before we could get to the resolutions. I won't bore you with the Robert's Rules of Order stuff, or the impossibly convoluted process by which the 80 of us is that cramped, steeple-roofed, fluorescent lit room elected 17 delegates to the state Republican convention. Suffice to say, it was crushing dull. To entertain us while we waited for the ballots to be counted four times, Republican Party activists and candidates gave little speeches. Some of these speeches were pure fantasy. One woman read a prepared speech about the United Nations working in concert with abortionists to take over the country. The other recurring fantasy had to do with us, 43rd district Republicans, retaking the 43rd for the Republican party. One man reminisced about the time, not too long ago, when the 43rd was a solidly Republican district. We can make this district Republican again, just like it was when I joined the party 25 years ago. All we have to do is get out there and doorbell, and identify the voters in this district who are sympathetic to our issues. Heart pounding, I stuck my hand in the air. Have any of you been out of the house or walked down Broadway in the last 25 years, I asked, standing and looking around at the toughest crowd I've probably ever played. The 43rd district, I pointed out, had gone all gay, all of the sudden. So long as the Republican Party was identified with homophobes and anti-gay bigot activists, the Republican Party could kiss the 43rd district goodbye. When I sat down a little old lady sitting behind me pointed out that she knew a very nice gay couple in the Republican Party. In other words, she, and by extension the Party, was not homophobic. And I was wrong. She said to me, the Party isn't against gay people. That's just a false impression you have. Gee, I wonder where I could have picked up that false impression, maybe from Jesse Helms, Bob Dornan, Bob $1,000 Dole, anti-gay rights rallies in Iowa during the primaries attended by all the Republican presidential hopefuls even moderate Lamar Alexander, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Newt Gingrich, Linda Smith, Ellen Craswell, Spokane county corner Dexter Amend, the Washington State Legislature, state legislatures all across the country, the Christian Coalition-- During a break, an attractive, middle aged man approached me. He was a little angry. I was offended by you forcing me to take responsibility for Jesse Helms. As if the Republican Party isn't responsible for Jesse Helms. One woman wanted to know why she should support gay people, since gay people didn't support her when her home was burned down by arsonists. The arsonists weren't gay or anything, but where were gay people when she needed them. Another pointed out that some gays had broken the windows of the Republican Party headquarters, so who's oppressing who? Another man took me aside during a break to let me know that the gay bashing within the Republican Party wasn't for real. It was only to get out the vote and motivate the frontlines. Well then, I guess that makes it OK. I'm happy to be vilified, and scapegoated, and denied my civil rights so long as it motivates people to go to the polls. Disenfranchisement is a small price to pay to increase voter turnout. To his surprise, at this meeting, Dan Savage talked the caucus into approving a resolution that affirmed the rights of gays and lesbians, and rejected elements of the party who would exploit fear and hatred of homosexuals for short term political gain. He could not wait, after this victory, to get to the county convention. As an official delegate, Dan Savage would be allowed to vote there, he'd be allowed to make amendments, he'd really be allowed to play a role. He planned to vote in the straw polls they have at these things for the most conservative Republican candidates. In this case, Pat Buchanan for President and for the Governor of Washington State, he was going to vote for Ellen Craswell, who opposes gun control, and gay rights, and moral decay, and who he loathes. Dan Savage's thinking was that the more extreme the Republican ticket would end up being, the more likely they would lose in the general election, and the more likely that the Party would eventually abandon this more conservative wing. A few weeks later, the big day arrived, the King County Republican Convention. My first major party function, hats, speeches, amendments. I bounded out of bed at 7:00 AM-- ew-- and ran to meet my new friend Steve at the QFC on Broadway. Steve attended his precinct caucuses way back in March with the intention of getting himself elected a delegate to the county and state Republican conventions. Like me, he joined the Republican Party out of a sincere desire to move the GOP to the center. Kindred spirits, we decided to attend the county convention together. The doors opened at 7:30 AM. After the crowd settled down, a preacher read an alarming opening invocation, which pretty much set the tone for what was to come. Please forgive our leaders for endorsing perversion, and God deliver us from some spineless compromise. Then we bellowed the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America. I slipped up to the merchandise tables on the second floor, where I bought myself a red, white, and blue Craswell for Governor hat. It must've been fate. On my way back down from the merchandise tables, I ran smack dab into Ellen Craswell herself. I said, hello. And looking very serious in my little red, white, and blue hat asked, what are we going to do about the homosexual problem Ms. Craswell? What is the final solution to all this homosexual nonsense? So long as they stay inside, we can let them alone, Ellen Craswell confided in me. But when they organize and demand special rights, we must oppose them. We can't give special rights to something that is an abomination in the eyes of God. Now, Ellen didn't seem interested in elaborating on just what it is we're supposed to stay inside of. The closet, are apartments, the priesthood? So I said, goodbye, promising to vote for her in the primary. You see, the better Ellen does in the primary, the better the Democratic candidate for governor will do in the fall. I made it back to the convention floor just in time for the opening debate on the party platform. The King County Republican platform is a document drawn up by committee that lays out what the King County Republican Party stands for. And here's the beautiful part. Delegates are allowed to propose amendments. Once an amendment is proposed, the amendment's sponsor is allowed to speak, followed by a few people in favor, a few opposed. After that, the sponsor gets another minute or so to address the floor. I was a delegate. I had amendments. And so I would get to address the convention over, and over, and over again. And, as amendments are time consuming, determined delegates can grind the convention to a halt. The first section we were to vote on was the preamble, in which we acknowledged God to be our creator, and the family is the foundation of our culture. We embraced free markets, recognized that tax and regulatory burdens are a threat to our freedoms, yada, yada, yada. Before we could vote on the preamble, and it hadn't occurred to me to amend the preamble, a delegate propose that a line be added stating that the Party was open to all who accept its basic principles regardless of race, religion, sex, or national origin. After debate, the first resolution of the day passed by a distressingly narrow margin. Race, creed, sex, national origin, something was missing. Steve approached the microphone and proposed that the just passed amendment also be amended to include the words sexual orientation. Well, Steve's amendment was soundly defeated by voice vote that, though untabulated, sounded to me like a 1,589 to 11. Then the liberty section was up for a vote. I dashed to a microphone, wearing my Ellen Craswell hat, and proposed this amendment. As respect for the rights of the individual are the bedrock of Republican values, the King County Republican Party hereby recognizes the fundamental human rights of gay and lesbian American citizens. We reject elements on the fringe of the Republican Party that would exploit fear and hatred of gay and lesbian American citizens for short term political gain. Through the shouting, I pointed out that we King County Republicans can't have it both ways. We can't say in one breath that we oppose discrimination, and with our next breath support discrimination against gay and lesbian American citizens. So let's vote on it. Do we, the Republicans of King County, recognize the fundamental rights of gay and lesbian American citizens, or do we not? Well, we do not. After some heated debate, the names I was called-- pervert, sodomite, Democrat-- my amendment was voted down. After my amendment failed, a woman in a Craswell hat approached me. Why are you wearing that hat, she briskly inquired. Because I'm for Craswell. You know where she stands on gay things, don't you? Having recently had a conversation with Ellen herself, I most certainly did. But I'm not, I smilingly inform my new friend and fellow Craswell supporter, a single issue voter. Try to imagine, now, that you're a homophobic, Republican jerk-off, which might be a triple redundancy, at your county convention. You came for the speeches, an anti-Clinton t-shirt for your collection, and a hot dog. This is what you do for fun, woo hoo. But these three guys keep introducing pro-gay rights amendments, moving to have anti-gay amendments struck, and generally messing with your afternoon. You didn't come to the convention to defend your party's homophobia. And you certainly didn't come expecting to listen to gay men giving speeches all day long. Who are these guys? And why is that one wearing a Craswell hat? OK, you're this person, what do you do? You get mad, very, very mad. One delegate decided to get even. In what can only be described as a David Lynch moment, a palsied delegate staggered up to the microphone and proposed a change in the rules. No further discussion of homosexuality allowed. His resolution needed a 2/3 majority to pass, because it was a rules change, not a simple amendment. And pass it did, to hoots, and hollers, and cheers. But we had yet to vote on the education section, which contained a plank about homosexuality. When we got to education, all hell broke loose. Robert's Rules of Order fetishists lept to their feet insisting that the anti-gay plank in the education section would have to be struck. If we can't discuss homosexuality, we can't vote on it, for voting is a discussion. Uh oh, we were talking about homosexuality again. People were booing, shouting, oh, the humanity. The chair, bringing the room to order, calmly ruled that the no-further discussion resolution applied only to pro-gay discussions. We could discuss homosexuality, he said, but only if we weren't saying anything nice about it. And the convention limped to a close. Most of the day having been wasted debating gay rights, gay marriage, what makes people gay, and my hat. What I learned. Here's what I learned about Republicans that weekend. They don't like homos very much. They certainly don't like having to talk about us. And they certainly like listening to us even less. But they do like beating up on us in their platforms. So King County Republicans, I'll make you a deal. Leave us out of your platform in '98, the next convention cycle, and I'll stay away from your convention. But if we're in the platform, I intend to return. Dan Savage writes the syndicated sex advice columns, "Savage Love." And he's the author of several books, most recently, The Kid, What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to get Pregnant an Adoption Story. Dan has continued his activism in the Republican Party, most recently he cast a vote in the Iowa straw-poll for Steve Forbes. His account of that is online. You can link there from the This America Life website at www. Thislife.org Coming up, illegal aliens who agreed that they should be deported, take matters into their own hands, and other unlikely stories. That's in a minute. From Public Radio International, when our program continues. This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program comes in the wake of the first Iowa presidential straw poll. With just 14 months left in the election season, we bring you election stories, hopefully, to restore a sense of hope. All of them taken from election coverage we did on This American Life four years ago during the last big election cycle. We've arrived at act three of our program, Act Three, Pete and Repeat. This is the story of and idealistic political movement, which, like so many, began in California, the self-deportation movement. This was back on the year, back around election day, 1996. Hey, Pedro, go back to Mexico. Stop taking our jobs. And stop looking at my daughter. Immigrants are you tired of being pushed around in America? Well, don't sit on your serape, do something about it. Join the conservative political action group, HALTO, Hispanics Against Liberal Takeover. I'm the chairman of HALTO, Daniel D. Portado. What is self deportation, do you ask? Think of it as a permanent vacation. Immigrants join hospital today and see your homeland tomorrow. Self-deportation is a trademark of Hispanics Against Liberal Takeover, subject agrees to voluntarily repatriate to native land or Mexico, whichever is the nearest. All self-deportations are final. No exchanges or refunds. Tickets are one-way only. While listeners to our program in California may be familiar with this advertisement and with the group, Hispanics Against Liberal Takeover, they are a militant, self-deportation movement, encouraging all minorities to leave the United States. That's right, all minorities. Its founder, Daniel D. Portado, has appeared on Spanish language TV. I actually saw a video of one of these appearances, where, basically, the entire Latino studio audience yelled at him nonstop for his entire appearance. Mr. Portado says that he started his movement when he read newspaper accounts about Mexican Americans who were in favor of California's Proposition 187. Prop 187 was the Proposition that cut off social services to illegal immigrants. He thought these Mexican Americans, who were in favor of cutting off the services, had the right idea but just did not go far enough. They just didn't take it to its logical conclusion. And he felt that self-deportation was the only solution. We feel that the immigrants are taking too many jobs, are bringing down the quality of life. They're not allowing our young American teenagers the character building experiences of picking fruit and cleaning hotel beds. So what's your evaluation of this week's election results. Were the election results in California good or bad for your self-deportation movement? Oh well, luckily, Pete Wilson is still with us. Of course, I was the chairman of, originally, of Hispanics for Wilson, the pro 187 group. Proposition 187 was the California proposition that suggested, and passed, saying that illegal immigrants could not receive any social services. Right, right, and we are also sponsoring for the next election our own initiative, the Spic and Span Initiative, which stands for, Stop Promoting Illegal Culture and Spanish. Basically, we're trying to prohibit any sort of activity which might attract illegals to this country, such as dancing the "Macarena". That would now be punishable by four Saturdays of freeway pick-up, clean-up, and a $250 fine. Pretty steep. And also saying certain words or any word in Spanish, such as a Los Angeles, California, San Diego-- Burrito-- Burrito, yes, and chorito, all these are traditional-- Things like Linda Ronstadt records would now be banned. Those ones where she sings the Mexican songs? Yes, the ones that she doesn't understand what she's singing, but it's very harmful. And it's like a yodel out to the immigrants. It's saying, are you out there? Is is there anyone out there? Would you like to come to America? That's what, basically, Linda Ronstadt is saying. When she sings a Spanish language song, you mean she's pulling people across the border with the power of her voice? Yes, it is a major conspiracy. You did not know? Governor Wilson has discovered that there is a major conspiracy to get all sorts of indios from remote villages to come over. I mean, when Clinton says, it takes a village, I mean, he's talking about importing a whole village from Michoacan. Don't you know that? So, also we have discovered, with the help of Governor Wilson, that the "Macarena" is actually a very sinister mind control device. And it is part of a conspiracy to control the white electorates feeble mind. What do you mean? How do you figure? What is it doing to the white electorate? Well, we actually have a translation here by our researchers that we can read for you. All right, sure. These are the words to the "Macarena?" Yes. And so my bodyguard, Rudy Rico, will do the translation in English. And I will read the original lyrics in the soon to be forbidden Spanish tongue. So here we go. I control your mind and body, gringo. Now, it's time to pick the fruit and make me rich. Give me the keys to your Volvo, gringo. Hey, stupid gringo. See how foolish you look. When you twist and dance to my mind control music. Screw the police. Now go cook some food for my friends. Stupid gringos, stupid gringos, stupid gringos. So, as you can see, this is a very sinister device. Daniel D. Portado, if you actually believe in deportation, what are you yourself still doing in California. Well, I am here to help everyone get out. I hope to look forward to the day where I will stand at the border and say, will the last Mexican out of California, please turn out the lights. That will be me. Daniel D. Portado, chairman of Hispanics Against Liberal Takeover. Act four-- Throwing Money at the Problem. Well, back in 1996, when the Democratic convention came to town here in Chicago, the city did a multi-million cleanup for the convention along the routes between the downtown hotels and the United Center, the sports arena where the convention was held. Well one night, after the convention, I jumped in a cab with some other people, strangers, convention goers, and we sped up Monroe Street, them to their hotels, me, back to the radio station. The moon was out, the air was perfect, the street was freshly paved, and a woman from Washington DC, a lobbyist who had attended the convention in a sky box remarked, Chicago is so beautiful. There are no potholes, no homeless people, and the weather is so beautiful. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Chicago. But I have to say, we do have our fair share of potholes, homeless people, and bad weather. I knew, before this moment, that money could not buy love, but I had no idea it could buy this level of misperception. This next story is about what all the cameras and all the political elite see in the neighborhoods they drive through, and what they don't see. You may remember the bestselling book, There Are No Children Here, from a few years back. In it, writer Alex Kotlowitz described the lives of two brothers at the Henry Horner homes. It was made into a TV film by Oprah Winfrey. It's been mentioned many times in speeches by Jack Kemp and by others. Well, Henry Horner is the public housing project that sits right across the street from the United Center where the convention was held. And when Chicago did its multimillion dollar cleanup for the Democratic convention, it cleaned up some of Horner. The boys from Alex Kotlowitz's book are now young men, and they do not live at Horner anymore. But they go back now and then. And during the convention, we asked one of them, Pharoah Walton, who was then 18, to give us a tour of what had changed at Horner because of the convention, and what hadn't changed. And one of the most interesting things about his report is how much of the neighborhood had improved for political and legal reasons, for all sorts of reasons, that never entered our political consciousness. They never became part of any discussion of what's going on in our cities. They never became part of the discussion of how things might be improved. So here, once again, is Pharoah's story. When I left Henry Horner five years ago, it looked like a ghost town. It had no green grass, broken windows, graffiti everywhere. Now, here in Horner, it's a different place. There are rows of flowers outside the maintenance building, and new windows in the office where my mother used to pay rent. There are trees, new elevators. Most of the changes are on the side of the building that faced the United Center. And on Washington Street, where the old Birney school used to be, there's a new playground, with a big lawn and a huge new blue and green jungle gym. Nicer than any playground I've ever seen in the city, even on the Northside, and everyone knows why. I like it. It's fun. I know why they did it. Because the President is coming. And then they all be taking kids and they going to be killing people, the President's soldiers. People say a lot of other things too. And not all of them make sense. Like what Kanue Howe told me about the playground. The Democratic convention coming, and now I can't be outside. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. After 7:30 [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and if you're not, you're gonna be all [UNINTELLIGIBLE] all you home, then get a doctor. There be a lot of parties in our building and parties not supposed to be in our building. People at Horner are glad about the physical changes. But most of them say they're mad that it took a President before the city would clean up a parking lot or plant a tree. Some things I'm hearing have changed and some things are still the same, like shootings and hot days. But when I was a kid, I would run in the house when the shootings start. Same with my nephew Snuggles and his friend Jeremy today. They always trying to shoot on a hot day. And they start gang banging, when they on a hot day. And then all the kids got to go in the house. Like two weeks ago, some boy got shot, he got shot in the eye. Probably is dead now. He is dead. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] shooting all the time. Usually when you here about the projects, you hear that things are bad, and they're getting worse. But when I went to Horner, I heard a different story. There still shootings, still drugs, and still gangs. But, mostly, people told me that things have slowed down. In 1991, the residents of Henry Horner filed a lawsuit against the city and won. Because of that, the Chicago Housing Authority is cleaning it up, renovating old apartments, putting in new elevators, tearing down the worst building. They've moved 233 families out of Horner's in 1995 and installed 24 hour security guards. My friend Sylvia told me she feels safer. So it's doing a lots better since 20 years it was looking around here, so. Crime [UNINTELLIGIBLE] a lot better too. They ain't doing too much shooting or nothing, so that's good. Police are around a little more, so that's better too. Since they put that United Center up there, because they watch that a lot. Sylvia says police are always driving around the neighborhood since the United Center was built. I visited my grandmother, and she said the same thing. That things are getting better. We sat in her apartment with gospel music on the radio and a preacher on the television. And she told me about life in Horner now. Well, it's not too bad around here. I never read about nothing happening around here, like somebody getting killed in a drive-by shooting. It's not too bad. I walk out this house every day and goes off. Lights be out, I have to take a flashlight, but I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. Of course, I got God, first of all. One of the things that the President and the delegates at the convention won't see when they look at Horner from across the United Center parking lot, is The Boys & Girls Club. Physically The Boys & Girls Club hasn't changed since I was little. Old pool tables, a basketball court, cinderblock wall, it's not in great shape. I talked to the grandfather of the community, Major Adam. He's worked at the Boys & Girls Club for 40 years. Everybody knows him, and everybody respects him. Kids would listen to Major before they'd listen to teacher, or parents, or even a police. He's the only person at Horner who can walk into the middle of a gang fight and make it stop. In fact, he's famous for jumping into the middle of fights. And Major would be the first person to tell you about all the fights he's stopped. He's going to jump on eight guys with these three knives. I didn't know he had three knives. But he had one in his hand he was going to get these guys. So I had to grab this guy and take this knife away from him. While the guy came out there, 12 of them was jumping on one guy. And it made me so mad, I said, well look, I'm going to take all 12 of you guys, one at a time. And I'd take them one at a time, and I whooped all 12 of them. I'm gonna do do it by myself. I picked them up and throwed them over the fence. I'm telling you, you got-- Some people say the neighborhood is safer because over 200 families moved out. There are fewer people to get in trouble or shoot each other. My friend Sylvia says, people have less time to fool around, because the Housing Authority is hiring residents to do construction and clean the place up. Another friend of mine says, people are getting their acts together, because now the city is kicking people out and tearing buildings down, and they don't want to lose their homes. But the way Major sees it, the neighborhood is better, because there are people in Horner who are trying to make a difference. I'll tell you, crime have went down in our neighborhood, this neighborhood, because you have a guy like me working in the neighborhood. When you walk in there, a lot of them gang bangers just came, I sent them. So is a lot of things I do for them. I let them play basketball. When they want to go back to school, I see that they go back to school. They go to jail, I send them money and stuff like that. Like my Aunt Millie says, you can't beautify the outside, when the inside ain't right. Major's working hard to beautify the inside. In the main room at The Boys & Girls Club, there's a trophy case. Inside there are all the trophies won by Horner baseball teams, basketball teams, and football teams. And pinned to the back of the trophy case, there are pictures of Horner residents who've made something of their lives, who've gotten out of the project, went on to do great things. All three of those young men up t there are teachers. They grew up in the area. All three of them? Yeah, all three there. And this is Dr. Steven Parker at Chicago State. That's Verdine from Earth, Wind & Fire. Then he pointed out a blank spot, and asked me for a picture. His way of saying, he knew I was going to make it. Well, This American Life is produced by Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, Julie Snyder, Nancy Updike, and me. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margie Rochlin, Alix Spiegel and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Starlee Kine. Some work in todays show was produced by Peter Clowney and Alix Spiegel. Musical help today from John Connors, Steve Cushing, and Anaheed Alani. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. two Well, you know you can listen to most of our programs for absolutely free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs our site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who is worrying about the effects of this radio show. It's very harmful. And it's like a yodel out to the immigrants. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week for more stories of This American Life. It's saying, are you out there? Is there anyone out there? Would you like to come to America? PRI Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And this is the story of the day that my dad fired his mother and sent her home from work. With her 13 inch black and white TV in the passenger seat. As if a sure sign that she was definitely not coming back, she was taking the TV with her. There are two kinds of family stories, your tragedies and your comedies. This, you'll be glad to hear, is a comedy. When Rory was growing up in Massachusetts, everybody in the family did some work for the family business, a machine shop. She and her sisters assembled tiny parts as kids at their kitchen table. Her grandfather ran the technical side. Her dad ran the business side. And my grandmother, my father's mother, was the secretary in the shop. She sat in the front with my father, like right outside his office. And he couldn't stand, basically, that she always gave him what he calls "chin music." Which is she would always be like, why are you paying that person that amount of money? Or why are you lending that person that money? It was always about money. It was always about the business affairs of the shop that she felt like she had to say something and that drove him bats. So one day, I guess he had asked her to order a bunch of liquor for a party. I think it was like a wintertime party, possibly a Christmas party. And it was a list of all the liquor that they needed to get. And she thought that there was too much gin on the list. She thought that gin was a summer drink, despite the fact that she doesn't drink. And so she said to my father, don't you think that that's too much gin? You should order something else or don't get that. Don't get that drink. And he said, no, we're going to get that. Just order what I wanted. And she sort of went at him again, I think. And then, as she says, it just grew into something much uglier. I guess, basically, he just threw in her face that she was always second-guessing everything that he did. That drove him bats and he told her, basically, to get out. Of course, second guessing is part of what being a parent is all about. You're supposed to second-guess your kids' decisions when they're little. And then, after 15, 20 years, who among us is so strong that they could just suddenly stop? It happens without thinking, without you even wanting it to. Your kid does something. You automatically calculate, is that the right thing or not? You can't just leave it aside because you and your kid happen to be at work. And then, of course, there's the kid's side. Who wants to be second-guessed like that all the time? Some estimates say that 40% to 60% of our nation's gross domestic product is created by family businesses. And you just have to wonder, how? How is our economy holding together? I would definitely wager that some of those families, I think that they probably become coworkers more than family. I mean that's just my guess. So I can imagine it. I think it's definitely like making money is more important than getting along at a certain point. Excuse me? Isn't that the way it should be? Now there's a big family values thought for all of us to share today. In Rory's family, everybody forgave or forget within a week after her father fired her mother. But other families aren't so civilized. Today on our program, stories of family businesses. What happens when the tension of family dynamics collides with the pressure of capitalist market forces? It's money, intrigue, blood, everything. Act One of our program, What's a Grecian Urn? David Rakoff takes us inside the world of one Greek family restaurant. Act Two, Silent Partner. A family that started a family business because grief counseling didn't work. Because time did not heal. Because nothing else to seemed to solve their problem. Act Three, Family Photo Opp. Dave Eggers and what happens when politics suddenly becomes your family business. When your brother runs for office spouting political views that you do not usually agree with yourself. Act Four, Every Unhappy Family Cleaning Supplies Business is Unhappy in Its Own Way. We hear how an invitation to a business meeting sent through the mail in 1963 kept two sides of a family from speaking with each other for most of the second half of the 20th century. Stay with us. Act One, What's a Grecian Urn? Writer David Rakoff says that every job that he's ever had was for a family business of one sort or another. They've usually been hot beds of family intrigue and melodrama. Except at one place where he worked as a teenager, where it was only in retrospect that he fully understood what had been going on around him among family members every day. King Constantine the Second, the deposed monarch of Greece, was passionate about my French vanilla root beer floats. The French vanilla was definitely one of our better flavors. We charged $0.05 more per scoop. Not every ice cream parlor in Toronto in the summer of 1982 came equipped with lapsed royalty. But Athos and Melina, the married couple who owned the shop where I worked, were old friends of the king. They had known him ever since the good old days when Constantine was still ensconced in happy figurehead-hood, and when Athos and Melina were at the tippy-top of Athenian society, he, a drug company executive, she, a scientist in the perfume industry. The sense one got was that this was a couple on the lam for some reason. From Athens, they had fled to the Sudan, where they continued their rarefied lifestyle. And where a few years later, the volatile politics of that region would send them into flight yet again, landing them here in Toronto, exhausted and vaguely punch-drunk, the stunned franchisees of a well known ice cream parlour chain. Regrouping, they settled into their new lives in this ersatz San Francisco gold rush saloon, with its faux Tiffany lamps, frosted mirrors, and wrought iron chairs. It was an aesthetic so relentless and so forced in its attempt to evoke those bygone days in the city by the bay, that it even went so far as to name its biggest and most vulgar sundae after a civic disaster where thousands upon thousands of San Franciscans were killed. I know a special birthday boy. Will you be having the earthquake? Imagine, if you will, Marie Antoinette, who instead of succumbing to the decapitory charms of the guillotine, is safely spirited away from France to England along with other fortunate aristocrats. Now resettled, she runs a fish and chips stand in Brighton, where daily the tiny, golden ship perched in the frothy waves of her high-powdered wig regularly topples into the deep fat fryer. This will give you a sense of how profoundly strange was Athos and Melina's presence in our midst. Athos looked like a latter day Jean Paul Belmondo, a formerly handsome man whose features have gone rubbery and heavy with age. He was, for the most part, a surly, taciturn man, constantly trying to bilk us out of our near minimum wages by suddenly pretending to understand less English than he actually did. But despite his gruff manner, y chromosome, and ultimate control of our salaries, it was no secret who was truly in charge: Melina. Formidable, fire hydrant-sized Melina. If she had ever decided to withhold our payment, she would have never resorted to falsely broken English. She would have simply told us outright. I adored her. She was smart as a whip, possessed of an appreciative and often bawdy sense of humor, and sounded not a little bit like Peter Laurie. She was also prone to moods so changeable-- from borderline inappropriate affection to homicidal seething rage in mere seconds-- that one gave up trying to guess her mental state and surrendered to the hurricane of emotion that was Melina. Actually, Athos and Melina weren't even really aristocrats. They were meritocrats. Their position in that world of Levantine glamour from which they had been lately cast out was earned by dint of study, expertise, and labor. They definitely knew the meaning of hard work. We all sought refuge in the back. The kitchen became a haven for us. It was the place where they kept the industrial-sized tank of nitrous oxide used to make the whipped cream. As anyone who has ever worked in an ice cream parlor can tell you, two things end up happening really quickly. You get sick of ice cream almost immediately. And soon thereafter, you fall in love with nitrous oxide. You heart whippets. This ardor eventually cools when you realize that it's been weeks since you've been able to subtract simple sums, use an adjective correctly, or spell your own last name. But at the first blush of narcotic romance, you merely wonder where whippets have been all your life. We were frequently joined in our daily worship at the nozzle by Melina and Athos' son, Nick. I was desperate to be Nick. In 1982, I was valiantly trying to manifest as alternative, eccentric, divo. Instead, with my hair in a short back and sides do with a long and floppy neuromantic quiff on top, framing a face of such poorly concealed sweetness and naivete, I looked about as threatening and alternative as a baby poodle, as complicated as one of the ice cream cones I spent my days scooping. But Nick. Nick had perfected that epoche brand of [UNINTELLIGIBLE] with his eyelids at the perpetual half mast of weary disdain, his two-tone spiky hair and tapered jeans. Athos and Melina seemed as oblivious to his silent truculence as they were to each other. If the front of the store was their putative living room, where they didn't feel the need to talk to one another except in the presence of company, then the kitchen in back was Nick's domain, where they almost never ventured. The teenage bedroom of one's dreams. Namely, one with a working refrigerator, a six foot tall tank of pressurized mind-altering gas, and a gaggle of stoners to laugh at everything you say. Athos and Melina's complacent disregard of their son seemed yet more proof of their European sophistication. Aside from occasionally working the register, Nick slouched about curating the music, a seemingly constant running loop of Big Science by Laurie Anderson, giving special play to its hit song, "O Superman," with its obligato of metronomic aspirating laughter. But his true pride and joy was his self-published punk new wave magazine, Before and After Science. It was a cut and paste affair of black and white checkerboard backgrounds, ransom note typography, and sci-fi movie chicks in beehive hairdos with cats eye glasses. It was available for sale at the front of the store at a cost of $5 for the premiere and, what was to sadly be, only issue. I think I'm the only person who bought a copy. But still, the pile of magazines provided a welcome counterpoint to the maudlin boosterism that invaded the store that summer. It was dubbed the summer of Annie by proclamation of the head office in honor of the release of the musical film adaptation of the Broadway show. Franchisees across North America had been encouraged to invest in Annie ice cream, a special tie-in flavor. Annie ice cream was a noxious combination of strawberry and marshmallow, of such a vile and diabetic coma-inducing nature that it was too cloying even for its target market of little girls. Seven and eight year old angels would skip into the store, all pigtails and horse love, and the scales would fall from their eyes as they spied the pink and white tubs of Annie, seeing the concoction for what it was, insidious marketing, a pernicious inducement to submit to the patriarchy. These apple-cheeked youngsters became suddenly hardened and cynical. They took up smoking right there on line, laughing bitterly like baby [? peofs ?], derisively ordering futility shakes and double scoops of alienation chip. Or, perhaps memory exaggerates just a tad. Available along with the ice cream and stacked into a doomed unpurchased pyramid were the Annie glasses. Drinking glasses emblazoned with the movie's logo and the likeness of Aileen Quinn, the little girl chosen in a nationwide search to portray the plucky iris and pupil-deprived orphan. Sales of these would benefit local charities. Even this altruism was not enough to move a single tumbler. Melina employed her usual unctuous tricks. Are you wearing Anais Anais, madam, she would coo. Ah, yes. It's a lovely fragrance. I was one of the chemists who created it in Paris. Yes, thank you so much. Can I interest you in one of our Annie glasses? Of course, it's for charity. No? That's perfectly fine. I thank you, madam. Good day. Wheeling around the instant the door closed she would hiss at us. Did you see the jewels dripping off of that woman and she would not even buy one Annie glass. This is a film directed by John Huston, the man who made The Maltese Falcon. What is wrong with you people? We laughed, imitating her behind her back as I am doing now. But of course, Melina's rages had nothing to do with your customers' lack of appreciation for the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] of John Huston. At the age of 17, I was too young to smell the tang of flop sweat in the shop air. That smell of exertion that comes from trying to keep away the wolves of defeat. Looking back now, I can see in Melina's pendulum mood swings the desperation of a woman running out of ground beneath her feet where she could resettle and start over yet again. It must have seemed so foolproof to them, an American ice cream parlour. And so close to America. And how perfect too, that summer's thematic undercurrent, the unloved cartoon urchin with her little mongrel, delivered from abandonment and privation to a life of love and untold riches. Nick's magazine might almost have been the story of their family, before and after science. Before was their tenure in the reliable field of chemistry where something as ethereal and intangible as a fragrance could be created through the sober logic of a recipe. After was this random, anarchic world of business, a world that was failing them. A year later, away at college, I would be sent a small newspaper item. The story between the lines made only sadder by the clinical dispassion of the clipping. A precipitous disappearance, no forwarding address, thousands of dollars in loans and bills outstanding, a shuttered store with no plans to reopen, a sheriff's department notice of seizure taped to the window. If I look carefully, I can see them on an airplane. Athos sleeps. Nick tampers with the smoke detector in the bathroom, so he can light up. And there is Melina's face at the small round window. Shielding her eyes against the glass, she stares out into the light, past the blinking wing lights, past the western edge of the continent, out over the ocean, scanning the horizon for the next piece of dry land. David Rakoff. His new book, Don't Get Too Comfortable, comes out this September. Act Two, Silent Partner. Now in this story of another family business, Sean Cole visited Chad's Trading Post, a restaurant filled with frilly knick knacks in Southampton, Massachusetts. The first my girlfriend Mary Ellen and I walked into Chad's Trading Post, she noticed that only boys worked there and thought it was weird. Normally, she said, in a place like this, a small country restaurant, you only see girls working. She pointed to the cover of the menu, which read "Dedicated to and operated proudly in the memory of Chad D. McDonald, 3/12/74 to 3/11/90." She leaned in to me and whispered, do you think the owner hires only boys because they remind her of her son? I certainly thought this was possible and sad in a way that makes you feel embarrassed for that person. Then a man came over and poured us some coffee. And when he turned around, there, in huge white letters on the back of his blue polo shirt, it said, "Chad's Brother." Do you think that's what they call all the managers here, I asked Mary Ellen. Do you think that's really Chad's brother? Then another friendlier manager type came over and asked us how we were doing and if we needed more coffee. And I noticed his shirt. My shirt says, "Chad's Best Friend." Logo over on the right-hand side. And it just tells the customers who we are. You got "Chad's Best Friend," you got "Chad's Brother," "Chad's Dad." And we had "Chad's Mom," too. But she's doing other things. This is the story of Chad's Trading Post. From the time he was 12, Chad and his brothers and a few friends had always talked about starting a small restaurant together when they graduated high school. They had planned out menus, Chad's father took him looking for locations. But Chad died in a shooting accident two days before his 16th birthday. Chad's father, Glenn, his brothers Scott and Cory, and his best friend, Mike, tell the story. The boy who shot and killed my son was his younger brother's best friend. It was myself and my best friend at the time and Chad. And they were cleaning up the cellar for his birthday. Oh, you were there too. Yeah, we were in the kitchen cooking sausage. But they were downstairs cleaning, and I was upstairs. My mother had just left. And me and Cory were upstairs cooking dinner. And they came up for a break, went in the room. And then we heard like a little firecracker go off. Then the person came out of the room. He had blood on his hands. And he's freaking out. I shot Chad. I shot Chad. The official ruling which was that Chad picked up a gun, pointed it at this fellow, said bang. The other fellow picked up a gun, pointed it back at Chad, pulled the trigger, and that was all. So I called 911, then I paged my mother, and then the police got there. I was charged for involuntary manslaughter because it was my handgun that ultimately killed Chad, and that I was not aware that he had two of my handguns out of my cabinet in his bedroom at the time. And frankly, that was something I should have been aware of. In 1993, the year Chad would have graduated from high school, the year he and Mike and his brothers and his father had planned to open a restaurant, they decided to open Chad's Trading Post. This is Chad's corner of the restaurant. Notice the menu board. It tells you to "Welcome to Chad's Trading Post Family Restaurant." It says, "Nobody leaves hungry" and lists all the specials of the day. It also has a claimer on the bottom that it's named in memory of Chad D. McDonald, and the date of his birth, which is 3/12/74. In all of the interviews I've ever heard and seen of an emotional nature, the person answering questions doesn't begin to cry until well into the interview. Chad's dad began crying before I even turned on my tape recorder. I asked him for a quick tour of the restaurant. It's a nice place. Homey, even froufy, though all the men who created it are tattooed, muscly, working class guys, Chad's father included. To the left of that, shows you the last and most recent picture of my son, which was taken about six weeks before he died. And the picture of the two boys that were named in memory of him, his younger brother's son, who is Ian Chadwick, and his best friend's son who is named Chad Michael. This photo originally showed the two babies in Glenn's arms. But they had the photographer alter the photo and insert Chad's head over Glenn's. And what they did was took the picture and replaced, by computer, Chad's picture over mine. It's actually my arms holding them, but the rest of it's all Chad. Glenn showed me a painting in another corner of the restaurant. It was the comedy and tragedy masks from the cover of Motley Crue's album, Theatre of Pain, Chad's favorite record. After he died, Chad's friends and brothers adapted the design into a memorial to him. It appears on their shirts. Two brass masks hang over the door smiling and frowning. A huge flag with the masks hangs in the breeze outside, too heavy to flutter. Chad's brother, Scott, calls them the faces. This was my first tattoo I got, the comedy and tragedy faces with the in memory of Chad banner. And that was my first tattoo. And I got that for the obvious reason. That's pretty much the family symbol now. It started off with my father getting-- because this was the tattoo he wanted to get without the banners. But that's what he wanted to get. That's what he planned on getting the following year for his birthday. He already had it planned out. So my father came home with it one day and he got it. You and your dad though, aren't the only ones? No, there's me and my father, Steve [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Mike [UNINTELLIGIBLE], who still works here. My grandmother has the sad face. Eric [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. A tattoo? Yeah, she has it on her chest too. And Eric [UNINTELLIGIBLE] who worked here has it also. And it's good. It's nice to see people. There's probably, all together, 15 people that have his name tattooed on them. We used to sit around the kitchen table and take a needle and wrap thread around it and dip it in calligraphy ink and tattoo each other with it. And there's quite a few people who we masterfully tattooed Chad's name on their arm. Whether they like it now or not, it's still there. They've tried to stay as close to Chad's vision of the restaurant as possible. He never specified decor, so they've had a free hand there. He and Mike actually drafted a menu for the place. And the family has kept about half of it. The other half was slow baking recipes that no customer would ever wait for. Chad was also a lot of fun, everyone says. A lot of fun. A comedian. And they say that's why they joke around so much at Chad's Trading Post. Scott says when he sees a heavy set customer that comes in a lot he says, hey Tubby. He builds towers of little creamer packages on the bald head of another customer. Glenn throws crumpled up napkins at his employees. They have water fights. All this levity in a place that's essentially a large roadside memorial that serves massive omelets. If Chad was here, we'd have the place upside down by now. How do you mean? Oh, it's in fun. We really have fun now. But I think if he was here, we wouldn't have all that tension of his passing on our shoulder. The only tension we'd have is, how much trouble are we going to get into? I have got to say, when I was here with Mary Ellen and we didn't know anything about the restaurant either. Obviously, we just found it. The first thing we saw was the menu and then we saw the back of Scott's shirt. And it was a little creepy, in a way. I've never gotten that response before, never gotten the response that that was creepy. I always got the response that that's a very nice thing to do. It's very genuine and it's heartwarming. I've never gotten creepy before. Well, I just mean it's like there's somebody else here in the restaurant that's not really here. You know what I mean? And that's exactly what it is. He's here. He's here with us. And we kind of have to yell at him once in a while, because every time something silly or stupid happens, you've got to blame somebody. And he's one to pull a prank on me for that. He's definitely here. But there's nothing creepy about it. I think I can safely say I have never seen any other family keep someone alive to this degree. They've gone out of their way to construct a world where they couldn't possibly forget Chad. A jumbo-sized photo of Chad stood behind Scott and his wife at their wedding. They believe Chad has protected their lives in serious accidents, that he brought Mike's son through a recent infection unscathed. Chad's room is the same as it was the day he was shot in it, with two exceptions. They took down the girlie pictures from the wall and they replaced the carpet. Before they did all this, right after Chad died, they all say they were lost. Mike said he wanted to crawl into a hole. Scott and his father had to make a deal with each other that neither would kill himself. Scott and Cory went into counseling. Scott says it didn't help much. But that's how it was when it happened. You didn't know what to do. I had no idea what to do. I walked in the bathroom, I'd look in the mirror, and I'm staring at myself in the mirror. And I flipped out and started punching the mirror. So now both my hands are cut, and I'm bleeding all over the place, and sitting on the floor crying. And I have no idea why. When you're that old and something like that happens, you don't have any idea what to do in any circumstance. Walking across a bridge looking down. Yeah, maybe. You sit there and think about it for a few minutes. It takes a lot out of you. It takes a lot out of your mind. And counseling made it worse for a while. What made it better, what Glenn says saved them, was starting the family business, Chad's business. I guess is it healthy? I mean, is it-- I think everybody grieves in a different way. For me it is, because I'm doing something constructive. I was semi-retired and disabled before. I'm still disabled, but I was just vegging. I was sitting at home, feeling sorry for myself, and doing nothing. When the restaurant idea came up from his brother Scott, and we started looking into it rather seriously, we found the place, it was almost like a breath of fresh air. It was something we could all do in memory of his brother and have some fun with it. And we have for seven years. Healthy? I don't know. The psychiatrists say many different things. People who blithely say things will get better over time have never been here. Things never get better. They get a little less immediate. So we work this in memory of him as a way of keeping him immediate to us. Nobody forgets. We get along this way. We get by this way. The whole bunch of us get by this way. In Northampton, where I used to live there was a couple, and they own a cafe. And at one point, they had a child who lived 19 days. And after they disconnected him from life support, they built a shrine in their restaurant for him. Pictures of him connected to white tubes dotted the walls and beams. And his father, a musician, would perform a song at the cafe-- weekly, as I remember it-- comparing his son to a [? salmon ?] and to the messiah. And some of us, at first, though we knew it had to be hard, felt a little embarrassed for them. As though this tragedy had driven them a little crazy. I think it's hard for us to know exactly what to do or say when we see public mourning like this because we see it so rarely. The intensity of it is shocking. It's too naked. And usually we think that if you hold onto someone after their death this way, you can't live your own life. But clearly you can. Sean Cole is a reporter at WBUR Radio in Boston. In the years since we first broadcast this story, Chad's Trading Post closed its doors. The family is keeping Chad's memory alive in a new restaurant, Chad's Good Table, 10 minutes away in Westfield, Massachusetts. Coming up, what's more dangerous, a borrowed military vehicle filled with family members or the rough and tumble world of the cleaning supply business? That's in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of different people to take a whack at that theme with different kinds of stories. Today's program, family businesses, what happens when blood has to handle money. We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Family Photo Opp. This is the story of a family that lurched briefly into a new business, the business of politics. Bill Eggers was 31, working for a free market think tank in Los Angeles, consulting with mayors, governors, and future presidents about privatizing and downsizing government services. He wrote a book on the subject, which Newt Gingrich endorsed on the cover at a time when that endorsement meant a whole lot. And then, well, his brother Dave tells what happened next. No one is caring about the Hummer. We are driving by, smooth and shiny, but no one is caring. It is bright red, this Hummer. And is powerful and gorgeous, this Hummer. And we are driving it slow, its wheels new and inky black, through Manhattan Beach, through Redondo Beach, past the boardwalks and t-shirt shops and retailers of frog-shaped paper weights fashioned from seashells. And while we are driving, we are waving and honking gently. And every so often we are saying, vote for Eggers, because my brother Bill is running for state representative and the election is tomorrow. The day is watercolor blue and I am with Bill, my younger brother, Toph, and this guy, Kevin, Bill's best friend from college who has taken a few weeks leave from his job as a toilet paper sales rep to help with the campaign's homestretch. This is the fall of 1998, and Bill is running in California's South Bay, just below Los Angeles, as a Republican against someone named George Nakano, a Democratic incumbent. Kevin is driving us around in a Humvee because we are quite sure-- who could doubt it-- that everyone will like the Hummer, it being red and wide and shiny, imperious and yet oddly whimsical. They will like the Hummer and will then like my brother and will vote for him and he win. We drive through an office park where a group of men in white shirts and ties are eating their lunch. They look at the Hummer as we go by. They are first surprised, surely by the startling beauty and power of this vehicle. And then they look at the signs papering the Hummer's sides, those bearing my brother's name. Then they go back to eating their lunch. Kevin waves. They were definitely impressed, he says. That's three votes right there, Bill says. We all laugh. Campaigns are fun. We came out from New York for this. Bill had been asking gently for weeks if there was any way Toph and I could come out for the election. After telling him that we couldn't possibly make it-- Toph was right in the middle of his sophomore year in high school-- finally, we surprised him, flew out to help with the last couple days of the campaign. When we got to LA, we were prepared for Bill to be edgy, wired with worry-- the details, the last minute polls, phone calls, all the money he had spent. The cumulative weight of a yearlong campaign. But then as were waiting for our luggage, Bill crept up behind us. Boo, he yelled, grabbing us both around the neck, then holding us in a double headlock, roaring. Good lord, there was no way we expected him to pick us up at the airport. Didn't he have better things to do? Wouldn't he be desperately running from house to house yelling his name, bursting into crowded restaurants, reminding people of his presence? His message? His destiny? No, he was picking us up at the airport, in his convertible, in a polo shirt and khakis. As we left airport and slid into the highway, I asked how things looked odds-wise. Well, it's hard to tell, he said. Hard to tell. Hard to tell. Hey, you guys hungry? We should get us some burritos or something. So we got us some burritos. Whoop, someone just noticed the Hummer. An older man walking in the crosswalk in front of us, himself in khakis and a polo shirt, just saw the signs and waved. We all waved back. Vote tomorrow, Kevin yells out the window. The man gives a thumbs up. Kevin drives slow, honks repeatedly. He and Bill are waving. There is little in the way of waving back. Kevin debates whether he should be honking more, or maybe driving faster or slower. We all agree that so far his driving is fine, but that in the future, we need to be more discerning about the route. For example, the trip through the high school parking lot might have been a bit unnecessary, so few of those kids being of voting age. Yeah, but the kids love the Hummer, he says. And it's true. Kids love the Hummer. Midway through the campaign, even after garnering endorsements from Pete Wilson, Milton Friedman, and Drew Carey, even after one of Bill's consultants had linked his opponent, Nakano, to everything from drugs in schools to death of cancer patients to various bus accidents, Bill was still lagging about a dozen or so points behind. There was all kinds of speculation why. Maybe Bill seemed too academic, too wonky. Maybe the anti-Republican sentiment-- this was just after the impeachment, remember-- was rubbing off on poor Bill. And maybe it was because Bill seemed rootless, lacking that comforting one of us feeling. He was single, had grown up in Chicago. Had no kids in the schools. Didn't own a house. While Nakano was 60ish, a married man with children, a mortgage, a rock garden, everything. Thus began a process of shoring up Bill's family side, a process that Bill entered reluctantly. My older sister Beth and I signed our name to a flyer that talked about how much Bill had helped out with the raising of young Toph since our parents passed on seven years earlier. And how the values instilled by our mom and dad-- may they rest in peace, sniff, sniff-- were being respected and carried out by Bill. And how he wanted only to create a community fit for the family he soon hoped to have, et cetera, et cetera. You get the idea. And though Bill was nervous at first about whether or not Beth and I would lend our names to the campaign, given that politically I'm far left of Bill, and Beth's far left of me, neither of us blinked really, didn't think twice. First of all, I had never in my life known the name of my own state representative. So I figured the office was mostly for the entertainment and advancement of its holder. Thus, the damage Bill could do would be pretty minimal. In the Hummer, we drive through a major intersection, six lanes. A mall on one side, condos on the other. Bill points to the median. That's it. That's where I had to stand. What do you mean, Toph asks. The consultants said I had to go out there and stand, waving to the cars going by. I did it three times, six hours each time waving to every car. We discussed this. We were often discussing the wisdom of the consultants' various ideas and initiatives. I'm beginning to wonder just how good these consultants could be if they think a candidate should be standing in the middle of a highway in a suit waving to people on their way to Radio Shack. This was endearing? This commanded the respect of voters? Maybe they'll feel bad for you, Toph says. Bill laughs. He's been laughing a lot lately. This campaign has been killing him. A few years ago, Bill lent his name to a conference in DC, one centered around the discussion of exactly where private companies might fit in should welfare or portions of its processes be privatized. Now, the conference was not planned so well. A meeting about poor people held at the swank Park Hyatt and costing $1,300 per participant. It was a PR nightmare. And easy pickings for someone like liberal bon vivant, Barbara Ehrenreich, who oozed in with an article more or less written before she darkened the doorway. And after lambasting the whole affair, quite effectively and often justly by the way, she saved some of her most condescending vitriol for Bill, who never saw it coming. She describes him shrugging off policy questions while turning to his dessert. A quote, "Five inch high structure of ice cream and chocolate. Now dribbling promiscuously into a brown and white pool," end quote. Nice job, if obviously the work of a journalist desperately stretching an anecdote to fill a metaphorical void. When he saw it, Bill couldn't believe it. He was angry and hurt, but nowhere near as angry as I was. You have got to help me write a response, he said. Yes, yes, please, I said. So we spent a few days working together on a letter. And oh, man, did I have some ideas. First, we'd call the fact checkers and tear the thing to shreds. Was the cake really five inches high? Was it served as she claims just as she asked him about welfare, or was it slightly before? Did the ice cream really dribble promiscuously? Then we'd dig into her other factual problems, then her politics, her agenda going in. Never mind that I had written the same kinds of articles, that I wasn't exactly on Bill's side of this issue, and that her piece was, for the most part, dead on. She had taken on the wrong family. Will the Eggers name be tarnished in the pages of Harper's magazine? No. The answer is no. So I drafted a withering response, laser accurate and dripping with condescension. Every time I sat down, I added to it, injected more venom, more dismissals. She would cry. Her children would cry. Her pets would roll over and moan with agony. But when I sent it to Bill for his approval, he had already gotten over it. I was still boiling, but he wasn't really mad anymore. He had put together his own letter, dry and curt, correcting a few facts and leaving it at that. It drove me nuts. If only he had left it to me, the letter and now this campaign. The flyers? I could've done them better. The events I could've done better. The media relations surely. The mailers, the phone calls, the reminders. His brother should have been doing them. I should have come out for the campaign, the whole thing. Only I could have done it right. Only family knows how to sell family. There's a reason these things stay in the family and it has to do with passion and loyalty, ferocious loyalty. We would brand our family's values, bring them to a grateful LA, and then a grateful nation. We would be the Kennedys, the Bushs. I would be Bay Buchanan. Kevin and Bill drop us off at the beach, so Toph and I can swim before sunset. Then they head back to headquarters to supervise the final phone bank, where they'll warn voters one last time that a vote for George Nakano will be a vote for corruption, the mafia, bus accidents, and drugs in the hands of all children over four. Tomorrow they will vote and Bill will not win. We'll go down to Manhattan's this cedary kind of bar and restaurant where we'll watch the results come in. Toph and I will be wearing our khakis and light blue button downs, and we'll walk around and chat with the volunteers. On the big screen TV, the results for Bill's race will be shown infrequently. Buried between those for Senate, House, governorships. We will see Bill's returns when only 2% or 3% of the precincts have reported. Then we'll stand around for a while longer. And then suddenly his returns will be shown again, and the words on the screen will say that Eggers lost. Later, I will find Bill downstairs alone, in his suit, with his young face watching a bank of TVs. I'm sorry, I will say. It's OK, he'll say. I knew it a while ago. But why didn't you say so, I'll say. Why did you want us to come all the way out if you knew you were going to lose? My brother has a beautiful smile. Dave Eggers is the editor of McSweeney's at mcsweeneys.net. William Eggers is now a senior fellow at the New York based Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He's the author of two new books on transforming government. Most recent, Government 2.0. Act Four, Every Unhappy Family Cleaning Supply Business is Unhappy in Its Own Way. People who study family businesses say that one of the biggest problems those companies face is the problem of secession. What happens when the younger generation comes into the business? These conflicts can last decades. This happened in Hillary Frank's family. My grandfather and his brother stopped speaking to their sister in 1963. I've seen old tin type photographs of her as a young woman, but I have never met my great aunt or anyone in her family. When I ask family members what happened, the answers are always foggy. Nobody seems to know exactly what happened. Something in the family business. The only living character from this shrouded past on the side of the family we still speak to is Mo, my grandfather's brother, my great uncle. He got in the business in the '30s. The trouble began after his nephew was hired. He was my protege. I was grooming him. He started out working in the warehouse. I was trying to teach him all the things that I knew and trying to get him into a role where at some point he could run that business. Mo was in charge of the sales department. There were two or three salesman who worked under him. Your grandfather came in in a slot that he was not qualified for. Had absolutely no right to be in that business. He was too nice a man. He had other interests that did not include the wear and tear of a dog-eat-dog business. And the other people felt that he was holding up progress, and probably felt that for the money he was drawing, for the work he was doing, it was not a good deal for the business. I was protecting him all the time. One day in 1963, Mo got a letter from his nephew calling for a special meeting. Mo says this was unheard of in their business. He was certain that they were going to reduce his authority and fire my grandfather. So he and my grandfather never showed up at the meeting. He never discussed it with his nephew. The treachery involved to me was the biggest factor. What I resented was the fact that my nephew, whom I had tutored, did not have the need or the desire to come and talk to me. Say, look, Uncle, let's talk about this thing. We're running a business here, not a family society. I could have understood that rather than a cold letter announcing a meeting. To me, that was a knife in my back from my nephew. And I got mad enough to say, I never liked this business in the first place. And if I can get out now with my brother while the getting out is good, we'll do it. And within a month, we were out of there. Everyone in the family has a different version of this story and who is in the wrong. You hear that Mo wanted to get out of the business anyway, that their side of the family blames the wives, not the men, for the following out. The story I heard from my mother growing up is radically different from Mo's version. It's very hard to imagine that my father was so ineffectual in his job that he needed to be protected. I know that he was a conscientious businessman. And it's also hard for me to understand, because I've spent all these years under the belief that it was my uncle who was being pushed out and it was my father who left in support of him. You know, part of the mystique of this whole incident is that nobody really seems to understand what happened. And yet, it caused so much pain. Shortly after we got out, I got an invitation to my nephew's son's bar mitzvah. I remember, in big red ink, writing on the invitation and sending it back, "Judas." Never attended the bar mitzvah. Never spoke to him again. Never spoke to my sister again. The greatest effect that this had on the family was that my father had a heart attack a few months after the family dispute. It was pretty clear to everyone in the family that stress that he experienced, which was major, was a direct line cause of the heart attack. The stress my mother is talking about had to do with family tension and what it's like to start over when you're 50. But mostly, it had to do with money. My grandfather was unemployed for two years. For the first time in his life, he was clipping coupons. He built his own storm windows from plastic sheeting and pieces of wood he found. My mother was 17 when he left the business and had planned on applying to Ivy League schools, but ended up having to go to the free city college instead. And the family blamed my grandfather's sister. Oh, bitterness is not the word. There was anger that was fostered and nurtured in that house every single day to the tune of a Jewish expression that my grandmother had that translates to a fire on her. The "her" being referred to was my aunt. For example, my grandmother was a really expert cook and baker. And she was cooking on a stove in my parents' house that was really on its last legs. And they talked about what kind of stove they could afford and if my grandmother was present for this conversation she would have said, a fire [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. There was always a direct relationship between what we couldn't afford and whose fault it was. Mo didn't talk to his sister or nephew for 35 years. Finally, when Mo's sister was, at the age of 90, going in for heart surgery, he got in touch with her. It took another year before he could bring himself to forgive his nephew. I feel that I underwent a catharsis. I cleaned out of my system something insidious that was hurting me, which was my anger. I got rid of that. Life is short. You get to be this age, how many more years do you have? Why waste them on something that's not productive for happiness? Concentrate on the good things. But in self-analysis and self-evaluation I ask myself this question. If I had not done as well financially as I have done in the last three, four years, would I have reconciled? Would I not have remembered the bitterness? It was easier to reconcile with a full stomach. Mo's been trying to get my mother to reconcile as well, but she doesn't want to. We don't really see eye to eye in terms of this reconciliation. I don't feel any void in my life in not being in touch with the people who caused my parents and my grandmother and me so much pain. Do you still feel angry? I've gotten to the point where I feel indifferent. And I also feel a sense of loyalty to my parents. I think it would be presumptuous of me to supersede my parents in a way. And beside that, it was important for me to make peace with people that they were content to be alienated from. This is like a lot of family conflicts. One generation carries its anger to the grave, or maybe takes the time to reconcile. But the children are a generation removed from the battle. Across that distance, anger can turn to indifference. And by the time it gets to the third generation, my generation, it's just an interesting story. Hil, can I say one thing? The other thing about the family business is that my parents met there. My father used to tell the tale that he was walking in the warehouse, and he tripped over a bolt, and that my mother, who was the secretary of the business, happened to be there. And she came to his rescue, and saved him, and picked him up. And that's how they met. How romantic. It's very romantic. And that was the most wonderful thing that came out of that business. Hillary Frank. When she's not doing radio stories, she writes novels for young people. Her most recent is called, I Can't Tell You. Well, our program was produced today by Susan Burton and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Blue Chevigny, Julie Snyder, and Nancy Updike. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Starlee Kine. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free 24 hours a day. Or you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, bestselling books, even the New York Times all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who describes the family that is WBEZ this way-- People who blithely say things will get better over time have never been here. Things never get better. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Let's start with what's legal. Let's start with what we're allowed to hear. This would be actually your off-the-shelf radio here. And so to power it up-- OK. And I'll go ahead and give you your short now. It's a 83-year-old male, difficulty breathing, O2 sats are falling. 811 receive. These are transmissions from a police scanner, a little radio the size of a walkie-talkie that picks up 911 dispatches, fire, highway patrol, the police. There are lots of people who listen in. There's been many instances, where, for an hour, they've tracked an individual on foot, running through neighborhoods. And as you're listening to the police officer running and talking into his mic at the same time, and they're panting, they're out of breath. And a lot of times you'll hear an officer tackle an individual, and, at the same time, he's trying to talk on his mic. And you can hear the struggle. You can hear the screaming, the yelling, the swearing. And you are there. Literally, you are there. I have another party trying to get the patient to vomit now. We're trying to instruct him not to do that. He said that he is acting sleepy. 811 copy. It's legal to listen in to emergency transmissions like this. But there is an entire invisible world, thousands of voices, passing through your body right now on radio waves, signals from cellular phones and cordless phones, military transmissions, and baby monitors, voices that you are not supposed to listen to. I have a hard time accepting that. I think that if it's traveling through my body right now, why shouldn't I be allowed to listen to it? I don't care how sensitive the material is. If you're transmitting it through my body, I'm going to monitor it. Today, on our radio program, people who are trying to make this invisible world visible, like this man, like many others, and stories of other invisible worlds. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today, seeing the invisible world, stories of what is all around us all the time beyond sight. Act One of our program, Faster Than A Speeding Bullet. People who figure out ways to hide 80-foot radio antennas in their backyards, who monitor the radio voices that are passing through all of our bodies right now at the speed of light, and what they know that you and I don't know. Act Two, More Powerful Than A Locomotive. We've all been in conversations where something, some truth, just hovers in the air unsaid, everybody aware of it. In this act, we examine just how powerful that force can be with case examples from David Sedaris, Scott Carrier, Sarah Vowell, Brady Udall, and Lan Samantha Chang. Act Three, Able To Leap Tall Buildings. This is the story of a man who sneaks through back hallways, searches abandoned subway stations, crawls through miles of drain pipe, and in general, goes all the places that you are not supposed to go. And what he finds there. Act Four, Look, Up In The Sky. My friend, what sort of incredibly sophisticated species are we? We are a species that, to confirm the existence of one of the basic building blocks of our universe, a subatomic particle hurdling here from the sun all the time, we had to use some of the same materials that you would use to remove a stain from a tie. Stay with us. Act One, Faster Than A Speeding Bullet. Well, it took a while for our producer Alex Blumberg to enter the community of people who listen in on the invisible world at the nether reaches of the radio spectrum, so much of their listening is illegal. But he found a guide or two. I'll call him George. We met over email. He said he knew lots of people who were involved in hard-core monitoring, illegal stuff. But he wouldn't get into the details. He said he didn't want to elaborate until we met in person. I expected a sunlight-deprived mole-man type, phreak spelled with a PH. But George pulled up in a red sports car. He wore a backwards baseball cap. I liked him. He said his father bought him his first radio, a regular AM transistor radio, when he was four or five. And from that moment on, I was hooked. Every night, before I went to bed, I'd fiddle with it. And I'd tune the static noise. And I always loved tuning between the actual audible stations. Every once in a while, you'd hear a station ID from several states away, sometimes, whatever, a quarter or halfway across the country. And it was just bewildering to me that these signals could travel such great distances. At age 10, he went to Radio Shack and got his first scanning radio, one that tunes frequencies outside the normal FM and AM bands. In those days, the instruction manuals that came in the box actually told you how to use the equipment to eavesdrop on cordless phone conversations. And so thumbing through the manual, I thought that would be one of the more intriguing things to monitor. So that's probably one of the first things I tuned to. And sure enough, there's several. Dozens of neighbors blabbing away, talking about marital situations, everything. How were you feeling when you were listening to those people? Was it something like-- I mean I imagine it must have been a mixture of emotions as you're listening. What were they? Actually, again, you got to remember I was very young at this stage, I don't know, whatever, 10 or so. And there were no mixed emotions. It was just plain exciting. But George got bored with his neighbors' marital squabbles. His radio collection grew to include declassified military receivers, shortwave radios, old Motorola walkie-talkies picked up at flea markets. He would listen at night, tuning new bands, different frequencies, fishing through static, hunting for transmissions like this one. I believe I had just begun to fiddle with the radio that evening. And I just got lucky. I was just tuning a portion of the spectrum that I usually don't tune. And very, very slowly was spinning the tuning dial. All of a sudden, you hear this faint noise in the background. And you kind of zero in and find out exactly what frequency it is. And then from there, utilize the rest of the components on the radio to zero in on that frequency, pull it out of the mud, and you could understand by what was being said that it was a rescue operation. I heard one of individuals transmit their call. And I looked it up. And it was obviously a Coast Guard helicopter. And it then became obvious that they were off the coast of Florida. And people were in the water, they were trying to pull them out. Things were not going very well. They could not reach the individual. And you're there. Time just starts to go so quick then. It seemed like I'd been listening for, I don't know, maybe 10, 15 minutes. But after glancing at the clock, it had probably been one or two hours. It literally felt like 5 or 10 minutes. It's almost like waking up from a dream, especially when you take the headset off, and there are, whatever, ambient room noises start to fill your head again. It's like waking up from a dream. For two decades, George has been entering this dream world nearly every day for hours, mapping the terrain of the electromagnetic spectrum. The portion of the spectrum that most of us are familiar with-- the AM, FM broadcast bands that you get on your car radio, your home stereo, whatever-- they're just an extremely small grain of sand on a massive beach. And the exciting stuff is really outside of that area. It's a world that can be heard, but not seen. It's everything just rolled into one big ball. And people have to realize that it's vast. It's astronomically huge. Again, I've been doing this for 20 years, and I haven't even scratched the surface. I haven't even begun to get a grasp on everything that's out there. Out here, we have a total of five antennas. The top antenna is what's called a Grove Scanner Beam. It looks like the television antenna. The little one below it-- I'll call this guy Morpheus. Morpheus is one of George's idols. George says Morpheus lives, breathes, and sleeps radio. We're in Morpheus's backyard, and he's showing us his antennas, three on the roof, each with a different purpose, and two more that run from the house underground where they come up at the base of a tall tree. This is where it comes out. And these go approximately about 80 feet up the tree. If you look up the tree back here a little bit, you might be able to see them. I painted them a flat black, as compared to their original color, which is a nice shiny silver. You can see up there with a little coil. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's them. He's afraid that if people would see two 80-foot antennas from the street, they'd break in and steal his equipment. Inside, Morpheus crams most of his gear on a beat-up set of wooden shelves. They're right next to the bed where he and his wife sleep, so if emergency channels start chattering in the middle of the night, he won't have to sprint across the hall to hear. He shows me a computer that, incredibly, gives a real-time readout of every city and county employee using a two-way radio at that instant from state trooper to municipal groundskeeper. He shows me portable radio gear and a safe where he stores two high-powered assault rifles. Then he steers me to something he calls, "The great book of all knowledge." What we have here is a very large three-ring binder, a few inches thick, full of pages and pages of numbers and little notes. What this is, is a compilation of pretty much everything I can receive from here as a personal reference. I've compiled this since I've been-- oh, jeez-- about 18 years worth of work here, on and off. This covers what I refer to as "DC to daylight," which means basically all frequencies from zero to a zillion. We'll go to the bottom here. Well, it's really low. The binder is like a phone book except instead of last names, there are five and six digit numbers representing frequencies. And next to each frequency is a brief description of what it's used for. Morpheus flips through page by page and points. "This frequency is a pirate shortwave. That one's what commercial airplanes use to communicate with the control tower." Well, let's see. United States Air Force Hickam. Hickam is in Hawaii. Submarine teletype, nothing to listen to there. Shortwave broadcast. Ooh, clandestine military activity. And then these-- He points to a whole range of frequencies, taking up a page or two in the binder. "The Air Force's global high-frequency system," he says. The most powerful shortwave communications system in the world. It enables jets over the Pacific to talk to jets over the Atlantic. "If you get lucky and tune one of the frequencies while it's active," Morpheus says, "you can often hear the roar of the plane engines in the background. But you're not likely to understand what the pilots are saying to one another." And what they do, instead of encrypting their signal, such that all you would hear is static, instead you can hear everything they say, but it's coded. They'll say, "Joker one, joker one, we have a message." And then this code comes out like, "Bravo, Delta, Two, Niner, One, Charlie, Foxtrot." And you get the idea. What does it mean? Who knows? That's why they encode it. Make sure everybody safe and comfortable. This thing's cold. I haven't driven it all day. And just FYI, no, I don't drive like a psycho. It's dark now. And we are, in Morpheus's words, "hot rodding American style" in one of his five cars, a black Monte Carlo, eight miles to the gallon. We're call jumping. That's the term for cruising with an onboard scanner, looking for action. Very quickly, we hear a promising squawk. There's a car in pursuit. Eastbound [UNINTELLIGIBLE] 104. Oh crap, that's the other way. We're stuck in a line of cars at a broken traffic light, and there's no way to turn around before we get through the intersection. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] vehicle. He is running without lights. We just have one occupant in it. Very light traffic. Finally, we make it through the light. But before we can turn around and head in the right direction-- [UNINTELLIGIBLE] with one in custody. They already got him. That was quick. They're listening for certain words, pursuit, structure fire, accident. But after an hour of driving, we've come up with nothing worth chasing. We all get a little bored. For fun, we scan some non-emergency frequencies. I want one Whopper, please. One Whopper? Yeah. Is that all? Yeah. $2.05. Over the course of a week, I meet a bunch of these guys. They all notice antennas everywhere they go. They all swap recordings like the one they played me, made with a scanner, of a madam at a Canadian escort service, taking orders and dispatching ladies over a cordless phone. And they all complain that the things they hear over the airwaves at night never make it on the news the next day. I kept thinking that people with access to all this information would want to do something with it on either side of the law. Tracking police brutality or uncovering government scandals on the one hand. Stealing credit card information or blackmailing philandering cellphone users on the other. But they don't. They're not that choosy about what they listen to. What's thrilling to them is the simple marvel that voices fill the air, pass through us all the time. I don't know. I guess with all of these radio waves going through my body right now, I guess I feel like a radio sometimes. You feel like a radio? Yeah. Well, we're all antennas. And I guess I feel a true connection with these transmissions. I even enjoy just listening to an open carrier or just static, just static. It's the essence of the wave. It's the pure energy of whatever it is. I don't know what it is. It's a radio wave that possesses some sort of special power. At the end of our long night driving around, we stop for one last snack before heading home. We were just talking now, joking around, trading stories. I've heard the guy in the Mir space station talk. And when they've buzzed overhead, that's pretty wild even though, of course, it's all in Russian. You heard the guy on the Mir? Yeah, sure have. You can hear satellites anytime we hear day or night. They punch one up. That's a satellite. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. That's what it sounds like. Like a weather satellite. And that's with an ordinary handheld scanner. We pulled out of the parking lot. Our Monte Carlo guzzled gas. The streetlights lit the empty strip malls. And from somewhere in the sky, too far away to see, a satellite played on our radio. Alex Blumberg. Act Two, More Powerful Than A Locomotive. Well, in putting together this week's show, we were all talking about the various invisible forces that are all around us, forces that we usually don't think about. And somebody brought up the idea that one of the most powerful forces in a room can be the thing that is unspoken between people. When there is a conversation and there's something that everyone is avoiding acknowledging, avoiding saying, everybody feels it, and you feel its presence with this intensity that is all the greater because the thing is unsaid. The unsaid thing just kind of hovers there, obliterating all the things that are actually being said. It hangs there, immaterial, unspoken, exerting a dense emotional force field. And we thought, in this program today where we're trying to make other invisible forces visible, let us make this one visible as well. And to do that, we turned to five writers, asking each one for a story about some moment when they felt the presence of something unspoken. I'm having some pain in my tooth, my upper right rear molar. So I call a dentist, one I've never been to before, and he says I can come by at noon, that he'll take a late lunch. When I get there, he tells me the tooth is dead. "It's going to need four root canals," he says. "I can do them in 45 minutes. Some guys say they can do them in a half hour, but really, it takes 45 to get everything and do a good job. I'll order out for a burger and do it right now if you want." I say, yeah, OK, and ask him if he has any nitrous oxide. He says he has some, but he doesn't usually use it. "It takes a few minutes to set up," he says. "But if you're the squeamish type, I suppose we could pull the tanks out of the closet." Squeamish? Squeamish? This guy is going to drill four small holes one inch below my brain, and he's saying, I'm squeamish. He's about my age, a little chubby, wearing expensive golf clothes and a gold necklace. I want to tell him to [BLEEP] off, but I say, "Yeah, I want some gas." He tells his assistant, a young man, to set up the gas and then walks out to the front desk and asks his secretary to go get him an Arby's roast beef sandwich. The kid straps on the mask, and I start taking slow, deep breaths, trying to fill every cubic inch of my lungs. I start feeling it almost immediately, a subtle separation of mind and body. The dentist comes back and shoots my jaw with Novocain and asks if I'm feeling the nitrous. I lie and say, "No, not yet." He tells the kid to turn it up and starts to drill. I inhale longer, deeper. I inhale and inhale, and it seems like I never exhale. Nitrous oxide is amazing. Nitrous oxide is my very good friend. I hope to leave my body and float above the chair. While he drills, the dentist talks with his young assistant. He says, "So I hear you're leaving for South Carolina?" And the kid says, "Yeah, in a couple of weeks." At first, I think he's going away to college, but then the dentist says, "Well, say hello to President Benson for me. He's a great guy." And I realize then that they're both Mormons and that the kid is leaving to go on his mission. I live in Salt Lake City. I grew up with Mormons. All my Mormon friends went on missions. I know the whole deal, how they take 19-year-old boys and screw them up for life. When I was younger, I was more tolerant of their beliefs and practices, thinking that this is America and that the Mormons can believe whatever they want, including the notion that God promised this land to them and that they are his chosen people. But as I've gotten older, I've become less willing to put up with it. I don't believe that their patriarch Joseph Smith was visited by an angel who showed him where some golden plates were buried in upstate New York. I don't believe the plates were a record of a people written in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics, which Joseph Smith then translated through the miraculous aid of a seer stone and a breastplate-type device he called the Urim and Thummim. And more than anything, I can't believe I'm letting a man who does believe in all of this drill small holes in my head. There were no golden plates. There were no golden plates. There were no golden plates. The dentist asked me, "How's that gas doing? Feeling no pain, huh?" And both he and his young assistant laugh at me. I groan like it's not working. And again, he tells the kid to turn it up. I take a long, hard bong hit, and it's all settled now. I know the dentist is a Mormon, and he knows I'm a druggie. That even though we've just met, it's like we've known each other for 25 years since we went to different high schools together, back when he gave up masturbating in order to get into the celestial kingdom, back when I gave up all respect for authority and tried to leave town forever. He knows he doesn't like me, and I know I don't like him. And we both know he's charging $1,000 an hour for his time, and that I will pay off the bill very slowly, finishing some time just before Jesus comes back. A woman I once worked for came to Paris on vacation, and we went for lunch at a little restaurant around the corner from my apartment. We'd just sat down when she cleared her throat saying, "I don't know if I ever told you this, but I really didn't think much of your last book." This came out of nowhere. It was as if she'd looked on the menu and read that the chef's suggestion was to tell someone what you really thought. I one-upped her, saying that she couldn't have hated the book half as much as I did. And this set the tone for the rest of the afternoon, both of us agreeing that my life was decidedly second-rate. After our lunch, we were standing in front of my apartment, her deciding that the building was unremarkable and me conceding that yes, it was. We said goodbye, and then she lurched forward, subjecting me to a hug, which I really wasn't expecting at all. I never hug anyone if I can help it. To make things just that much more awkward, I was holding a lit cigarette that proceeded to burn a hole in her obviously new and first-rate jacket. We both knew what had happened. She caught me staring at the hole, and then she caught me deadening my gaze and pretending to be lost in thought. It was clearly my responsibility to acknowledge what had happened, to offer to pay for the coat, or at least to apologize. I was close to cracking, and then I decided that, while it had been my cigarette, it had definitely not been my hug. And so we stood there for what seemed like hours, one of us introducing a possible conclusion, and the other one rephrasing it. "Well, all right then." "OK." "So--" "Well--" "Golly." "Gosh." "Well, what do you know." "Still married?" I ask him on the way to lunch. "Unfortunately," he answers. He laughs. I laugh. That's the only thing we say about it, his being married, me wishing he wasn't, the both of us wondering if this lunch is such a good idea considering the feeling we both get around each other. I have an ulterior motive for this little get-together. My hope is that by the end of the lunch, I'll like him less. We have a lot to talk about, a lot in common-- music, movies, history, books. I avoid these topics and steer the conversation towards politics. He's a republican, and let's just say, I have an LBJ keychain in my pocket. Actually, he's a libertarian which, as near as I can tell, is just a republican who doesn't believe in God. He's really excited about the flat tax. The more he goes on about the flat tax, the more thrilled I feel because I loathe the flat tax. I keep nodding along, "Uh-huh, uh-huh, really?" All the while, I'm telling myself, "See, I can't fall for a flat taxer. The flat tax is about greed. I'm about civic duty, tax and spend, tax and spend." It works. For, what is less sexy than the mention of Steve Forbes? I run through all the usual issues. Unfortunately, we agree about abortion and gun control and education. I start going soft, doddering on about assault rifles, all the while noticing his hand resting there on the table so near my own. It would be so easy, so quick to just reach for it-- his hand. But there is that wedding ring on one of his fingers. I look up, stare deep into his eyes and say, "So you didn't happen to vote for Ross Perot, did you?" My eight-year-old son found a wig in the garbage dumpster this morning. I walked into the kitchen, highly irritated that I couldn't make a respectable knot in my green paisley tie. And there he was at the table, eating cereal and reading the funnies, the wig pulled tightly over his head like a football helmet. The wig was a dirty bush of curly blond hair, the kind you might see on a prostitute or someone who is trying to imitate Marilyn Monroe. I asked him where he got the wig, and he told me, his mouth full of cereal. When I advised him that we don't wear things that we find in the garbage, he simply continued eating and reading as if he didn't hear me. I wanted him to take that wig off, but I couldn't ask him to do it. I forgot all about my tie and going to work. I looked out the window where a mist fell slowly on the street. I paced into the living room and back, trying not to look at my son. He ignored me. I could hear him munching cereal and rustling paper. There was a picture or a memory, real or imagined, that I couldn't get out of my mind. Last spring, before the accident, my wife was sitting in the chair where now my son always sits. She was reading the paper to see how the Blackhawks did the night before, and her sleep-mussed hair was only slightly longer and darker than the hair of my son's wig. I wondered if my son had a similar picture in his head, or if he had a picture at all. I watched him, and he finally looked up at me, but his face was blank. He went back to his reading. I walked around the table, picked him up, and held him against my chest. I pressed my nose into that wig, and it smelled not like the clean shampoo scent I might have been hoping for, but like old lettuce. I suppose it didn't matter at that point. My son put his smooth arms around my neck, and for maybe a few seconds, we were together again, the three of us. Before my grandmother died, she brought my sister Sally and me to a fortune teller in Chinatown who never made mistakes. My grandmother believed in fate. She believed that the twists and turns of our lives were mapped out at birth, as clear as pages from a book of standard plotlines. I, on the other hand, was a rationalist and a skeptic. And Sally was simply distracted. She was the beautiful one. She was getting married, and she had her own life. The fortune teller was a tall Buddhist monk whose huge bald head startled me. He studied my palm, pressed my hands, and peered into my face. His eyes were shrewd and bright. In that moment, I forgot I was a rationalist. I wanted his opinion of me. The fortune teller and my grandmother faced each other, talking rapidly, moving their hands. They spoke in a Sichuan dialect I could not decipher. My future floated through the air in inaccessible words. I waited for the translation. Maybe I would learn who I would marry. Maybe I would find out if I could pursue my ambition of becoming a writer. Finally, after several minutes, the monk turned back to me. He said, in English, "You should eat more slowly. Eat less oil. Exercise." Then he beckoned to my sister. I stood with my mouth open, furious, as he spoke to Sally. Eat more slowly? Eat less grease? Was I destined to die of heart failure? The monk was holding out on me. The more I thought about it, the more I had to know. But my grandmother refused to talk. She would ignore my questions and plant herself at the kitchen table, spreading hot pepper sauce on whole wheat toast and shaking her head. In the next few years, I could only pry from her a few vague pieces of information, and what I learned wasn't comforting. She said I would have money and fame, but that my luck would not be steady. She especially wouldn't talk about Sally who had always been her favorite. "She has peach blossom luck," she told me once. A few months later, my grandmother died. Since then, I've asked about peach blossom luck, but the explanations are never the same. "Too much desired," someone once said. And I wondered what was wrong with that. It's only recently, since my sister's divorce, that I've begun to see how complicated being desired is. Nowadays, I live a rational life. I write in the morning. I meet my sister for lunch, and we talk about our relationships. We tell each other, we need to learn to let go, stop trying to control the outcome. But in the back of my mind, I'm standing with Sally in the darkened room of a Chinatown temple, trying to piece together words in a dialect I can't understand. I'm listening for the answers to our most important questions, answers that have joined the great catalog of things I'll never hear. I'm more like my grandmother than I thought. I believe those answers exist. They are our fate. They are encoded in every word I write, in the swinging line of my sister's dress. They hover in the room around us, waiting to be seen. In order of appearance, writers Scott Carrier, David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Brady Udall, and Lan Samantha Chang. Coming up, scientists stumble on a problem they cannot solve. And the only thing they can think of is an act of pure faith. Somewhere, they decide, somewhere, there must exist an invisible particle, a tiny particle with no weight and no charge. And then they go looking for it. What they find, and other unlikely stories of how the world is put together in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of people to tackle that theme. Today's program, seeing the invisible world, stories of the unseen forces that affect our everyday life and what happens when we finally see them. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Able To Leap Tall Buildings. Well, my friend, I hold in my hand a stack of zines, self-published magazines. They are called Infiltration. The subhead written underneath says, "The zine about going places you're not supposed to go." And people write into this zine from all over the world, mapping out their adventures prowling through construction sites, deserted buildings, steam tunnels under university campuses-- there's a big article here on UCLA-- subway tunnels, abandoned subway stations, drainage pipes, catacombs, plus-- if that were not enough-- the back hallways of hotels, hospitals, office buildings. One article is on an abandoned missile silo in Roswell, New Mexico. The guy who puts the zine together does not give out his name publicly, but he did agree to an interview from his hometown in Toronto, where he has been sneaking behind the edges of the normal visible world for years. About three or four years ago, I had to stay in the hospital for several weeks one summer. And while I was confined to the hospital and wasn't allowed to leave, I got very, very bored. So I took to exploring the hospital. Each night, I would walk around in my flimsy little bathrobe and my plastic slippers, and just see all the secret sites of the hospital. And what sort of things would you find-- would you see when you walked around? I found abandoned wings in the hospital. Entire wings? Yeah. So that was really fun. Got to explore all the rooms, and see where patients had been kept, and investigate all the wonderful tools they'd used to heal them. And went down to the morgue and the engineering levels. And managed to get up onto the roof at a few different places. You devoted an entire issue of your zine, Infiltration, to this. And at one point, on page 12, you have a diagram, four photos that's a sort of step-by-step instruction to the reader. Over the photos, it says, "To visit F-wing's locked elevator room, go up this ladder." And there's a photo of the ladder. And then there's another photo. "Climb through the door, out onto the roof." Shot of the roof. "Find this open window." Shot of the open window. "Lower yourself in and enjoy." And then there's a picture of the locked elevator room. Yeah, I was really proud of that one, because listening to the whirring and clanking behind that door was driving me mad, because it was always locked every time I checked. And eventually, I found a nice indirect route to get in there. And that was quite a triumph. And then once you lower yourself in and enjoy, what's it mean to enjoy that room? Well, to savor it. You take the pictures, proving your conquest. You get to understand what was behind all those sounds that you heard from the other side of the door. In this case, it was sort an elevator room. So I realized, a-ha, the reason for those random patterns of sound was people were summoning the elevator at different times. And it was going up different numbers of floors and so on. So it all made sense. It was very satisfying. What do you know about this world that is invisible to most of us that the rest of us don't know? I don't think I understand it better than the average person. Really, I'm just keenly aware of its presence and impressed by that. Certainly, if there are interesting noises coming from somewhere, I'll pick up on it. Or if I'm walking over a grate, I'll try to figure out what exactly I'm walking on top of. I never think about grates as something to look down. Will you actually lift up a grate and lower yourself down the ladder to what's there? Yeah, and that's usually pretty easy to do, at least here in Toronto. It's not too tricky to find an unlocked one. And there is usually a ladder. What's down there? The standard grates that I'm talking about will lead to a network of steam tunnels, which aren't usually accessible directly from the street. They'll just lead to a little hot room with one or more locked doors at the bottom, usually locked. Have you seen the movie The Matrix by any chance? Yes, I have. I was wondering if you felt a special relationship to that movie in some way, that notion of all of you are seeing this thing that's in front of you, but there's an entire world behind the scrim. Yeah. You did? Yeah, I definitely identified very strongly. It really is like that, because most people have no idea the extent to which they are being coddled and taken care of. The millions and millions of dollars and man hours that go into all the support systems that sustain them and make it possible for them to live in an urban environment. Do you think the rest of us are missing something interesting and important by not seeing this world? Yeah, I really do think so. I think that the secret part of a city is generally much more interesting than the open-to-the-public part. If you know what's going on under the streets-- you know there are another four levels of city underneath the one that you're walking on-- it really adds a lot to your understanding of the world you live in, I think. You said there are four levels underneath the street level? Oh well, that would probably apply to Toronto where there would be heating tunnels, gas lines, subway tunnels, and then stormwater drains. In Chicago, there would probably be six levels. In New York, there would probably be a good dozen, I would think. Is the thing that's the most interesting thing about this secret world the fact that it is secret? If it were open for tours, it would not be that interesting. Now is it true that your devotion to exploring around is so thorough that sometimes you'll be on a date, and you'll see a doorway or whatever and abandon the date? That's not an uncommon occurrence for me to ask someone I'm out with to come with me or wait somewhere for me for 10 minutes. I mean sometimes when you see a certain door that's open in a certain way, you know that you'd be missing a huge opportunity if you didn't check it out. Tell me about the most recent time when that's happened. That happened a month, month and a half ago, when I was just walking through a subway station and happened to be strolling down a main hallway in the station and noticed out of the corner of my eye that, off, down a hallway a little bit, there was a door open with some unpainted cement behind, which is usually a revealing sign that someone has accidentally left a door open. So I said to the person I was with, "Will you come and check that out with me?" And she said, "No." So I said, "OK, well, just wait here 10 minutes." And I went through the door, found a tiny little freight elevator, took that down a few levels, wound up in a mechanical room, saw what it had to offer, found I couldn't go back out the same way that I came in, so I had to exit out to the street, and then pay my fare, and come back into the subway station again to meet up with her. It sounds like it took more than 10 minutes. It may have taken a little longer than 10 minutes, yes. So when you're going to go out with somebody, is your motto kind of "bring a book?" Yeah, well, the kind of people I would go out with would generally be armed with a book, I would say. I think overcoming your own mental block against going somewhere you're not supposed to go is usually the biggest hurdle. Most people seem to just have this instinct to stay on path, make sure they only go places they've been clearly told they're allowed to go. They don't need to be told not to go. They actually specifically need to be told that they can enter a place before they will. I've drawn the comparison before that fish farmers, they use these special underwater tanks that blow little tiny oxygen bubbles through tubes. And the fish see a wall of oxygen bubbles, so they don't swim through that wall. The idea is that fish will perceive that there's a solid wall there. And therefore, they'll all stay put. And I think that's the exact same reason why people stay confined to the designated public areas of a street level, rather than fully exploring their environment. They perceive walls that aren't there. The publisher of Infiltration, the zine about going places you're not supposed to go. Their website has the easy-to-remember name www.infiltration.org. Act Four, Look, Up In The Sky. Well, astrophysicists have come to believe that the universe is made up more of things that we cannot see-- dark matter, subatomic particles-- than things we can see. And one way to describe the process of science is that it chases after and names what is invisible to us. Nancy Updike invites you to consider the case of one subatomic particle, the neutrino. What you are sitting there right now not feeling yourself experiencing is the passage through your body, every second, of hundreds of neutrinos. They are so small that, to a neutrino, your body is mostly the empty space between the atoms, space for it to move through at the speed of light. Now neutrinos are able to do this because they have no electric charge and practically no weight. They are about 10 million times lighter than the smallest atomic particle. No one has ever seen one. The most abundant natural source of neutrinos in this corner of the galaxy is the sun, which releases neutrinos during nuclear reactions at its core. These neutrinos travel through space, unchanged, without stopping, forever. And since they're unchanged, they're one of the few ways we have to figure out exactly what's going on at the sun's core. So here's the equipment we, as a species, chose to use to try to confirm the existence of these delicate, elusive particles. A solid rock chamber dug into a gold mine in South Dakota, a metal tank the size of a small ranch house, and, inside the tank, 100,000 gallons of-- Dry cleaning fluid. Yes, dry cleaning fluid. Because it's cheap, and because it contains chlorine. Ray Davis is the chemist who designed this experiment, which is called Homestake. He's been studying solar neutrinos for 30 years. The more liquid you have and the bigger the thing is, the more you capture in the tank. So it just increases the likelihood? Yes. Because you have to account for the fact that most neutrinos are just going to keep going and are not going to be stopped. Yes, most of them don't interact at all. I mean they just go right through the tanks as if it wasn't there, and the liquid, the whole thing, and go out the mine the other way and go to Japan. Now that's the way neutrinos are. Here's how it works. The chlorine in dry cleaning fluid, when it's bombarded with neutrinos, produces atoms of a radioactive gas called argon-37. And when you count up the argon-37 atoms you've collected in the tank, you know that for each argon atom, one neutrino passed through the tank. I know all of this because I've been obsessed with neutrinos ever since I first talked to Ray four years ago. And I have to tell you that I am here as an advocate, a fan. I don't just want you to understand neutrinos. I want you to love them. Consider their history. Neutrinos weren't discovered so much as imagined as a bizarre answer to an especially thorny problem. In the early part of this century, scientists thought they understood pretty well the basic workings of the atom. But when they measured the amount of energy atoms give off during radioactive decay, the numbers didn't come out right. Now, they could have concluded that perhaps our understanding of the atom was wrong, but they didn't. They came up with something that, to a non-scientist, seems a lot crazier. Wolfgang Pauli suggested that maybe something comes out you can't see. Wolfgang Pauli was exactly the sort of scientist who could say something like that with a straight face. "Hey, maybe what's happening here is that a particle is coming out that we can't see, a special, secret, invisible particle." Since Pauli was smarter than almost everyone else, nobody told him he was nuts. In fact, other scientists took his idea very seriously. And Fermi-- This is Enrico Fermi, a scientist. Enrico Fermi. He'd developed a theory that would take this into account, and he called this "the neutrino," the little, neutral one. He said, the particle is neutral, and it should be almost impossible to detect. And for many years, that was a real problem. This was the problem that Ray Davis started with as a young chemist after World War II. He wanted to detect neutrinos. Since the lab where he worked had a nuclear reactor on site, and since neutrinos are continually emitted during nuclear reactions, he decided to start there with, of course, some dry cleaning fluid in a relatively small container, a 55-gallon drum. It didn't work. You have to have a more sensitive detector. And you have to go underground. Underground, so that the earth would shield the experiment from other particles from space that kept confusing Ray's results. Thus began Ray's seemingly counterintuitive plan to pursue one of the universe's most minuscule, ethereal particles by building bigger and bigger containers and moving them further and further underground. Until finally, he was building a 100,000-gallon tank a mile underground. I can show you some pictures of these. Yeah, I'd love to see them. Oh, that's the tank. That's the tank. It looks like a huge vitamin capsule. Yes, the engineers call that a horizontal blimp. And it's a tank that's about 50 feet long and 20 feet in diameter. Now these are the posts that-- Gosh, it's huge! There's a man standing there, and he-- That's me. Some man standing there. One of the great things about Homestake is that it was almost written off as a complete flop. But over time, it proved itself right and changed forever the way we look at the sun. Basically, Homestake challenged decades of accepted stellar evolution theory. Ray was supposed to register 10 neutrinos a day in his tank, and that number was based on careful calculations using everything scientists already knew about nuclear processes. Instead, Ray saw only two neutrinos a day. And his results never changed significantly. And no one could explain the problem of the missing neutrinos other than to tell Ray his experiment just wasn't working. It wasn't until other neutrino detectors started being built in the 1980s that Ray's results were confirmed once and for all. And scientists finally began to face the mess that neutrinos presented them with. There's the science of things you can see and touch, surgeons studying the heart, Diane Fossey out there with the gorillas. And there's the science of things you can't see. When Ray started his neutrino experiments, the director of his lab tried to warn him off. He only liked science he could see. A guy that works on things that are in the laboratory, hands-on, that do this and that, you know where you stand. When you get up to the middle of the sun, you're kind of in deep water, and you do the best you can. I'm on the other side of the argument from Ray's former boss. I'm all for invisibility. I think it imposes humility, and that's a good thing. No one has ever seen a neutrino, no scientist, no fan. In the face of neutrinos, we are all fumbling around in the middle of the sun, doing the best we can. What we can't see rules us, love, God, neutrinos, radio. But I think we want to be ruled. We want God to be ineffable. We want love to mysteriously endure after our physical presence is gone. We want to know that neutrinos are moving through us and continuing on, unchanged forever. Everything we can see has an explanation and an end. And we don't want everything to end. Nancy Updike. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself with Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, Julie Snyder, and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margie Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Starlee Kine. To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who wishes to take a moment to send this message to his masters back in the Soviet Union. Bravo, Delta, Two, Niner, One, Charlie, Foxtrot. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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People really were different back in the '60s. Here is something that it is impossible to imagine any politician saying today-- any successful, mainstream, big-time politician anyway. Listen to the President of the United States, June 4, 1965. Perhaps most important is the breakdown of the Negro family structure. For this, most of all white America must accept responsibility. It flows from centuries years of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. In 1965, black single mothers became a national political issue, a national symbol, for the very first time. And it was the Democrats who put the issue on the table. A young Assistant Secretary of Labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan submitted a report to President Lyndon Johnson calling for national action, to do something about the large number of black single mothers. When large numbers of men grow up in homes without strong male authority, the report said, it leads to chaos, crime, violence, and unrest. Black single mothers, the report declared, were at the center of quote "a tangle of pathology in the black community." Black leaders, including the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, did not take too kindly to all this. They said that all this talk of black pathology had unfortunate racist overtones, and the issue dropped from the national scene for years. Then the Republicans picked it up. Ronald Reagan talked about welfare queens. Dan Quayle said the LA riots happened mainly because of a breakdown in traditional family structure. For two decades, the entire national debate over welfare reform has often seemed like it's really just a referendum on inner city single mothers, which brings us to Barbara Clinkscales. We gave Barbara Clinkscales a cassette recorder. And for seven months, she taped her family's life. And the story we bring you today, her life in her own words, it isn't that it completely contradicts everything in the national debate over single mothers, though sometimes it does contradict that debate. It's more that when you hear her talk, the national policy discussion somehow seems irrelevant and off the point. It's as if the policymakers have no real picture of what a life like hers is really like. Today, we devote our entire program to her story. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Like most African-American single mothers, like 77% of them, Barbara Clinkscales works for a living. She has a job in the new information economy as a data entry operator. And she's so committed to seeing that her kids graduate high school that when her son, Gerald, cut some classes, she started escorting him to class herself, telling his classmates, "My name is Barbara. I think we'll be seeing a lot of each other from now on." Before we start her story, some quick statistics to put all this in perspective. Barbara's family is not unusual at all. There has been a radical shift in American family structure. The number of children born to black single mothers has risen from 17% in 1950 to 70%, seven zero, in 1994. The number of white children born to single mothers has risen even faster, from 1.7% in 1950 to 25% in 1994. Here, then, is the story of one single mother told in her own words. OK. Hi, I know we late. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's my fault this time. Let me introduce myself. My name is Barbara. Good morning, Miss Clinkscales. Hi baby, good morning. I'm a single mom. I have three kids, Angie, Tess, and Gerald. Good morning. Good morning. Angie's 25. Tess and Gerald are 17. They are twins. They're in high school, in the 11th grade. Hi, my name is Barbara Clinkscales. Everybody knows me. Yeah, I know that name from somewhere, Clinkscales. Yeah, I always bring him to school. And I stand here while he goes up to his locker, and he comes back. Every morning, I take Gerald to school. If I don't take him to school, he'd get up, get dressed, and he'd just sit there. He won't go. In order to take him to school, I have to go a half hour out of my way in the opposite direction of my workplace. Then after I leave his school, it takes me another 50 minutes to an hour back past my house before I get to work. Altogether, it takes me an hour and a half to two hours to get to work in the morning. But I'm sorry, Mr. Maybaum. That's OK, everyone's right out here. Last week, almost every afternoon-- I'm going to go get my book-- he did not come to my afternoon classes. Let me go get my book. OK. Where were you? Where were you? I was at school. You stayed in school, but you just didn't go to his class? That doesn't sound like it makes any sense, does it, Gerald? Where did you go if you stayed in school? The twins don't go to school in the neighborhood we live in. I had to borrow my coworker's address to get them into Bogan High School because I feel Bogan High School is a real good school. They really care about the kids, and they work with you. Like Gerald's teacher, Mr. Maybaum. He cares about Gerald as if Gerald was his own child. Where have you been going? Come on. You might as well tell us. No big, dark secret, is it? Where you been going? Where did you go last week? Gerald, are those hickies on your neck? No. Yes, they are. What a-- Turn around. You see that, Mr. Maybaum? What's that? That's what he's probably doing. Those are the love passion marks, hickies. Could be. Could be. If I hit you upside your head, you'll know what they are. Right now, all I can focus on is the twins and getting them through high school. Get them through high school. Now we're walking him down to the other end of the school to the counselor's office, Mr. Ware, where he'll have to reinstate Gerald because of those two cuts. When I talk to them about graduating, I always tell them, when they walk across that stage, I'm going to do a cartwheel. And my best girlfriend, she says, she's going to do a split. And the twins look at us and laugh. And they say, they want to see this. And I say, well, I better start practicing because I know you guys are going to walk across that stage. OK, what I was doing, that moment of silence, I was writing my name and the time, signing in, on the sign-in sheet in Room 102. I'm sitting here next to Gerald waiting. I always dreamed about going on a prom, all the senior activities that the seniors do when they graduate from high school. I didn't get a chance to go on a prom because when I was graduating from high school, I had my own apartment. I had been out on my own ever since I was 16 years old. So I had to play grown-up. But I can live some of my dreams through them. That's why I feel the way that I feel, that nothing is going to get in my way, nothing. You really think you're smart, Gerald, don't you? You really think you're getting away with something, don't you? Do you think I'm going to give up? Huh? Do you think I'm going to give up? Gerald, I'm talking to you. I'm going to kill you, Gerald, and sit up in jail before I let you be out there on them streets, no education, a dymie, trying to deal drugs to have some money. I will take your life and sit up in jail gladly. Because I'm not going to live day to day, knowing my only son is a failure. All right? My landlord is playing his music. I'm standing here just holding the mic. I have a portable bar because I like to collect pretty glasses. And that's just how the music is vibrating through the floor. Really, noise don't bother me. When you grow up in the projects, noise just don't bother you. You can live with it. And my apartment is real big. I have three bedrooms, living room, dining room, a nice long hallway. And I'm walking into Gerald's room now. And you get-- why? I can't come in here? What you putting on the radio? Well, they can't see you. But it's going to be on the radio, though. Well, you should keep it clean if you don't want nobody to know your room is dirty. People will be hearing it? Yes. Everything we talk about from now on, your whole life, is going to be on the radio. People are going to know how you don't want to go to school, how your momma have to take you to school every day, watch you go in your classroom. So I'm in my living room now. And I'm having company tomorrow, so we going to clean up tonight. And I can't wait for Tess to come home because I worry about her being out at night. But I can't stop her from doing the things that she want to do. But I really don't have no peace until she walk through that door. And then I feel better. OK. I guess I'll start cooking them tacos. I promised that I'd cook tacos for dinner. Oh god, did you just hear that? They're shooting. Oh god, don't let that be Tess. Oh god, I hope Tess is not outside. Gerald, get away from the windows. Gerald, just come in the hall. Come in the hallway, Gerald. Gerald? What? Where are you at? Oh god, I hope Tess is not out there. Oh god. Crime and drugs is everywhere, but I know my block is the crack block. Just wait, Gerald. Wait 'til the shooting stops. I always lived in the area. But I moved right on the worst block. I just moved smack dab in the middle of hell, pick-up hell. And he put me right in the middle. That's my block. Gerald, is that the police or ambulance? Do you see anything? No. Oh god. It sounded like somebody coming up the steps. That's probably Tess. Who is it? It's me. Oh god, it's Tess. And they just got through shooting, so that means she had to be getting off the bus on 79th Street. Tess, did you hear the shooting? When? They was just finished shooting. For what? They was outside just shooting. I didn't hear it. Father, thank you again. She was praying for me? Yeah, I was praying. They was just shooting. You could have got caught up in that. Where are you just coming from? The library. Come up close. I can't hear you. Doing research on Thurgood Marshall for me English class. Oh, OK. Tess and Gerald are twins, but they are totally opposite, like night and day, sweet and sour. Tess is the dominant twin. She knows what she want, and what she have to do to get it. Tess was on the cheerleaders. She was on the swim team. She worked at Seaway Bank. I never, never had to take Tess to school. What time you got to go to work? I got to be at work at 9 o'clock. I don't have to wake you up. No. So you get up on your own? Give me a Tasmanian alarm clock. That's what I want. OK, her name is Tess. And they call her Taz. So she loves Tasmania, anything with Tasmania. If you come over and you see her room, she have Tasmania posters, Tasmania blankets, pillows, clothes. Underwear, socks, pictures. Tess have so many of my ways. She eat like me. She think like me. She dress like me. And these are things that just come natural, not things that I teach her. It just come natural. Is this for me? Yeah, no, wait 'til you eat. Now what about your diet? Forget my diet. Everybody like me the way I am. Oh Lord. First, she was all depressed. She said her arms was too fat. They still is. Look, I still want to get my arms sucked. Some boy done told her that she looked good, so she don't care about-- she want liposuc-- what you call that? My arms sucked. I don't know what it's called. I think it's called liposuction. But I just want to get my arms sucked. Oh, OK. Go turn that skillet off. I'll go and cook the tacos. People always ask me, do I have picks with my kids, who I like the most. And people always tell me, I know you're proud of Tess. I know that's your pick. But you know, Tess is not my pick. I don't have a pick. Angie's not my pick. Gerald is not my pick. I love my kids the same. They all special in they own way. Angie, I had Angie at 15. And I was a baby having a baby. I was 15. I didn't know nothing about raising kids. I knew nothing about life. But I was determined to stay in school and to graduate and to raise Angie. And it was just me and her against the world. And I did it. Even though she dropped out of school and had babies and everything, but she's still a good person. She's my first born. And Gerald is mommy's man. That's my son. All my life, I never had a father. I never had a brother. And so only time I ever loved a man was in a relationship. And when my son was born, that's a man who loves me unconditionally. His love is just because I'm his momma. It's not because he wants something from me. It's not because he wants sex or something. A man finally loved me for me. And Tess, she's a carbon copy of me. In other words, she's a young me. And you would think she's my pick, but she's not. Come on, let's make a toast. To the Hens. To the Hens. Everlasting, never-ending sisters. The Hens are a group of ladies that's been friends since high school. We do all kind of stuff together. We laugh, we talk, we watch movies, we get in trouble. OK, wait a minute. It spells out something. What do it spell? Never-ending, everlasting sisters. H-E-N-S. H-- hens. Some of the most fun we have is when we go away. We leave the kids, the husbands, the job. We leave everybody. Rent a room, and eat, laugh, and talk, and just don't do nothing. And our next big trip is to Jamaica. And we have been planning and paying for this trip since October of last year. And whenever the Hens are sitting around, talking about our trip to Jamaica, we end up talking about our fantasies, and what we're going to do when we get there. Every Hen has a different fantasy about Jamaica and what they want to do. My fantasy is on the beach, a big, black piano, with this man in a white jacket, and I name him Sam, playing the piano, playing love songs. Y'all know this? And me leaning over it with a exotic drink. And me constantly saying, "Play it again, Sam." When I go out with my girlfriends, and I meet men, and we go out, especially on one of those hoochie mama nights-- hoochie mama can mean a lot of things. Sometimes we'll call ourselves, yeah, we're going to be hoochie mamas tonight. That mean we going to dress sexy. We don't overdo it, just show a little cleavage, a little legs, something with a split. And I go out, and I meet men, they just love me. They just all over me. But they don't know that that's the evil twin, my evil twin. Everybody know about my evil twin. One of my coworkers found out about my evil twin, and he laughed because they know Barbara the hard worker, the mom, the grandmother. But every now and then, the evil twin will slip out at work. But when I go out, the men meet the evil twin. The night we get to Jamaica, I'm going to get out on the balcony. And then I'm going to let all them Jamaican men know that I'm there. And I'm going to do the Xena yell. You do that Xena yell, and they're running away. No, baby, not that Xena yell. Barbara standing out on that balcony in that gown, and my hair flowing in the wind, no, baby, nuh-uh. But when they get to know me, when they see that evil twin was just that personality for the moment, that night, out partying, dancing, living. And then they get to know the serious me, the mom, the hard worker, the grandmother, they get kind of turned off. And they constantly refer back to the night we met, that personality. What's yours, Tiny? Mine's is dirty. It ain't clean, huh? It ain't clean. I know when I talk to them on the phone after we have met. And they call me up, and I try to have decent conversations with them. And they want to know, "How do you make love? What's your favorite position? How often do you like to make love?" I'm like, "That's none of your business." I'm like, "Do you have kids? Where you work at? Are you religious?" I want to talk about these things, and they get turned off. They don't want to talk anymore. Leah, what's your fantasy? When we go to Jamaica? Oh, just to make wild, passionate love. My girlfriend, Peaches, she's going through the same thing I'm going through. And we said, we have PhDs in heartbreak. We can write a book on "No, that's not it." And we just sit up and we laugh and we talk. And we always tell each other, "Well, one day, we going to be at each other's wedding. We going to be standing up there, looking at each other walk down the aisle in love and happy." And so why are we here? We sit up and talk about our PhDs. And we add a new chapter to our book. It just doesn't seem to fail. I don't know. Come on, Rosetta. Oh no, mine's is too, too, too outrageous. Well, tell one of the nice things. I don't have nice things like that. I have great fantasies, great fantasies. Just a walk on the beach. They cannot be told. It's Monday morning. Tess has gone to school. We're running late, so I called a cab. I called the livery. It's like a person owning his own car, and he drive it as a cab. These cab companies only work throughout the black neighborhood. Gerald, did you get you a bus pass? Your school ID? Did you ever find your school ID? OK. Did you lock those bars? You turn off the iron? So I'm going to go downstairs and wait on the cab. They said, four minutes. A grate leaking. Come on, Gerald. I'm in the living room with Gerald. I'm just getting home from work. He was watching TV, so I thought I'd talk with him. Have you been cutting any more classes? No. Do you still hate that school? Yeah. Why? People start so much stuff. What kind of stuff do they start? They be talking stuff. If I do talk back, they act like they about to jump on me. Would they be thinking about jumping you outside? Yeah. They kill people. I know. That's what they talking about doing. Killing you? Yeah. Just for talking back? Yeah. What do they say to you? They just be starting stuff. Like what? Just out of the-- Like they call you names. And I call them back. And they be like-- they jump hard, and I jump hard back. Five more guys come up on me, telling me, what y'all want to do then? Jump hard? What you mean jump hard? This means they-- you know-- They ready to fight? Yeah. Jump hard mean they jump up to you with their fists up in-- Yeah, they want to pull it. That mean they want to fight you. They want to pull it. Yeah, that's slang for they want to fight you. That's why I was cutting a few classes. Because if I did when I went to school, I probably would have been beat up by now. Hello? May I speak to Marvin? How you doing? Marvin. I met Marvin through my Auntie Susie's boyfriend, Grantey. Grantey is from Jamaica And he's been telling me about his nephew, Marvin, and Jamaica for a long, long time. He always told me that Marvin would be the perfect, perfect man for me. But I never paid him any attention. And one Sunday morning, Grantey called me around 7 o'clock in the morning, saying, he just got back from Jamaica, and he had pictures and a phone number, and his nephew wanted me to call him. And I laid in bed, and I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn't. I couldn't go back to sleep. That's your favorite picture of me? You have it with you? OK. So I called him. And when I heard his voice, I went into a trance. It was like I knew him all my life. This was the man for me. Yeah, I love that song. Ooh, I used to cry over that song. You do? Well, I got to play it. I want to see you cry. After talking to Marvin for about a week, he asked me to come to Jamaica. And I got real scared because talking to him on the phone is a security blanket because we're on the phone. We're not in person. And I'm older than him. Marvin, he's 28. I'm 41. And being an older woman, being full-figured, and what if I get there, and he don't like me because I'm older, because I'm a full-figured woman? Those songs make you cry just like they make me cry. When I tell him these things, he know how I feel. But he says, it don't matter. He fell in love with my personality, the way I think, and the things that I believe in. He said, it really don't matter. So it's time. I'm going to Jamaica. It's June 6. I love you too, baby. Yeah. Bye. Here, Gerald, get the keys. I forgot the flowers. What's that, Gerald? Where the flowers? The bag is on the microwave that-- Gerald. What you gonna do? We getting ready to go see Gerald go on his girlfriend's prom. With Keisha? Yeah. I never want to prom because I couldn't afford it really. I really couldn't afford it. Mamma. What? That's the dog that bite me. Yeah, that dog gonna bite you. Now get in the car. I always wanted it. I said, my kids is going to do the things that I didn't do. And when Angie didn't graduate from high school, it hurt me so bad. I was like, oh God, my kid's going to follow in my footstep. And then with Tess and Gerald, and I made a pact with them, and I made a pact with God that they going to do this. They going to do it for me, and they going to do it for them. What's wrong, Gerald? You nervous? Huh, Gerald? Look how he holding the flowers like they're a little, bitty baby. You nervous, Gerald? Nuh-uh. You're not nervous? Because I told Tess, I said, your prom dress is going to be rent. Your shoes gonna probably be the phone and light bill. We're not going to have any food that month, and we might have to live in a shelter. Because I'm not paying no bills when it come time for her to go to prom. Lock the doors. Put the locks on. Angie and her friends are talking about crashing the prom, take pictures of Gerald sitting at the table, take pictures of Gerald dancing on the floor, take pictures of Gerald taking pictures. We're so excited. It's not even his prom. But we're going to live our dreams through the twins. OK. We're standing outside of Keisha's house. Gerald's ringing the doorbell. Do you have your socks, Gerald? Gerald's going to get dressed at her house. He don't have his tux on. I fantasize about Gerald being a man all the time, being a father, working. I have these pictures in my mind, what he's going to look like when he's 30. I don't do this with Angie. I never did this with Tess. But I wonder all the time about Gerald, what he's going to be like when he's a man. Give her your tux and stuff, Gerald. Don't smash your flower. Give her your tux. Uh-oh. Pick your jacket up, Gerald. Come on now. Don't let it hit the ground. Gerald don't have a will like Tess do. Sometime I think Tess took it all from him. But I know somewhere down the line, Gerald's gonna fool me. I know it. She's coming down. One more, hurry up. OK. Now she can come down. Oh my goodness. Oh God, she's so pretty. OK, hold it, Gerald. OK, how you gonna pose? Come on. Come on, Gerald. Put your-- yeah, like that. OK, open your-- yeah, yeah, go-- Oh, look at my baby. Oh, look at him. Oh, look at my baby. Hold it again. Hold it again, Gerald. Quickly, hold it like that. Open your-- relax, Gerald. Your hands, relax, there you go. Wait, fix his jacket, fix his jacket. Close your jacket in. OK, there you go. OK, now you go. Relax. There you go, Gerald, relax. OK. One day I'm going to look up, and Gerald's going to outdo Tess. And I'm going to go, "Hey, mommy's man, look at you, boy. You go, boy. That's mommy's man, hey." This is not happening to me. This is a movie. I'm dreaming. Somebody pinch me. Wake me up. This don't happen to me, no. I don't supposed to be at this moment. I shouldn't be this happy and this here proud. I know it. One day, he's going to really fool me. I claim it in your name, God. In your name, Lord, I claim it. Oh, look at that. I'm home. My girls came and picked me up from the airport. And I haven't woke up from this dream yet. So maybe it's not a dream. It's late. Let me look at the time. It's like 2:00 AM. So I've been laying here for about an hour and a half, thinking about the last 11 days of my life in Jamaica with Marvin. Marvin Malcolm Craig. Marvin. He's 29 years old. Yes, and I'm 41. When I saw the movie How Stella Got Her Groove Back, I made my daughter Angie promise she wouldn't date over a certain age, and I wouldn't date under a certain age because we would never bump heads dating. And who breaks the promise? Me. I can't believe it. My daughter will be 26 in November. And March-- let's see, November, December, January, February, March. So he's a year and four months older than my daughter. No, two years, four months. Oh boy. Well, I don't care. On my way there, I was so nervous. I was so nervous. I was so scared. But soon I walked out of the airport, I went over there to him, and he just grabbed and hugged me. And that was the beginning of my new life. Oh my God, Barbara, what have you done? He proposed to me, and I said, yes. He had one of his rings melted down, and made into an engagement ring, and asked me to marry him. And he inscribed "Love MC" and the date that he proposed. Oh God. I am so lucky. God, thank you. I know. I used to write letters to God. And I would put them in a Bible, praying for a man because I was tired of the dating. And every time I write a letter, God will give me what I wanted. And I said, oh Lord, I should have been more specific. I left out something. I got to think about this. I got to think about this letter. OK, I don't want him to do drugs. OK, drink to be sociable. And my coworker, Doris Kelly, she said, "God will give you what you want. So if you want him to look a certain way, write it down there." I'm like, "Oh, I can do that?" She's like, "Yeah, it's OK." OK, I wrote down there what I want him to look like. And I always would leave something out. And you know what I left out this time? I forget to put down, "God, please let him be in the same country. And God, can you let him be kind of close to my age?" So ladies, when you write a letter to God, you can't leave anything out. And I always leave something out. But that's OK, Father. I'm up for this challenge. There's so much. There's so much. Oh God. And the hardest thing was Marvin and I was laying in the bed. And I usually take my shower first. But Marvin took his shower first. And he said, "Come, Barbara. Come get in the shower." I did not want to do that. Because I would not let him see me without my clothes on because I feel my body was so ugly, stretch marks from having kids, being a full-figured woman. I know, look at your beautiful body, breasts sit up all perfect. And I sat there, holding my stomach, holding my breath. And he called me, "Are you coming, Barbara? What's wrong, honey? Honey, what's wrong?" I took a deep breath, and I undressed and got in the shower. And he just took the towel, and he just soaped it up, and washed me. And I stared at him. I kept trying to see his face, see his eyes. And all my fears and insecurities went away. He took those fears away. And I just keep asking myself, why me? And everyone like, Barbara, why not? Why not? Coming up, things take a turn for the worst in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, we are devoting our entire program to one story. Barbara Clinkscales is a single mother living in Chicago. Over the course of seven months, she recorded her family's life. In this half of the show, her story continues. Oh boy. I'm sitting in my bedroom on the end of my bed. I stayed at work 'til about 7:00, 7:30. I didn't want to come home. I just didn't want to deal with this problem, deal with this-- I was praying I didn't have to go through this. So I'm just sitting here. Thought I'd just pick the mic up and talk about it. I'd call Gerald in, and we can talk about it. Tess called me, and she had Keisha on the phone, Gerald's girlfriend. And did Tess tell me she was pregnant, or did Keisha tell me she is pregnant? I think it was Tess said that Keisha was pregnant. I can't remember. I went into shock. I didn't say anything for about 10 minutes 'til Tess got scared. And she kept saying, "Momma, momma, momma are you there? Momma, momma?" I went into shock. I went into total shock. I felt sick and dizzy. And then I just started praying. And that's when I heard Tess say, "Momma." How do this feel? I'm trying to sum it up in words. How do this feel? I want to cry. I want to scream. Oh God. Last night, I went and picked Angie up from work. And on my way out the door, Gerald stopped me. And he was on the phone. And he said, "Momma, I have a friend, and he's named after his dad. If he have a son, would his son be the second or the third?" So I used Gerald as an example. I said, "Well, Gerald, you're a junior. Your dad is senior. He's Gerald Louis Clinkscales, number one. You're number two. And if you had a child, your son would be Gerald Louis Clinkscales the third." And I just walked my happy-go-lucky butt on down the steps, went out the door, got in the car. And I started up the car, and something said, I hope that fool haven't got some girl pregnant, and he was talking about himself. Then I look at the time, I'm like, oh Lord, it's 9:50, I better get out of here. And it left me. I haven't thought anything else about it until the phone call. Oh my heart hurts so bad. My stomach hurts so bad. Oh Father, in the name of your son, Jesus Christ, I don't want to go through this. I just want to get them through one more year of high school, get them across that stage, Father, please. So now I have to call him in here, and talk to him, and deal with this, talk about this. What am I going to say? What am I going to say? Oh God, forgive me for this, but I don't want to deal with it. I want to act like it's not happening. Because I am so tired. I'm so tired of dealing with things. OK, Barbara, take a deep breath. Blow it out. Call Gerald, and just say what the first thing on your mind. OK, I'm going to do this. Gerald. Get off that phone, and come here. I'm ready to talk about it now. Tell him to call you back tomorrow. Or you may not receive any phone calls 'til you grown. 21, and I'm not talking about 18. Have a seat. So why your eyes red? You been crying? No. Why they red? Sinuses. Your sinuses. So I went over to Keisha's house. She says she don't want this baby. She don't want to keep it. So how you feel about that? I feel kind of bad because I don't believe in killing babies like that. I should take care of my responsibility. And that's it. No, that ain't it. How you gonna take care of your responsibility with a McDonald's job? You got to go to summer school. You gonna probably have to go to night school next year to get you out on time. Oh God, help me here. Lord, give me strength. I can do this. If you don't understand how important school is, what do you know about being a father? I can read the book. I can get a book about it. I have to take you to high school, Gerald. I'm going every day. That's what I'm doing it for this time. Well, why did I have to take you? I was lazy back then. You want Keisha to get an abortion? I'm not going to make that decision. I don't know. All I know is I'm not ready for you to have a baby. I wish this was a dream. I wish it'd never happen. I wish y'all was playing a joke on me. I'm not going to say that. But no, I don't want y'all to have a baby. You're not ready. She's not ready. Do you think you're going to be with her the rest of your life? Didn't I ask you to be a better man? Do not bring a child into this world that you was not able to love, raise, and marry the mother. And y'all raise this child together as a family. Didn't I ask you that? Don't make the same mistakes your dad made. Be a better man. That's what I'm trying to do. I really love this song. Sometimes I put the CD player on repeat, and I play it over and over again. I was at work. And I called Gerald. And I asked Gerald, "Have you talked to Keisha? What's going on? Is she going to have an abortion?" And he told me, "No, she's going to keep the baby." And I just laid back in my chair at work. And I think I did it for at least 40 minutes. I just laid there. My son, Gerald, he's going to be a father. Not someone else's son. My son, Gerald. OK, I failed. My son is not ready. I can fight with him, getting him through school, getting Gerald to realize how important a career and education is. But now I got to fight with him being a father. And I know he knows nothing, nothing about being a father. Angie told me that they was out in J. C. Penney, and Gerald saw this little jacket. And Gerald went, "Oh man, Angie, look, won't my little shorty look good in this jacket?" And Angie said, "Mom, I couldn't do nothing but cry." She said, "My brother's going to have a baby." And I didn't think it was cute, "my shorty." He's all proud. I just don't want to go through this again. I just can't do it. I don't have the money. I don't have the strength. I don't have time. I'm tired. I am so tired. Because all my life, it's been struggling to do this and do that. And I can give up. But I don't want to give up on my kids. I don't want them to be like they had a life like me. Hello? Yeah, my mom told me to record something. So I'm kind of shy. So I might not say a lot of stuff. I'll just talk about me and Keisha. I had got her pregnant, I think before prom. Everybody was just mad. My mom was just mad. Her parents, they got mad. So they don't want me to call the house no more. So like that. So my mom's staying home. We talked about it. She told me, what did I think. I was like, I wanted to have it, but her know already I ain't be going to school. Hey, block that out. Shh. Don't tell my momma. Block that out. I don't want the world to know I'm not going to school. But I'll change now, seeing as I got a kid on the way. I just need a job. That's what I need. But it's hard. They be thinking I'm not trying. Ma, don't think I'm not trying this hard because my girl, Keisha, she type me up some resumes. Shoot. So I went out there, I gave them the resumes. And they acting like they bored. So I'm like, man. I'm calling back like, "You checked over my application or whatever?" He's like, "Yeah, I'll call you. I'll call you. I'll call you back next week." And hear you, I'll be two weeks later, calling back. So that's it. It's messed up for me right now. People are acting like they don't want to help nobody and stuff, acting all shisty. It's hot in here. It's 90, almost 100 degrees. Hot, sweaty, talking on microphones, stomach hurt, feel like I'm about to throw up. Talking to you about my personal life. I'm really messed up. But I messed up. Now I got to pay the price. But I just messed up. It'd be different if I didn't have no kid on the way. It's just messed up for me. The bar is open. Today is my bridal shower. All the Hens are coming. My family, my mom is coming. My aunt, her sister, their friends. Hey Caroline, hey girl. My nieces, my daughter's friends are coming to my bridal shower, and Rambo. Y'all got your dollars ready? Your 5's and 10's? Rambo is the stripper. He's coming all the way from Atlanta, Georgia. And he comes out in this expensive Armani suit, walking around, eyeballing the women, and talking business to them. So everybody, we've been practicing, "Rambo, Rambo, Rambo." Then we going to do the Xena yell, "La-la-la-la." So this is Jeri Bello. And I invited Jeri today to pray over this, to pray for my sister to be happy with her new husband. So that's why I invited Jeri here today. Now I'm going to turn it over to Jeri Bello. God bless everybody here. Well, I give honor to God today and to the future bride, the future groom in his absence. I just want to share a word, and it's on marriage. A sacrament is an act instituted by God for us to observe, so that we, the people, can receive divine strength. Come on, y'all. Rambo. Rambo. Rambo. Rambo. Rambo. Tell me what you think about your baby and the pictures. I have ultrasound pictures of Gerald's baby. It's a girl. Gerald's going to have a little girl. Who's she look like to you? People saying that she look like me by the nose and the lips. She sure do. She's big. You can see her head, her nose, and her lip. And she look like she got fat cheeks. How you feel about having a baby girl on the way? It feel OK. I have to say, I'm kind of excited. I'm not so depressed like I used to be when I thought about Gerald being a father. I guess with babies, when you see the babies, it makes it all right. So what are you going to do? How you going to be a father? What type of father are you going to be? A good father. What is your definition of a good father? To be there for my baby like a father should do. What should a father do? You tell me. What should a father do? I don't know. Like the fathers on TV, I guess. I don't know yet. I told Gerald when I get some extra money, I'm going to take him shopping and get things, so he can feel good about himself. Because he kind of lost it the other day. Kind of scared me too, the way he was crying. Because he is no longer in the STEP program. He's in regular classes because his test scores were so high. And he says, "The classes are too hard. They're too hard. I can't do it. I got a baby on the way. I don't know. I don't think I'm a dummy." And he was just going on and on and just scaring the hell out of me. Are you scared? I don't know. I still like that. I'm kind of ready though. But I let him know that everybody goes through that. And he's going to make it. All he had to do was study harder and don't give up. And I know he's going to turn out to be a good father. When you look at those pictures, what do you think? I can't wait. That's what I think. I can't wait 'til the baby comes. And I told him, "I got your back. I'm gonna do what I can. Don't worry. Momma got your back." That story was recorded by Barbara Clinkscales and was produced by Elise Spiegel with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Gerald is currently speaking with Keisha's family again. They're sitting here in the studio with me as I say these words. She looks great. Her baby is due the first week of the new millennium. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380, or listen for free at our website, www.thislife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who makes this sound at the end of every show: I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Daniel Rostenkowski was a congressman for 36 years. The powerful chairman of one of the most powerful committees-- Ways and Means. But a funny thing happened when he was sentenced to prison for mail fraud. He started to meet people like one young man, 20 years old, who approached him in the exercise yard one day. And this young man, a very young, good looking young man, said to me, you know, are you the congressman? Yeah, I am. I said, well, my gosh, what did you do that was so bad? He said, well, I transported drugs. I said, why would you do such a thing? And he said, well, I was going to school and I needed the money. I said, OK. So what was the price that you sought for moving these drugs? He said, I got $10,000. I said, didn't you think that was an exorbitant amount of money to carry a package? Yeah. I said, so you really knew that it was drugs? I mean, I figured that it was. And I said, what was your sentence? He said 17 years. I said, my gosh. First offense. To put this number in perspective, in federal courts a first time rapist gets five to seven years, kidnappings, four to five years, second degree murder is 11 to 14 years. And here's the thing. The young man was sentenced under a 1980's drug law that Rostenkowski had voted for himself. It set harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, even first time offenders. Rostenkowski thought the guy deserved to be punished, but locking him up from the end of adolescence until the beginning of middle age, it seemed excessive. The whole thing is a sham in my opinion. It's not justice. It's this get 'em idea. Now, the kind of sentencing laws that put him in for so long, can I ask you to explain the terms in which those were discussed among congressmen when those were being talked about? Why were those voted for? I can't tell you that, I don't remember it. I'm not trying to duck that question but I was totally in a tunnel vacuum vision with my jurisdiction. And I expected out of the Judiciary Committee-- The committee that made these particular laws? --to have the experts in the Judiciary Committee give me the best conclusion. Listening to the debate about these things on the floor of the House of Representatives had nothing to do with it. Not long after he got out of prison, Rostenkowski made a speech to lawyers in which he said he voted for these laws because he was quote, "swept along by the rhetoric about getting tough on crime. Few of us had the patience or courage to point out to the public that there was relatively little that changes in federal laws could do to reduce the violent crime in their neighborhood. So we acted, took our low bows, and went on to other topics." As a result, he said, we lock up too many people for too long. And I don't know how to correct it. No member of the legislature that I know of will take this on because it's not popular. And he'll be criticized as being weak in the criminal justice system. Before he was put under investigation himself, Rostenkowski says, he didn't really know about the sentencing guidelines even though he'd voted for them. And in this way, I'd argue, he is more like the rest of us than not. Most of us don't pay much attention to all the laws that are written. We do exactly what Rostenkowski did. We have some vague faith that someone, somewhere, is paying attention. And if something bad is happening, if something unfair is happening, somebody will tell us. What we offer today on our radio program is a study of how that faith failed us and where we've ended up. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. In the last 20 years there's been a radical shift in the way that we sentence people to prison-- mandatory minimum sentences, three strikes and you're out laws, laws bouncing 12 and 13 and 14 year olds into adult court for long adult sentences. Because of all this, the prison population has grown by 50% in less than a decade. And at some point or another we've all heard news stories about harsh sentences, possibly unfair sentences. And many of us carry a notion somewhere in our heads that maybe some part of this has gone too far. But, you know, who has the time to sit down and figure all of this out? Well, in today's show we tried to figure it out. And we bring you stories of places where the law seems to be working just fine, where it seems fair, and stories about those areas in which there seem to be some problems. All our stories today are about drug laws. Act One of our program today: What's Wrong With This Picture? The story of how a person could be sentenced to 19 years for drug possession even if police found no drugs, no drug money, no residue, no paraphernalia. Even if it's a first offense. Act Two: How We Got Here. A firsthand account of how and why Congress wrote these laws in the first place. And believe me, my friend, it is not pretty, from a lawyer who helped draft the laws working for the Congress. Act One. What's Wong With This Picture. This is the story of a case where the law worked exactly as it is supposed to. This is our system working as we have designed it. Dorothy Gaines was living in Mobile, Alabama, 39 years old, the mother of three children, working as a nursing assistant. The father of her oldest child was a man named Larry Johnson. Dorothy says that she hadn't talked with him in years, that they used to fight over child support. There was bad blood between them. And when he was thrown in prison on drug charges, to get himself a lower sentence he said that she was part of a drug ring. I always felt like it was a revenge thing. You know, as I read my paperwork and I talk to my attorney, she told me also that he brought up some things against his own mother. So, you know, I didn't know that. At the time she and her children were living with a man named Terrell Hines, her common-law husband. He was a working person. A merchant seaman that also came out of the service with honors. But he got caught up into doing drugs. You know, when I saw that he was falling, I did my best to put him in rehab for him to get off drugs. Federal investigators came to believe that Dorothy and her husband were part of a conspiracy to move cocaine from Miami to Mobile. She was charged with possession of two kilos of crack cocaine with intent to distribute. Lyn Campbell is Dorothy's current attorney. OK. They searched her house stem to stern and did not find the first hint of residue. And they looked for residue, sandwich bags, cellphone bills, beeper bills, money, hidden guns, hidden--, nothing. And that is incredibly unusual. They found no paraphernalia, no drug scales. They found no evidence that she'd ever made any money from the drug business. There was no evidence introduced that she had any money other than what she got through her meager job and the public assistance her children got. All indications was that she was just living on the edge of poverty. How did they decide two kilos, since they never actually found any crack cocaine in her home? Well, it was totally based upon, according to the agent that testified, what the kingpin of the conspiracy said. That he had stored a kilo of crack at her house on one occasion. And on another occasion he had brought a kilo through and picked up a kilo of powder from her house that was later converted to crack. So it was totally on what he said. If that were not true, why would he say that? What's in it for him just to finger her? Well, cooperating witnesses get substantial sentencing cuts in the federal system. It's the only real way to get your time reduced. And because he was a leader, and I believe there were some weapons involved with him, he was looking basically at a life sentence. By telling on other people, and by being valuable to the federal government, he ended up with less than 15 years in jail. So he has a big incentive to turn in as many people as he can. Because there was no physical evidence implicating Dorothy, her case had been dropped in state court. But the federal rules are different. In federal court you don't need physical evidence. And the federal drug law has another provision that hurt Dorothy Gaines. It says that if you have knowledge of a conspiracy, or benefit from a conspiracy, or have some tiny role in a conspiracy, you can be accused of all the drugs involved in the conspiracy. So even if you just carry an unmarked package from one side of town to another once, you could be charged with the same amount of drugs as the person who ran the whole operation for years. Dorothy fought the charges. She says she didn't do anything wrong. And she says they have no real evidence against her, just the testimony of a bunch of admitted drug dealers. I got the longest time of anybody in the trial, 19 years and seven months. And I understand that the guy who is accused of running the drug ring and who had admitted to a lot of the charges against him, and who had a previous record, that he's actually going to get out eight years before you will. Exactly. And did you have a previous record going into this? I had no record. So what do you make of that? I mean, I'm still trying to deal with this emotionally. I still try to deal with it every day, that I got 19 years and seven months on what somebody said I done. No evidence, and all these other people had evidence against them. When I got sentenced on that date, my kids were there at the courtroom with me. And when the judge said-- he didn't say 19 years, he said 235 months, and I just couldn't function. I mean, I reached over and I asked my attorney, I said, what did he say? He said 235 months. And I said, what is 235 months, because I just couldn't think. And he said it's 19 years and seven months. And, I don't know, I just lost it. All I could hear were my kids screaming in the background. And when the marshals took me out, one of the lady marshals was crying. And I said what's wrong? She said, to see your son hold onto the judge and tell him that my mother's all I got, don't send her away. She said that was the most hurting thing. The U. S. Attorney's Office in southern Alabama, which is the office that prosecuted Dorothy Gaines, declined to be interviewed on tape for this story. But a prosecutor acting as a spokesman for that office told us over the phone that the office still contends that she's guilty, that her conviction has withstood several appeals. And as for her 19-year prison term, the prosecutor said that when he began his job, he thought sentences like this were unfair. But now that he's seen the devastation that crack cocaine has on families' lives, he thinks they're justified. He reiterated this several times. One of the jurors in Dorothy Gaines' case told a reporter that, while he thought that she deserved a few years in prison, he was flabbergasted that she got 19. It was possible for him to be surprised because, in federal cases like this one, the jurors only determine guilt or innocence. They aren't present for sentencing. Sentencing is done by judges who have to follow federal sentencing guidelines. And at sentencing, the rules of evidence are much looser than they were during the trial-- testimony that never made it to the witness stand, things that were said to police but never entered into evidence, incredibly, even past charges that you've been accused of and found innocent of in other trials. These can all be used against you during sentencing. And it is at this point in the process, when the rules are so loose, that the court decides the amount of the drugs you'll be charged with. A tiny amount will mean a smaller sentence. A greater amount can mean decades in prison. Again, Dorothy's attorney Lyn Campbell. I'm in the system a lot. I think the biggest abuse we still have is the amounts get puffed because-- The quantities of drugs. The quantities, they get puffed up. What's the sign that things are getting puffed up? What do you usually see that makes you think that it's puffed up in a particular case? Well, you might have somebody caught with, let's say, an ounce of crack. They're busted red handed. They've got an ounce on them. By the time they get to sentencing they're being held accountable for, let's say, a kilo and a half, which maxes them out. But you have to understand, when you convert kilos to pounds, just to make the illustration better, a kilo is 2.2 pounds. Each pound has 16 ounces. So you're talking, in essence, of 31 phantom ounces. How do they get boosted from one ounce to 2.2 pounds? It's what somebody says. If somebody says, oh, Fred brought in a ki, boom, there you go. And then what kind of sentence are they looking at? Well, depending on their criminal history, if they're somebody like Dorothy, they're looking at 19 years seven months, provided there are no guns and they're not supervising anybody. So, I mean, actually you could get 360 to life on a first offense, 30 to life. And life in the federal system is life. You come out in a box. There is no parole. Nearly 2/3 of all federal drug offenders across the country have never been convicted of a violent crime. 40% are first-time offenders. It's tens of thousands of people. Here's something else about federal drug law. There is a randomness to the way that it's enforced. Whether you're accused has a lot to do with where you live. Dorothy Gaines had the bad luck to live in a federal district that very aggressively targets drug offenders. Southern Alabama, where the largest city is Mobile, population 300,000, convicted roughly the same number of federal drug offenders in 1998 as all of Los Angeles, population 3.5 million. Federal drug enforcement also tends to disproportionately prosecute minorities. They made up 73% of federal drug convictions in 1998 , even though 72% of illegal drug use is by white people. The federal penalties are much more severe for crack cocaine than for other drugs. This is reporter Sam Hodges, who first wrote about Dorothy's case in the Alabama Mobile Register. It's just clear that a very high percentage, an extremely high percentage, of those who are convicted for crack, which carries the longest sentences of all, are black people. And if you're in a federal judicial district where crack is the focus, as it has been in south Alabama-- and a lot of crack cases end up in federal court as opposed to state court-- then you're really up against it. I mean, your odds of ending up with one of these very long no-parole sentences go up pretty dramatically. And I think that's the environment in which Dorothy Gaines was caught up. In the end, her 19 year prison term was higher than the federal mandatory minimum sentence for rape, for kidnapping, for running a slave trade, for criminal sexual abuse of a child, for second degree murder, for conspiracy to commit murder. Her sentence had the same minimum as she would have gotten if she had hijacked a plane or bought and sold children for use in pornography. You have mothers in prison that-- all you're doing now is bringing up children to be bitter against the government. I mean, my son is very bitter. And I know I never saw that in him when I was home. This law has destroyed families. And how old were your kids before you went in? My daughter, my oldest daughter, Natasha, was 19 years old. My son, Phillip, was 9 And my daughter Chara was 11. And how are they doing? Right now they're not doing well. Phillip is incarcerated himself. He's 14. He tried to kill himself twice. Right now they're trying to get him psychiatric help. He had tried to come where I was and he was stopped by the police officer. Ever since I've been incarcerated he always said that he wanted to go to prison to join me. And I always explained to him that even if he get locked up, we won't be together. Right. You're in a different facility. Yes, I'm in Marianna Camp. And how were they doing before you were indicted? Before I was incarcerated my son was an honor student. He's failed every year since I've been incarcerated now. He was an honor student? He was an honor student. He was on the honor roll. And your daughter? She tried going to college but after this it was so hard on her trying to go to school and take care of the kids. She was on the Dean's honor list. And she had to quit college because of this, to take care of the kids, because she didn't want anything to happen to them. You must feel like all the work you put into raising them is just-- It's just down the drain, right? Do you think our country's gone a little crazy in trying to crack down on drugs? Yeah the country's gone a little crazy. They need to really check and see what's really going on. I mean, it's outrageous. I never thought that the United States of America would be like this. I always did my pledge. But it's hard now for me to do a pledge now. You mean the Pledge of Allegiance? Yes. Do they try to have you do the Pledge of Allegiance in prison? No. I was going to say. They never tried to have me since I've been incarcerated. But, you know, I go to different things and they would say, well, let's do the pledge. It's going to be hard now. But I know through faith I'm going to get out of this. My hopes are very strong. Dorothy Gaines, she recently lost her last appeal in the Eleventh District Court. She's not yet told her children. She has one final chance and it's a long shot. She is now appealing to President Clinton for clemency. Act Two. How We Got To This Point. It's tempting, when we hear a story like Dorothy Gaines', to think that the tough laws that put her away for 19 years were created by conservative law and order types, Republicans. And it would be nice to believe that part of the motivation for the loss is idealism. There is, after all, a reasonable case to be made for getting tough on criminals. But in fact, the drug laws that did in Dorothy Gaines were not created by Republicans but by Democrats. And as for how much idealism was at work, well, let us examine the history. It is an amazing story that begins in 1986. 1986 was a pivotal year. It was the sixth year of the Reagan presidency. This is Eric Sterling. In 1986 he was the lead lawyer when it came to drug laws for the House Judiciary Committee, which was about to become a central political battleground. The two sides in this battle: on one side Tip O'Neill and the Democrats, who had the House. On the other side, Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who had the Senate, the White House, and, you could argue, the hearts of the American people. The bottom line was the Republicans won in 1984 on the crime issue. They had beat up the Democrats. They had attacked the Democrats as soft. Former Vice President Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate for president, went down in flames. And so we now come to 1986, a year in which it is possible that the Democrats could retake the Senate, a year in which the stage is being set for the 1988 election, in which Reagan will not be on the ballot. And so in the overall national political calculus, Democrats are looking around for traction. And traction just means an issue that they can champion as theirs so as to win people over and get some votes? Precisely. So in June, 1986, at the end of the basketball season, the champion player from the University of Maryland basketball team, Len Bias, signs with the NBA champion team, the Boston Celtics, the team of the home town of House Speaker Tip O'Neill. Bias flies to Boston. He's going to be the hope of the Celtics. Bias flies home. He's celebrating with his friends. And he dies in the middle of the night from an overdose of cocaine of some kind. And a few days --almost immediately-- Congress adjourns. Members of Congress go back to their districts for the July 4 recess. And the Speaker keeps hearing over and over again about, if a man in the peak of his health, a young man of such promise as Len Bias, can die from cocaine, this is the proof of how bad, and dangerous, and evil this drug is and this drug phenomenon is. And this was traction. By the summer of 1986, the national media had also discovered crack cocaine, and was kicking in full force with scare stories about this new menace to society. When Tip O'Neill got back to Washington he bolted into action. The Speaker convened the Democratic leadership, the Steering and Policy Committee, the chairs of the committees, and says we're going to put together an anti-drug bill. It is going to be a Democratic initiative and I want everybody involved. We're going to have a comprehensive anti-drug provision. And I want it out of committees before we go on our August recess, August 14 or 15. And this set off about a four week stampede. They were told, look, you've got one month to put together your anti-drug agenda and then you're going to go home in the middle of August and you're going to campaign the hell out of that agenda. And we're going to come back in September, we're going to take it to the floor, and we're going to vote on it. And this is what we're going to ride to electoral victory in November. That's the plan. And to make all this happen in four weeks, just how much faster is that than usual? It's warp speed. We squeezed into a month what is typically an 18-month process. So it's a legislative frenzy. And three days before the end of the whole process, a couple of legislators propose this idea-- mandatory minimum sentences, a radical recasting of drug law. If you were caught with drugs it would not matter if you were a first time offender. It wouldn't matter if there were extenuating circumstances. The only thing that would matter is the amount of drugs you were caught with. And then the judge would give you a sentence whose length was imposed by the Congress in these laws. But it was being introduced at a point in which there was no longer an opportunity for hearings. We had no hearings. We did not consult with the Bureau of Prisons, or with the federal judiciary, or with DEA, or with the Justice Department, to at least find out from those folks what would be the effect of mandatory minimums. What are appropriate mandatory minimums? And the specific minimums that they chose, could you just talk about one for a moment? How off were they? Was it really so bad? Was their judgment really so bad at this point? The numbers that we picked in the Judiciary Committee, the 20 grams of crack cocaine, would have triggered a five-year federal minimum. The Republicans in the Senate dropped the 20 grams to five grams and raised the-- from 5 years to 40 years because the Republicans were going to be tougher. There was, again, no sense of, it's not a large quantity of drugs from a consumption point of view. It's a very small quantity. And these are folks who have really no clear sense of the dynamics of the business enough to make a just determination. When you're just picking a number-- One member of Congress, when we tried talking in terms of real significant quantities, would say, in our city we never have quantities that much. I can't go back and say I'm doing something about high level traffickers because we don't have high level traffickers-- I think it was from Kentucky-- that are comparable to what you have in New York, or Houston, or Miami, or Los Angeles. I'm going back to my district and I want to be able to bring something to the Chief of Police, who'll say, damn, great, this is going to help us. Among the staff and among the chairman of your subcommittee, who was usually very deliberate in hearing all sides, and wanting to gather evidence, I mean, did people turn to each other and just say, what are we doing? No, not in this case. There's a way in which rhetoric crowds out rationality. If you're a member of Congress and you've spent a lot of time dealing with the minutia of various arcane federal programs, it's not simply a breath of fresh air, it's really intoxicating to talk about the issue of drugs with its good versus evil clarity. It's like you can loosen up your tie. You can start pounding the table. And you know you can connect with your constituents when you start talking about the scourge of drugs, the menace of drugs, the danger that our children face, the epidemic, the pandemic. You are saying, in a way, that anti-drug rhetoric is like a drug. Yes, that's right. Barney Frank called one of these issues the crack cocaine of politics. And while these laws were being rushed through Congress, there was actually a commission of sober minded people, Democrats and Republicans, trying to figure out a fair solution to sentencing all federal crimes. And they were doing all the things that Congress was not doing. They were going over statistics, they were talking to prison officials and to police and to judges. And this commission was set up just two years before by Congress itself. And it was due to present its comprehensive overhaul of all sentencing in just a year. Congress ignored all that. Congress also ignored an order rather relevant bit of recent history, which is that Congress had already tried mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes back in the 1950s this exact solution, and it didn't work. Drug use went up. So in the 1970s they repealed all those laws. But there must have been a point where somebody said, well, you know, we tried this with drug policy back in the '50s and then overturned it in the '70s because it wasn't working? I don't even know that that was raised in any more than an aside or in a paragraph in a background memorandum. It was, at that point, simply not a consideration. It didn't matter. We were going ahead with this. In fact, it was such a success that two years later the Democrats did the whole thing again, rushed their way to another set of drug laws in a matter of weeks. And this is where they added one of the rules that did in Dorothy Gaines-- the law that any low level person who is judged to be part of a conspiracy, they can be sentenced at the same level that the leader of the conspiracy is if they have knowledge of the conspiracy and benefit from it in any way. You know, your brother was going to buy you a new set of shoes or you were going to get some money or some benefit. If you have some stake in it, that is sufficient to involve you in the conspiracy. And if you're involved in the conspiracy, you're liable for the whole thing. A very profound change, again without any kind of hearings. I don't think people were paying attention to what the consequences were going to be, and it just passed. When you would talk to members of Congress privately, what was your feeling about it? Did most of them actually believe the anti-drug rhetoric that they themselves were saying? There's a difference when you think about somebody doing something like passing this kind of law if you believe they're doing it idealistically-- that is, they truly believe that drugs are a scourge and someone must do something-- and doing it cynically, where they feel like well, maybe it's a scourge and maybe it's not, but basically this is what I have to do to stay in office. This is what it means to stay in business. I was never able really to have those kinds of honest conversations with members. To ask a question like that is too close to asking are you really gay, or-- I mean, we're talking about an extremely sensitive subject. I would say that the overwhelming majority of members of Congress believe that drugs really are a scourge. But they also, at one level think, well, there's nothing we can really do about it except continue to get tougher. And I fault them for that. Our challenge with drugs is how to deal with this phenomenon that is an important part of our society, an important part of our economy, in a way that the system itself is not causing more wreckage than the drugs themselves are. But to take the other side of it, crime is going down in cities all across the country. The domestic effect of these laws is that crime is going down. People feel safer. But dope dealing is not especially going down. I mean, we're talking about a specialized type of law, the drug laws. You know, it is still extremely easy for anybody who wants drugs in America to get them. I mean, the real irony is that this is the one category of crime that keeps increasing. We have almost twice as many arrests for drug crimes now as we did when these laws were passed. Eric Sterling quit his job with the House Judiciary Committee, disturbed over the kinds of drug laws that they were making, and created the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, an organization that is trying to get Congress to change those laws. He now heads the organization. We invited the two leading supporters of these tough drug laws in Congress to come on to our program and give their side of all this. Both of them, Republican Representative Bill McCollum and Senator Orrin Hatch, both said no despite repeated phone calls and faxes. We were also turned down by another supporter of these laws, Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio. And two senators' offices simply never returned our calls inviting them onto the show-- that's Republican senators Spencer Abraham of Michigan and John Ashcroft of Missouri. Coming up, we hear about all the places where drug law seems to be working fairly. And judges, we've got judges. That's in a minute from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Sentencing, stories of where our laws may have gone too far in the war on drugs and where they seem to be working just fine. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three: Who Watches the Watchman? Many people within the judicial system have turned against the harshness and inflexibility of current US drug sentences. The nation's chief law enforcement officer on the drug issue. US Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey, has come out against them, saying they are too strict and ineffective because of that. 86% of all federal judges-- this includes both Republican and Democratic appointees-- say that they want more flexibility to give fair sentences in drug law. All 12 federal judicial districts have passed a resolution asking Congress to reconsider the wisdom of the current laws. Dozens of senior federal judges have refused to hear any more drug cases. Judge Morris Lasker of the Southern District of New York, a veteran of over 30 years on the bench, stopped hearing drug cases for a couple of years. It's with regard to the drug cases that I think the greatest injustices take place. They're almost all nonviolent offenses. They carry very substantial sentences. Those were the cases I didn't want to touch. I don't find it so hard to send somebody to prison for a violent crime. Judge Terry Hatter is the Chief US District Judge for the Central District of California. He says that under the current federal guidelines, 60% of the time he has to play word games-- that's how he put it-- word games to get to a fair result. 20% of the time he says his final ruling is not the sentence he believes would be the right sentence, given the facts. A big part of the problem, he says, is that because the sentences are set for each crime when the prosecutor chooses what crime to charge a person with, the prosecutor is in effect choosing the sentence. And it turns out there are lots of cases where a person could be charged one way or another, for a more severe crime or a less severe one. We had two young women. Both young women were living in Mexico City. They were mothers of toddlers. They had been used, sadly, by their respective spouses and they were asked to bring some drugs into this country. And they were caught coming into the country. And what happened under the sentencing scheme was that the drugs were combined even though the women were traveling on their own tickets. They counted the drugs collectively. Is that because they could be seen as part of a conspiracy? Yes, that's right. And of course they didn't have to be charged that way but they were. And since they were, then they were faced with 10-year mandatory minimums. A young prosecutor has the ability, which I don't have as a presidential appointee confirmed by the United States Senate, serving for life. I don't have that. But the young prosecutor can make a motion to go below the mandatory minimum on the basis of substantial assistance being provided to the government. In other words, the prosecutor, if he says that these women have helped us out, he can change the charge so that the women's sentence would change? What he can do do then is trigger my ability, then, to go below the mandatory minimum. But you as the judge-- But I can't do it myself, no. only the prosecutor can do that. I intended to give them harsh sentences just because they were involved in drug dealing, two or three years perhaps. But as it turned out, when they came back for sentencing, I said to the young female prosecutor, are you going to make a motion for downward departure? And she said no. It wasn't that the witnesses had not cooperated. The prosecution agreed that they had. They told everything they knew. They were truthful. It was just that they did not know that much. They did not have much information to give. They were at the bottom of the drug hierarchy, not that useful to the government's investigations Judge Hatter felt that was unfair. The women had cooperated as much as they possibly could. It was not their fault that they had no useful information. So he filed the motion that would allow him to sentence them to fewer years than the guidelines permit. This was unprecedented and, it turns out, against the law. It was overturned on appeal, just another example, says Judge Hatter, of how the prosecutor has more power than he does to determine a person's sentence. Well, that's true in every case. That's true in every case because the prosecutor makes the decision on how to charge that particular case. And dependent upon what the charge is, you know what the sentence is pretty much. In the 1993 case United States of America against Johnny Patillo, a Reagan appointee to the bench, US District Judge J. Spencer Letts, was so outraged that he had to sentence a man to 10 years for delivering a package containing drugs to a Federal Express office, that his decision in the case included this. He wrote, it is hard to imagine that there is any other nation in which a convicted rapist with a long and unsavory history of prior misconduct can be sentenced by the judge who presides over his trial to a sentence which will make him eligible for parole in less than three years while defendant, a first time offender with a spotless prior record, stands to be sentenced by a Congress who has never seen him and never judged him, to a minimum sentence of 10 years without the possibility of parole. In my view a criminal justice system that does not require not only those who accuse a criminal, but also those who sentence him, to confront him and publicly acknowledge their acts as their own to his face, is worse than uncivilized, it is barbaric. Act Four: A Night In Drug Court. So before the show ended we wanted to know, how typical are the horror stories? How typical is a case like Dorothy Gaines'? What happens in a typical drug case? All this hour, up until this point, we've been talking about federal drug laws. And while 20,000 people are convicted each year on federal drug charges, most drug crimes in this country end up in state courts. In 1996 it was 350,000 convictions in state court. Some states are known for especially ruthless drug laws, like New York State. But for the most part state drug laws are usually less harsh and less rigid than the federal statutes. Often they include a whole range of creative sentencing options including treatment programs, probation, boot camp. So to find out what happens in a typical drug case, This American Life producer Nancy Updike went to state court here in Chicago. Chicago deals with its huge caseload of drug crimes by holding court at night. The City decided 10 years ago that rather than build new courtrooms to handle its 40,000 drug cases a year, it would simply open up some of its existing courtrooms at the end of the regular court day, and these rooms would handle only felony drug crimes. The court day starts up about 4:00 PM. For an hour or so, defendants have been heading up the stairs and into the seven story stone courthouse down on 26th Street in Chicago. Unless you work at 26th Street, this is not a place you end up if your life is going well. As I was walking into the building the other day around 3:30, I passed a black man in his fifties and saw him stop in his tracks, quietly throw up on the pavement, and keep walking. The courtroom I sat in on is set up sort of in the round. The judge's desk is a huge curve at the top of the circle. The jury box sits at his right, usually empty. There are very few jury trials in night court. And at the foot of the circle are two tables, one for the prosecutors and one for the public defenders. Behind the lawyers are huge panes of glass, and behind the glass are defendants and their families. To picture this courtroom, please don't imagine a majestic, echoey space with fine polished wood like in The Verdict or some John Grisham movie. This room is much smaller and dingier, with fluorescent lights, bland carpeting and 70s paneling on the walls. I'm not allowed to record anything in the courtroom itself. So you'll have to guess at exactly what sound all this bad taste makes. The judge in the courtroom is Daniel Darcy. I was born and raised in Chicago on the South Side, enlisted in the Army in 1966, came back home and joined the Chicago Police Department. During my time on the police department I went to undergraduate, graduate school, and law school. I got my law degree-- Darcy is a serious man with white hair who bears a passing resemblance to Andy Griffith. He calls all the defendants Mister and Miss. He hears about 40 cases a night. Most of the cases, 90% of the cases, are either small possession charges or people who are selling two or three packets of cocaine to other people on the street. And the reason is, one, is to support their own habit, or to make a few dollars. Here's a typical case. Tony Bell was a skinny, 27 year old black man who kept rubbing his head with his hands. He stood in front of the judge with his back to me, and was charged with possession of 2/10 of a gram of crack. Think of a Sweet'N Low packet. That's a gram. 2/10 of that. He had no prior record. The public defender on his case was Pablo Decastro. Tony Bell told me that he was standing with several other people out there, which is consistent with the officer's story. That as the officer approached, one of the guys dropped some drugs and everybody scattered but him. We call it the slow runner cases. Everybody ran and Tony Bell got caught. When Tony Bell's case was first called, at 10 minutes to five, he said he wanted to go to trial. Judge Darcy said OK, and then put the case off until later to give Pablo a chance to ready his defense. By the time Tony Bell's case was called again an hour later, he'd decided to plead guilty and take two years probation. Pablo said Tony told him he was just tired of waiting and that's why he want to take the plea. The prosecutor on Tony Bell's case, Assistant State's Attorney Mike Hood, didn't buy the idea that Tony was just tired of waiting. I think Mr. Bell saw the writing on the wall. They didn't have any witnesses. We had a solid case. I think a judge, if he found him guilty at trial, would give him a similar punishment because he has no background. So I don't think he felt he was losing anything by pleading early. Mike Hood says he believes with all his heart that every person he prosecutes in night court is guilty. And Pablo Decastro, the public defender in Tony's case, doesn't exactly disagree. One of the old jokes about drug court, as opposed to other assignments in this office, is this is the one place where everybody did it. The only question is the legality of the search. Is that what you believe? Not everybody did it, but there's a lot of motions here more than trials. There's a lot of questions about search and seizure, where you're basically admitting that the drugs were in his pocket. You're just trying to argue that the officer's hand shouldn't have been in his pocket also. I saw 105 cases in nine hours at night court. Usually what would happen, since almost no one gets in and out of the legal system in one day, is that Judge Darcy would call the case number, some small action would be taken-- a motion or an update on gathering witness testimony-- and then Darcy would put the case off until a later date. This happened in 101 out of the 105 cases I saw. That left four cases, four people who did get sentenced. Three got probation and one guy was sent to prison. He had a record of burglary and had once escaped from prison. Now, to see how typical those sentences were, I looked at all the cases from the other five courtrooms for the two nights I sat in on Darcy's room. Here's what I found. There were 343 cases total. 18 got probation and 21 got prison time, most of them less than two years. Five people were recommended to boot camp as an alternative to prison. The longest sentence anyone got on those two nights was six years. Two men ended up with that. One had already been in prison for burglary and sexual assault. The other had done time for robbery and also for, as the law delicately puts it, taking indecent liberties with a child. For the whole month I sat in on, August, 149 people were sentenced to probation, about the same number as were sent to prison, 144. Also, fully half of the defendants who asked for a trial in front of the judge were found not guilty, and a significant number of others were found guilty of a lesser crime than the one they had originally been charged with. The statistics for July and September were similar, about an equal number of sentences for probation and for prison time, and at least half of all trials ending in not guilty. Overall, examining these cases, it seemed fair. Tiny quantities of drugs got probation or short sentences, even for second and third offenses. Large quantities of drugs, but especially a history of violent crime, meant longer sentences. And dealers got more time than people just caught in possession of drugs. Again, overall it seemed like a decent system. I had a long talk with Judge Darcy about his position as a state judge versus that of federal judges handling drug crimes. I don't think the laws are harsh at all at the state level. So you feel like you have the freedom that you need to give out sentences that you feel are just and fair? Yes I do, absolutely. Have you ever felt forced to send someone to prison for many more years than you felt was just? No, no. Well, sometimes some people get caught up in situations that they have no background. And the sentence calls for a minimum of six years. So, in other words, it's the first time that they're arrested but they're arrested with a large amount of drugs. With a certain amount of drugs that, what we call here in state court are facing Class X penalties. And the penalty for a Class X felony, if they're convicted, is 6 to 30 years. And sometimes that doesn't fit the person if they're-- Sometimes two or three years might be good rather than six but, you know, I have to follow the law and that's what I'll do. But that's not normal. Most of the cases that come through here, the sentences are appropriate and the dispositions, I have no qualms with them at all. While the sentences for individual cases seemed fair enough, there was one thing that did not seem fair about night court. Out of 105 cases, almost every single defendant was black, maybe 15 Latinos, three white men. In the other courtrooms it was the same. Out of hundreds of defendants, only a tiny handful were white. It's not that white people charged with drug crimes happened to be coming during the day. The distribution of cases among all the courtrooms, both day and night, is random. And it's not that these courtrooms are just serving black neighborhoods. This building handles all the drug cases for the entire city of Chicago, a city that's only 38% black. Let me remind you that 72% of drug users nationwide are white according to the Department of Health and Human Services. In Chicago that works out to 66,000 white drug users. But when it comes to drug arrests, look what happens. In Chicago in 1997, the last year police have compiled data for, 37,000 black people were arrested for drug crimes compared to 9,000 white people. I know these numbers can be kind of hard to follow over the radio, so here's the bottom line. If you're a black drug user in Chicago you have a nearly one in two chance of being arrested. White drug users, one in seven. Anyone who works at night court sees it. I asked judge Darcy what he thought about seeing almost all black defendants night after night, whether it bothers him. When I'm judging people and people are coming in front of me, there is no color line. It doesn't make any difference to me. Now, does it bother me that a certain group are being charged with all those crimes? Yes it does. I asked Mike Hood, the Assistant State's Attorney who prosecuted Tony Bell, what he thought about seeing practically all black defendants. It bothers me. I mean, I'm concerned. But I don't really look at it as a-- I'm not prosecuting on race, I'm prosecuting a person for a crime. What bothers you about it then? Well, I think what bothers me is that people take notice of that, like you just did. But how can you not? I mean, if you're sitting in the courtroom, you know, there's a court full of mostly white people and then everyone sitting behind the glass is black. Let me explain. I meant that it bothers me that people don't look at it as the crime. You take notice of it because you're saying it's an African American here, they're all African Americans. I don't look at that way. My issues are very simple. Two grams of heroin, three transactions, two police officers, three on surveillance, the stuff was inventoried. It's in fact crack cocaine or heroin, a good arrest, that man did it, he's going to go to jail. That's how I look at it. It's easy to feel, when you hear about drug sentencing in this country, that the justice system is a total mess, as though the system is running us, not the other way around. We feel this way because what we really want from any system is to feel that it's still possible to operate within it as a human being. We want to see someone make an appropriate exception. We want to see someone understand the reality of the rules they're implementing. We want to see someone grasp the intent behind the system and use the system skillfully in the service of that intent. I saw all that at night court. I saw Judge Darcy talk to a defendant named, memorably, James Brown, who had been saying for more than a year that he didn't want a public defender, he wanted to hire his own lawyer. Darcy had finally had enough. He wasn't mad, but firm. He leaned forward and said, let me explain this to you. If you don't have an attorney with you next time, this public defender right here is going to stay with you and we are going to set this case for trial. I just want to make that absolutely clear. I saw Darcy agree to recommit a kid to probation after he was picked up on a new drug charge and then look the kid in the eye and say, you only get so many chances. Do you understand that? The kid nodded. I found out that prosecutor Mike Hood refused to help a cop polish up his testimony, even though it would have been better for Hood's case if he'd done it, even though no reporters were around to find out about it at the time. The cop couldn't remember which kid was which out of the two he'd arrested, and he was confused about where he picked them up. Hood said, so be it, and the kids were acquitted. These are small examples, but they demonstrate how it is possible to create a legal system with room for human beings to act like human beings. I think that's what we want from our laws. Nancy Updike. One postscript to our show today. Congress has not changed its opinion of mandatory minimums. The House and Senate both recently passed the Violent and Repeat Juvenile Offender Accountability and Rehabilitation Act of 1999, which would extend more mandatory minimum sentences to more crimes, and to more crimes involving teenagers. It can go to committee and become law anytime. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and of myself with Blue Chevigny, Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, and Julie Snyder. Original piano music for today's show was composed and performed by Charles [? Misser. ?] To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. 312-832-3380. Or you know you can listen to this or any of our programs for free on the internet. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who says after every single show-- Bam. Oh my God! What is this all about? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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When Mark was 15, his father was shot. And he reacted like a 15-year-old. He went up to each of his relatives, to anybody who'd listen actually, and he declared, someday, when he grows up, he would become a pro football player, and he would find the men who shot his father. When I look back at that kid, that 15-year-old kid making that promise, it's pathetic in a way. Well, it's such a particular vision of what a pro football player is, which is to say, as a kid, you're trying to conjure the notion of somebody who's very powerful, but also pure somehow. Yes. And I remember even then some friends saying, now, Mark, pro football is kind of a lofty goal. Just maybe high school football. Years later when I reflected back on that, I thought, geez, the kid's dad just was killed. Why disabuse him of some vision he's got? Mike's dad was a bar owner in Fresno, California. Two men came into the bar, played a game of pool, ordered two beers, then came into the back room and shot him. They didn't take any money. It was a gangland-style hit. And there was talk that Mark's father must be caught up with organized crime. So at 15, Mark started calling around until his mother made him stop. Seventeen years later, he moved back to Fresno. By this time, he was a reporter for the LA Times, and he wanted to write a book investigating his dad's murder. He was so skittish that he and his wife got their home under assumed names, did not tell people where they lived. It's hard to make sense of all that, but there was a great deal of paranoia. I didn't want family to really know what I was doing. And I thought that if there was some way to-- if someone got nervous about the questions I was asking, I wanted to make it difficult for them to try to find me. And I remember changing my sleep patterns so that I was awake all through the night, and I was guarding the house. I had actually a gun that I had under the couch. I was sleeping on the couch. In a way, I became very childlike again. I really had to become a 15-year-old again in some ways to get at this thing. Like how do you mean? Well, I think it wasn't terribly adult to try to think that you could come back to your hometown and try to hide your identity. I don't think that was really adult. When somebody close to us dies, part of us can remain suspended there at the moment it happened. And we stay there. Part of us stays there, turning the whole thing over and over in our heads. Mark spent three years talking to informants about his father's murder. He went through police files, analyzed phone records, and in the end found credible evidence that his father was murdered, just as he was about to blow the whistle on a drug ring, one with local police on its side, Mark believes. He wrote his book about it. It's called In My Father's Name. And still that was not enough. He's still not at peace. Have I been liberated by some of those answers? I don't know if liberation is the right word. But why? What would it take? I think there's a part of me that wants to sit across from the men who set this whole thing up and talk to them about it. You want them to admit it to your face. Yeah, that's right. That's what I want them to do. I have played over that encounter with the killers so many times. And one of things that I would tell them going in is it goes no further than you and me. This is it. I want to ask you one question. Were you responsible for the murder of my father? And so actually, you've actually imagined this over and over to yourself. Oh, I've imagined it all the time. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm IRA Glass. Today on our program, people trying to make sense out of things for which they'll never get answers or real peace. All three stories in our program today are about people facing the idea of death and telling themselves one thing about it or another. And is there anything that can be said? Is there anything that can comfort us in that situation? Act One of our program, The Disappearance, trying to comprehend what it means when people are there, alive in your life one day, and the next, gone. Act Two, Look for the Union Label. The plot of this story sounds on the surface, I have to say, like the script of the worst sitcom ever made. A father and daughter sit down together for no real reason, just a whim really, to write his obituary, not really thinking about what it means. And then at some point, someone starts to think about what it means. Act Three, Take My Wife, Please. Can dwelling morbidly on future disaster striking your own family, can that actually be healthy? One brave man defends the idea. Stay with us. Act One, The Disappearance. One of the most remarkable books that I've read in a while is by a woman named Genevieve Jurgensen, about her husband Laurent and she lost their two daughters, Elise and Mathilde, at the ages of four and seven. The book is a series of letters that she wrote to her friend 12 years after their deaths. And one of the things that's so remarkable about it is how she still struggles. She doesn't want to keep suffering over their deaths, but suffering over them is the last way that she has to love them. She's also keenly aware that she wants them to seem, in these letters, to be more than just names. When you tell a story about somebody, it's sometimes hard for them to seem more like just a character in a story, and she keeps trying over and over to find ways to make it real, that, in fact, they were alive. They are more than can be expressed on the page. You never knew our daughters. Neither did you know me as I was when they were alive. I will have to tell you everything. Can one really tell someone about very young children? I will not even show you photographs of them. All they show are two little girls, barely distinguishable from each other, just like all the little blond children which people primary school classes in the beaches along the Atlantic coast in the summer. On the 29th of April 1980, the official photographer for the school which my daughters attended came to take some class photographs. They were both dead the next day. Indeed, we did not receive these photographs until several weeks after the news of our solitude. Mathilde's class is in uniform, so it is a picture of a little girl in navy blue in a row, stifling her giggles in between her best friends. Elise, who was still in the nursery class, is wearing the dress with the sailor collar that my mother gave her. She's sitting in the first row, looking solemnly at the lens. I think that in this picture, she's really very like me. In Mathilde's satchel, I still have her school overall with her name embroidered on it, with its ink stains and biscuit crumbs in the pockets. In her exercise book, in her childish but careful handwriting, she has written the date, which will be the date of her death and the death of her little sister. Wednesday, 30th of April 1980. What else can I tell you? I would like you to have heard me talking to them just once, even if only on the telephone. I feel powerless in trying to make you accept this evidence. They were here. I was their mother. I went to pick them up at school. We stopped at the supermarket to buy two cheap waxed coats, one in red, one in blue. And I dropped them off with my mother, not before playing a practical joke on her on the landing. I bundled my daughters up in the coats with the hoods up, pulled tightly over their noses and tied under their chins. They rang the bell, and I hid, and my mother pretended not to recognize them. Then I went home because I was a speech therapist at the time, and I had patients waiting. My sister-in-law came, as intended, to pick Mathilde and Elise up to take them to their other grandmother, but they never arrived because they died toward the end of the afternoon about 10 meters from each other on the side of the northern highway. I'm hesitating about what to write next. There is no common ground between before and after. Or at least what they have in common strikes me as just as painful to excavate as the most deeply buried relics of before. Yes, I'm hesitating. I'm afraid of failing. I'm afraid that you will believe more readily in their death than in their lives. A few years ago, I still used to drive out into the countryside and bellow at the top of my lungs: Mathilde! I was really calling her. Of course, she did not come. At least I had spoken her name once more. Sometimes I meet a little girl who has the same name as her, and I speak it. I say, hello, Mathilde, goodbye, Mathilde, with a smile. And I think, help. On the eve of that May Day holiday, we were not expecting anyone to call, and the ringing of the telephone awakened no feelings in us. We lifted the receiver without curiosity. A slight rustling on the line indicated that the call was being made from outside Paris. My sister? No, I knew she was on her way to Paris. An unfamiliar man's voice checked that we were indeed the people he was looking for. Then he told us to hold the line. The next voice was that of our brother-in-law, Christian, who had left with his wife, their baby, and our two girls. We asked him how he was. He said that he was not good at all, that they had had a very serious car accident. We said yes, and? He told us our two little girls were dead. We thought he was playing a joke on us and then thought no one would play a joke in such poor taste. Laurent said, but Christian, it's not true. He fell to his knees, calling his children. I asked for news of the others. Everyone was fine. Where did we have to go? To the hospital at Peronne. I did not know where it was. Christian give us a few directions. Laurent knew. We hung up. I immediately felt how impossible it was to raise myself to the scale of this event. The terror mounted in me out of all proportion to my own dimensions. I could not contain it all. I was still this little woman in her little apartment next to a little man in the same little apartment. The terror targeted us exclusively. We were its only prey, it's only destination, the terminus. It was a giant, and we were dwarves. Laurent took me by the wrists and asked me not to scream. He said, "To think we're going to have to get over this." A big part of us has stayed there forever. I will tell you what happened next, everything you want to know about what happened next. But at the moment, I cannot. Just as then, I am looking for the link between my daughters and that news. We arrived at the door of the hospital. Jean-Bernard asked where we had to go, and the porter replied, "In surgery." Then I thought that my daughters had been operated on before they died, and everything expanded into infinity again. Corridors. It was difficult to walk. My sister-in-law at the end of the corridor, arms circling around her, a room. My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, a stranger. They ask us if we would like to see them, if we wanted to see our daughters. You would have had to drag me there with a tractor. They ask us if we would like to ring anyone to let them know. I then understand that this horror does not stop at us, that we have to tell my mother. No, it's the evening. She's not expecting any news this evening. Let her sleep one more time. I was right. They need the family record book. When they ask for it, and I reply, "Yes, we've brought it with us," I feel proud for a moment. We are good parents. We thought of everything. Aline and Christian are going to spend the night in the hospital near their baby Aude. All three are kept under observation. We are taken back. In fact, we came for nothing. Right from the first instant, death is this nothing. Mrs. L suggests that we stay the night at her house. I agree readily. She lost a son long ago. At the L's house, we eat what we are given, food and sleeping pills. It is not so much in words that I'm lacking to tell you all this but in courage. When I realize that I have forgotten something, and I have to retrace my steps, I say to myself: "Is it really worth it?" Before taking the sleeping pill, we thought that over at La Haye, their grandparents were waiting for our daughters. Laurent's parents. Have I told you that they were attending the coronation of Queen Beatrix of Holland? Have I told you that on the 30th of April 1980, this young woman was rising to the throne, and that, ever since, this date has been celebrated there as a joyful anniversary of an event whose secondary effect was the death of the girls? That my father-in-law, the French ambassador, and my mother-in-law were attending the festivities? That all the embassy staff were busy so we had found no one to go and fetch the girls at the airport? That, resigned only at the very last minute, I had canceled the places reserved for them on the Air France flight? Have I told you that at my mother's house, before they were picked up by their aunt, they had watched the coronation ceremony on television, as I had done out of the corner of my eye at home? Have I told you that seeing my father-in-law's very characteristic form and gait, I telephoned my mother to ask whether everyone had spotted him, and I can still hear in the background Mathilde's voice full of disappointment: "No, I didn't see him." The very, very last time. My mother told me that at the time Elise was turned away from the television, absorbed in her drawing, but that that had not stopped her from affirming energetically, "But I did. I saw him!" Since then I have not called Mathilde nor Elise. Or if I have called my eldest daughter, it was without the hope that she would reply. It was to feel the vibration in my larynx of those syllables chosen when I was 25 years old, the arrangement of clear vowels and aquatic consonants, which were to name the first of my children to accompany her all her life, to act as her passport, announce her arrival, to be said with only a hint of shyness, and finally-- in the mouth of the one who would love her-- to betray all the emotions that this girl would one day elicit, that she alone would arouse in one young man, a young man who will never know her, who lives and who does not live to love her. After the funeral, I went over to my mother to see my aunt and uncle who would soon be returning to Haute Savoie. The concierge came out of her lodge to see me as I went into the building. Mathilde often used to go over to play with her daughter. She said, "You will see. You can get used to anything." It is certainly the most simple, true, brutal, and perceptive thing that anyone said to me at the time. You could interpret it either as a message of hope or of crushing contempt for human nature. It is very strange this double rhythm that I have with you. I write to you, forcing myself to clarify a period of my life that I've done everything I can to understand but which has always been out of my grasp. It is said that reality outstrips fiction, but this is something else. The reality remains inaccessible. Since the death of the girls, 12 years and 16 days' time, I have honestly and constantly tried to unveil this reality without success. Perhaps I've already told you, sometimes I believe in them alive, my darling children, my darling little girls. These words, which are so light and yet so burdensome, cut through me then. And sometimes I believe in their death, on the edge of the motorway, 10 or so meters from each other, their legs in dungarees, their arms and heads on the side of the motorway. There's never a link between the two. The other rhythm constitutes the things I do in my current life, as if nothing had happened. Conversations, laughter, mutual friends, a double rhythm like a double life. You do not know whether they struggle against each other or enrich each other. Have I already mentioned Yasser Arafat to you? This is what made me think of him. When Elise was born, I found myself battling with a huge, hungry baby. The few odd ounces of milk that I was able to supply in the first 24 hours of her life in hospital were definitely not enough for her, and she screamed constantly. With Mathilde crying on the telephone because she felt lost without me, I quickly lost my patience. I found myself brutally grasping Elise's cradle, which was on casters, and furiously pushing it away from my bed so that it was in danger of banging into the far wall. A second of silence, and then the crying started up again. On the third day, my mother came to see me. She sat at the end of the bed and chatted. We were cheerful. We, the adults, were talking to each other, but I was looking at my daughter, who was looking back at me. Drawn by her gaze, I leaned over her and rubbed my nose on hers. She said, "Huh, huh." I stared at my mother to reassure myself that I had not dreamed it. It had quite knocked the breath out of her. I did the same thing again, and Elise replied again. Third attempt, third exchange. And that was it. She was my child, my treasure, my stupefaction. For logistical reasons, it was my mother who came with Mathilde to pick me up from the hospital. I went down one of the big staircases. At the end of one of the ground floor corridors, I saw Mathilde in her little green Loden coat. She was watching silently, motionless, her nose pointing up another staircase. My mother pointed me out to her, and Mathilde started to walk towards me slowly. I handed Elise to my mother so that I could lift Mathilde into her rightful place in my arms. I can still feel to the nearest ounce the pressure of her legs around my waist. She did not say anything, but she slowly and silently felt my face with their hands like a blind girl. During this rediscovery, this tender and cautious reunion, my mother was smiling and whispering sweet nothings to Elise. She had brown hair, olive skin, and huge eyes ringed with black coal and, to confront the October weather, she was wearing a woolen hat which was a bit too big for her, which skewed sideways over her ear. "She could be Yasser Arafat's daughter," my mother laughed. The other day, the radio announced that Yasser Arafat's plane had disappeared in a sandstorm in the Libyan desert. A few hours later, although the members of his entourage were killed or injured, he himself was found alive and grinning. Every time that a tragic event affects him but spares him-- the murder of an adviser, all sorts of attempts on his life, or an airplane crash-- I feel that hug again. When I think of the life he leads and the life that Elise led, when I think of the life expectancy they each had on that October day when my mother teased me about my daughter, to think that she is dead, and he is here. I've been careful. I've never watched the home movies in which my two daughters appear nor have I listened to their voices on the answering machine tapes that my mother kept. The messages to Granny are at her house, accessible, but I do nothing about it. How many catastrophes have there been since I began this correspondence with you? Football stadiums collapse. Young motor bikers kill each other at the 24-hour race in Le Mans. And here I am with the children and you. And I tug at my net, which has plunged so deep in water. Last week, I spent a long time looking at a car exactly like the one in which my daughters fell asleep, from which they were thrown, in which, leaving their parents to go to their grandparents, they left Paris, never to return. I was there looking at the back seat, the seat belts that we had not done up, the right-hand window out of which they would have both been thrown. The letters on the number plate confirmed that this Renault 5 was from the same year as my sister-in-law's. They're still on the road, those cars. When there are none left, I will no longer be able to ask questions of them. Someone will have to keep one somewhere for me. After the impact when my sister-in-law managed to bring her car to a halt, she and her husband turned with relief to smile at the children. But only their baby was there, sitting in her little seat, stupefied, with some fragments of glass spread over her. Have I already told you that? I tell it to myself so many times. When I was near that Renault 5 the other day, I wanted to lie down on the rear seat and wait for the end of time. In short, back to square one. I have some work to hand in, a lot, but nothing will get done until I've written to you. At first it was the other way around. Everything came before writing these letters. I used to tell myself, why suffer? What's the point of this artificial rendezvous with these long-lost children? I always had something happier to do. Now, even as I get up, I am carried by the things I want to write to you. I should have gone to see in that room in the hospital where they put my daughters. I knew as soon as they suggested it to me. I knew that by refusing, I was setting a precedent for a future of weakness because I was not worthy of-- I do not know what. Just not worthy. So I did not go to see them dead. They were there, and Mummy did not come. They were only one or two rooms away. They remained alone. Mummy did not cross the doorway. I know nothing of their faces as they were at the end. They had the strength to die, and I could not match their strength. I know nothing of their last great achievement. Wherever they went, they went alone, together or apart. And I'm inclined to believe it was apart. Ignorant of their own heroism, they went to the places dictated by their violent trajectory at more than 100 kilometers per hour over the safety barrier. I stayed on my chair like a lump. And since then, people have not stopped congratulating me for my courage as a mother. To such an extent that many friends, including you, hesitated before talking to us about the difficulties and hardships they were facing, they did not seem worthy in comparison. Laurent and I sat enthroned on a pedestal, hoisted there by the annihilation of our two little girls. But we still knew what real life was, like a weather map of constantly changing skies, and we needed people to tell us about it, because the air was thin for our two statues. The only stance that I battle against is to threaten suicide, to keep those around you on tenterhooks because you claim you're going to die. Watch out, I'm going to kill myself. My goodness, the living can make a fuss with their moods and their other half running all over the place trying to stop them. I'm going to kill myself. Watch out! Watch out! Oh no, that is not how you do it. I will explain to these maniacs how Mathilde and Elise managed to die. If I can, that is, because they did the whole thing by themselves. And when the adults came to their senses and began to realize that they were no longer in the car, not even under the front seats where they looked once they realized the rear seat was empty, when they had to resign themselves to getting out of the car to look for them, they had to be found wherever they might be. When it was done and they had been found dozens of meters from the car and dozens of meters apart, they had actually already gone without a word to a place that no man can see. All of this brings me back to that moment of weakness on my chair when even though two children, my two children, two very young children, had known how to die and were waiting to be presented to me one last time in their truthfulness, I had not even gone those few meters along the corridor that separated them from me. They had known how to die. I no longer knew how to walk. There has been nothing glorious about the way I live my life. I love the living in all their miasma. I love the dead for their temerity. There is nothing in between. Our children now, Elvire and Gauthier, have asked us 100 times whether they would have been born if their sisters had not died. I really hope so, but I just cannot say. The girls' death allowed me to be pregnant again, which I wanted anyway, to have other children, which I wanted anyway. Even so, at the square with the children, I was not like other mothers. Sitting on the bench or on the side of the sand pit, I would watch my Elvire making mud pies, and I would let Gauthier suck on his biscuit. If another woman wanted to talk to me, I had only two options. A bright facade, which devastated me-- yes, mine's already three and a half, but she's still frightened of the slide. I can't believe your little scrap. He's so brave up at the top of the ladder-- or a truth that was socially unacceptable. These are my younger two children. The elder ones died four years ago. I would always be out of place. The working class, immigrants, the self-taught cranks, the handicapped, the unemployed, and grieving parents are more alike than people think. They have at least one thing in common. They have to make Herculean efforts to hold a normal, banal, bouncy conversation. They can think of only one thing, the moment when they might introduce a sentence about their misfortune. Thirteen years have passed, and I still cannot last half a day without evoking my daughters. Elvire has received a post card from a friend announcing the death of a classmate. I was having a siesta. In my drowsy state, I could hear the voice of my 12-year-old daughter talking to her father, respecting her mother's sleep. "I'm going to have to tell Gauthier, aren't I?" He was playing with his cousin. Gauthier does not want to hear about anything to do with death, so when Elvire told him, he hid his feelings and hardly broke off from his game. And Elvire was left alone with this news, which she had just learned from one of those holiday cards that should never give you that sort of news. "What's going on?" I asked, pretending to have heard nothing and feeling sure that Elvire would want to tell me everything herself. She joined me on the bed, buried herself against me, sighed, and then cried. She had been telling me about this friend's illness since the beginning of the school year. I knew that Lauren came to school sporadically, that she had changed physically, that her mother, who was always cheerful, came to pick her up from school with her two younger children, asking her whether she had forgotten anything in her locker, as you would to a child who still has 10 or 15 years of school ahead of them. Then that was it. Lauren sank into a coma. Elvire had told me about that, too, but now, as she cried, she realized she had never imagined that Lauren would actually die. And this death, this end to everything, this earthly truth, which meant that the child, who had been told not to forget anything in her locker would not begin the next academic year in three weeks' time. This was so harsh and so invincible that Elvire had only her tears to link the two realities, that of a life yesterday, which was complete even in a state of coma, and death, which was eternal right from the first moment. Now, even as she struggled with the sharp pain, she already knew that soon, very soon, this pain would soften. And despite her sobs, her shuddering little frame, her puffy red face, she was already missing the purity of this revolt before it had even begun to fade. And she refused to accept that this sorrow would become integrated into her life. "When I tell my children about this one day, they won't understand how horrible it was," she told me. "And then, maybe even tomorrow, there will already be moments when I don't think about it." This idea redoubled her anger. Far from hoping to suffer less, she never wanted the freshness of the pain to deaden. This was the only acceptable response to a disappearance that every part of her refused to accept. As I listened to her, I loved her for having already understood everything. And I thought of these letters in which so many years later, I try to discover exactly what has become of all those feelings. Genevieve Jurgensen's is book is called The Disappearance. It's published by Norton. Excerpts were read for our show by actress Felicity Jones. Coming up, death takes a holiday, and while it's gone, can you feel better about tragedy by talking about it in advance? And if not, what's talking for anyway? That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different stories on that theme. Today's program, telling stories in the face of death. In each of our acts today, somebody contemplates the death of a person that he or she is close to and then surrounds that idea of that death with words and stories, even though to some degree, in that situation, words and stories cannot entirely do what we normally want them to do, which is to comfort us, to give order. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Look for the Union Label. In this act, two people, father and daughter-- we'll hear from them both-- start to compose a story about death before anyone has died. Well, it simply began by sitting in the kitchen of my home, reading the Boston Globe, and I looked out on a beautiful fall day, looking out at a maple tree in front of my yard. And suddenly, it occurred to me that I should write my obituary. I'll begin working on it. No special reason. It must've been probably over the Christmas holidays, probably last year. And you were visiting your parents' house? My parents. Uh-huh. Around that time, and I was on the telephone, and I was just looking for a pad of paper to write something down. And I just noticed on a yellow legal pad that my father had started writing his obituary. But it wasn't labeled obituary at the time. No. No. It said born in 1917 to-- Albany, and it just was incredibly straightforward and standard. And I just couldn't believe it. I didn't actually have an emotional response to the obituary part at all. I was just sort of-- I guess I was amused in a way, because he is such an interesting person, and the writing, it was just the most basic details about his family, and it didn't really say anything about him. In other words, he's a more interesting person than the writing itself. Right. I don't know. And I didn't really process the thought. I just went straight to him, and I said, Dad, my God, this is so boring. I said you've lived a much more interesting life than this. And he said, well, then help me write it. You're a writer. Help me write it. And all he knew was what the headline should be. That was the one very clear thing that he knew. And what should the headline be? The headline should be his name. I'm named after him, and it should say Adrian LeBlank comma product of the working class. That was what he saw. Well, to me, that's really important. Because when I say the working class, I'm talking about workers, you know? Yeah. Throughout my history, from the first factory job, first learning what a union was, and then being a committee man and president of the local unions wherever I worked, and from then on, I gravitate to becoming a full-time field representative. I tend to take positions, you know? I do this every day of my life, and I think that the obituary is like saying there are still union guys around. You follow? Yeah. I don't know if that's clear. But that was pretty much it. It's like saying, you know, look, 82 years later, from 16 to 82, there are still guys who are making a pitch. And so we sit down. I'm pretty sure that first day we sat down, I opened my portable computer, and I said OK. And he said so how do we do this? What do we do? And I said, well, I just need you to tell me about your life. I've actually tried to do this with my dad before, not in the context of the obituary, but in those moments where I felt that I need to learn about my family history. But he was not very responsive. He would be very vague. But for some reason, when he was thinking of his life in terms of an obituary, a lot of details came out that I don't feel I could've-- well, I wasn't able to get when I was trying to just have straight conversations with him about his biography, daughter to father. I was wondering if it was an enjoyable process for you talking to your daughter? Yes, yes, yes. I find her to be a searcher and a prober and with good instincts and caring. So I don't know. It was just interesting, and it came very easily. I learned so much about him. Since it was an obituary you were writing, did the two of you talk about his death? No. That's something that I think is-- I don't know. It's funny. In preparing for this, several of my friends were asking me about it, and it just shocked me a little bit that they were thinking about it in that way. And then, of course, I realized it is an obituary. I wonder if he understands it more the other way, that as far as he's concerned, it really is about his death? I think he must, and I think over the years, he's known how anxious my brother and I have been about him dying. So I think he often tries in his way to help us cope with it. He doesn't seem nervous or frightened, so I don't know. When I leave when I go to visit, I find leaving my parents sometimes quite difficult because they are older, and I'm very busy, and I don't get back as often as I'd like to. And I think he knows how hard it is for me to say goodbye. And he'll say I'm always with you, and I'll always be with you, that kind of thing. Yeah. I wonder if this whole process, you think you're doing it for him in a way, but maybe it's for you. Mm-hm. He's doing this all for you. Right. I believe that's very possible. I think that's very possible, which is probably why he was a good union organizer. Because I'm feeling like I'm helping him do something. You know, he was good at what he did. Is one of the reasons that you've agreed to talk to your daughter about the obituary and work with her on the obituary is to help her prepare for the thought that you might die? It could be. I haven't stayed with that thought, but it could very well be, Ira. Maybe you're cluing in. I think that thought has crossed my mind, but I haven't stayed with it. Hm. I haven't stayed, but you could be partially right. Is there a way to ever-- I'm not sure I would want it to be easier, but I wonder if it's possible? Is it possible to even know what that could be like? You're saying that no matter how we try to prepare for the death of somebody so close to us, there really is nothing we can do. We can think about it all we want. Yeah, I definitely feel that with it. I mean, because obviously, I've been working on an obituary, not really thinking at all about my father dying, not thinking that it's about death, just thinking that it's about talking to my father, that I have all the time to sort of figure this out. I don't know. It's part of my relationship with him will be what happens when it's over, when he's physically gone. I mean, my brother-in-law passed away, and he was quite sick before he died, and he was in a coma right up to the moment that he actually did die. And there was such a vast difference between him-- even though he wasn't available as the person we'd known, his physical life was so immense. And when it was gone, it was-- the loss of it was just huge, you know? It was huge, and it happened in just a minute. And I just was so shocked by that because I was so ready for him to die. We knew that he was going to die. He wasn't really with us anymore, and it was just-- and I was glad that I was able to at least understand how little I actually knew about it. So how far are the two of you on the obit? Have you finished it? No. No. I haven't actually-- I can't figure out how to write it except in the past tense, and it just seems completely bizarre to speak of him in that way. So I understand she hasn't finished writing it. No, we haven't completed it, no. Do you feel like she's taking too long getting this done? Do I think she's taking too long? Yeah. No, I didn't feel there was any-- there's no great rush that I know of. Why? Do you have a feeling there should be a timetable? No, I don't. Are you rushing the process, Ira? No. No, I have no intention to rush the process. I'm not going anywhere. I'm still bowling on Fridays with the senior citizens. Adrian LeBlank and his daughter, also named Adrian LeBlank. Act Three, Take My Wife, Please. Some of us have tragedy thrust upon us. Some of us creep up tentatively to the edge of thinking about our worst fears and only allow ourselves a few quick moments to contemplate them before burying all thought of tragedy deep into the backs of our minds again. And then, some of us choose to think about the worst that can happen-- all the time. And is that good for you? One of the producers of This American Life, Julie Snyder, has this story about her brother. A little over a year ago, I was in the car with my older brother Tom, coming back from a weekend trip to our dad's house. And just as we were entering Chicago, he began to tell me about how whenever he says goodbye to someone or hangs up the phone at the end of a conversation, what goes through his head is that might be the last time he'll ever talk to them. And that's just the beginning. Then I think about what would happen, what would I do, and what would be the reaction if that particular person died. For instance, who would take care of the funeral plans? Who would call the cops, I guess would be initially. Do I touch the body? Do I call the cops first? If there's foul play involved, do I like-- if I was in an apartment, like if it was my wife or something, should I investigate to see if anyone's still around or not? Would I freak out or would I able to handle seeing the sight of my particular wife or loved one dead or mutilated? It's at this point that Tom notices the look of horror on my face. What, what? What are you looking at me like that for? It's just crazy. I didn't know you had cops involved. Well, yeah, if you're the first one who stumbles on the scene. There's no sense in talking about the funeral and your life thereafter if you can't deal with what happens right away. Tom has really specific plans for what he'll do when almost every member of our family dies. But his most detailed scenario is for his wife Lisa. What am I going to do to get through the initial day? And what's going to happen to her body? Is it going to go to the coroner's office? Will there be an autopsy? Probably. And what happens when I come home? Who will I call? What will my words be to her parents when I have to explain to them that she's dead? And how am I going to tell them? Of course, where do I sleep? Do I come home and sleep that night? How am I going to eat? OK, am I going to go to work? Will I be able in the morning period of the first week to just carve out a couple hours and finish this up? Will I continue to work? Can I just take the time off? I have a lot of law school debt still. But then again, of course, my wife's life is insured through her job, and so I'd have that extra money. Would I continue to live in the house or not, I think. Now, she's pregnant, of course, and so that's going to turn-- that's another equation. Do you have any idea how long you've kind of been doing this for? Let's see. I'm 32, so probably 10 years probably. Yeah, I don't know what started me thinking along the lines of people close to me dying, because nobody has, which is kind of peculiar that I would think this way. But maybe that's why I think this way, because it hasn't happened to me yet, and I'm just waiting for it to happen. But every time I come home and I see a message on the answering machine, particularly at night, I oftentimes think is this going to be the call with the bad news? I just need to stop right here and say that my brother is much more normal than all of this makes him seem. He's really smart and funny and sweet. He's a successful attorney, married, and has his first baby on the way. It's just that he worries. A lot. I think it's morbid. By definition, it's morbid. I'm thinking about people's morbidity or mortality. But I think it's practical, too. It makes you appreciate the person so much more. When you play the answering machine and it's just a telemarketer, and you're like, well, my mom must not be dead, because, of course, if that happened, I would get a phone call. It would be on my machine, and I don't have one. Ergo my mom, who I love, is still alive. So I think that I don't see any detriment to the way I think and even about things that aren't-- issues I'm not presented with in terms of people dying, because it gives me better appreciation, I think, for life. Do you think this kind of emotionally keeps you closer to our family then? Yeah, I certainly do, without a doubt, both to my family and to my friends. The only emotions I ever feel when I'm thinking this way is kind of-- and I know you're going to think this is bizarre, is like kind of a satisfaction in knowing that I care so much and that so much-- if this person was to go, how much this person meant to me and how much they helped me in my life and just made my life better. It just gives me a little satisfaction knowing they're not dead. And I've thought oftentimes about delivering eulogies at people's funerals, my mother's, my grandparents. So I've thought about all the good things I would say. My dad's funeral, too. The things I would say to celebrate their lives and say what they meant to me. I asked if he had a eulogy for me. He says it's pretty much the same speech he gave at my wedding. I wouldn't characterize it maybe as a rush or a cheap thrill so much as it's just something that you know is going to happen. You're going to die. Martin's going to die. Gina's going die. My wife's going to die. My mom's going to die. I'm not going to be around probably to see all that happen, but certainly, some of them I probably will be. And so I think that in the final analysis, I think there's nothing wrong with thinking this way, and I think it's healthy. I know my wife disagrees with me. I know she thinks that if I were to tell anybody, which now I am, that I think this way, I'm going to be the first suspect if she's ever murdered and no one knows who did it, particularly when I know who to contact in terms of her life insurance, and I already have everything planned out in terms of how much I'm going to see her parent, where I'm going to move to, et cetera. But I don't think that that's bad. I really don't. I'm sure none of my plans will probably happen. But just thinking about it I think calms me. To think about it happening and then have it not happen and being glad that it didn't happen I think takes away the fear of it happening a little bit more for me, just in my own mind, thinking I'm dealing with it. OK, that person could die. If I get a little mini fear that the person's not there as I'm climbing up the stairs, maybe my wife is dead in bed, but she's not, and, of course, I get the little mini rush that she wasn't. I also get the feeling that-- it helps calm me, and like, well, look, I could have dealt with it had that been the case, which I think is probably foolish, but yeah. Do you have any plans for people you're not related to? Yeah. There's been friends of mine who-- yes. No, I do. There's been friends of mine, male friends, I have pictured dying, and I think about what type of relationship I would maintain with their wives and their kids. Would I step in and try and do a lot in terms of like-- I don't know what. Taking these kids to ball games? Obviously, I would never take the place of their father. Or would I just pay my respects and let the wives come to me if they needed any help? I do think now that my friend's dad died, I thought-- I had pictured his dad dying prior to him dying because he had had a heart attack prior to the heart attack that killed him. And I thought that my friend would need a lot of support, a lot of attention, but I ended up not doing much. A few phone calls-- it's very strange. A few phone calls I made to him initially to talk about it, and then we would continue to talk, and I'd make a point to call him every week. But I never wanted to talk about the fact that his dad had just died. I did not want to talk about that with him. I wanted to ignore it and just get beyond it. And he would bring it up a few times and bring up a few stories and stuff, but I think-- I remember thinking to myself, this is horrible. I should be able to talk to him about his dad dying, but for whatever reason, it was too difficult. Really? Yeah. I mean, it kind of runs counter to my free-flowing thought process of when people die, I'm going to do this. I'm not scared to think or, in this case, talk about it. But I think I just expected myself to be giving him a little more support. And when you're kind of thinking about these plans like through to the will I move, will I get another job, that kind of stuff, do you then also think about, like, through all the way to the end and then plan for the moment that I think everybody goes through to a certain extent when they're mourning when you have to let go of that person? Do you ever think about that? No. Nope, I don't. I don't. I don't think about that at all. I think that is a scarier thought to me, honestly, thinking about letting somebody go. If I ever got to a point in my life where I just said OK, I'm not going to think about Julie or Lisa or Gina or Martin or my mom anymore because the mourning's over and I just kind of have to go on, that would be [SMACKS LIPS]. So no, I would hope that would never happen to me. Julie Snyder. "I'm still bowling on Fridays with the senior citizens." PRI, Public Radio International.
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In Danielle's house, ever since she was a girl, when holiday dinners come, they serve this meal that might look familiar to you. The main course on a big platter, drumsticks, white breast meat, stuffing and gravy, cranberry relish on the side. And in Danielle's family, they have a name for this meal that she told me on the phone. The name for this meal is-- Fish. Got that? Fish. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. A special program today on the wonders of fish. Actually, we can say the word here. And the word is poultry. And as you know, each week on our program we choose some theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle that theme. And this week, as we stand now, in that magical five weeks of the year, that magical five weeks between the turkey served at Thanksgiving and the turkey served at Christmas, a period when Americans consume nearly 1/4 of all the turkey consumed in this country every year. 67 million turkeys are eaten during this period. And every year during this important time, This American Life brings you yet another program about poultry. That's right, stories about turkeys, chickens, ducks, fowl of all kind, and their mysterious hold over us. I'm Ira Glass. Coming up in this hour, Act One, Duki. The story of a typical American family, imaginary poultry, and a hand puppet. Act Two, Still Life with Chicken, what happens when a chicken crosses that thin, yellow line that divides the animals that we eat, on the one hand, and the animals that we keep as pets on the other. Act Three, How to do the Funky Chicken, the true story of a multinational chicken company powerful enough to turn a white man into a black man, and the man they chose to do this to, well, an old-time Kentucky colonel who happened to be their own spokesman. Act Four, Chicken Diva, yet another testimony to the power that chickens have over our hearts and minds, my friend, an opera about Chicken Little, done with dressed-up Styrofoam balls, sung in Italian, and-- no kidding-- able to make grown men cry. Stick around and hear it for yourself. Act One, Duki. So in Danielle's family, the power of poultry is so great in their lives that when they serve chicken or turkey, they call it-- Fish. That's right. And they call it this for a reason. And the reason has to do with a stuffed hand puppet called Duki. Now, Danielle is a woman over 30 years old. Her sister Ashley is two years younger. Duki has been in the family since they were children. Well, he was a Christmas present when Ashley was about eight and I was about 10. And when he first arrived, he was really fluffy. And he was this beautiful, fluffy, white duck. And he had a cape on and black, kind of, villain slash hero goggles. He lost the outfit pretty quickly and he went naked. And then he became Ashley's vehicle for torturing me. Now, it's not unusual for older siblings to dominate younger ones. And as children, Danielle dominated Ashley. Ashley looked up to Danielle, fought to get her attention and her approval, and Danielle always, always got her way, except when Duki was around. Basically, Ashley would channel-- I mean, the word's kind of an anachronism in this context-- but she would channel Duki. She would become Duki's voice. She would speak as Duki. And Duki was sarcastic. Duki was selfish and bossy. Duki would insult Danielle. Duki would tease Danielle. Duki would give her painful nose squeaks. Whenever Ashley brought Duki into the equation, he was completely the dominant force. I was just putty in Duki's hands. Let me ask you to compare his personality with Ashley's personality. Ashley's very kind of considerate and-- she's very considerate and kind and thoughtful, and very, very sensitive to other people, very, very concerned about if other people are happy, and if someone or someone else doesn't feel good. And Duki just has this total, you know, what's-for-lunch attitude. Like, what's in it for me? In your face, totally out for himself, simultaneously a braggart and a total wimp. He's boastful and vain. He's just this indomitable spirit. All right, I've been at Danielle's apartment sometimes, and I've witnessed the following scene. Picture please. Danielle has not spoken with her sister in weeks. She picks up the phone, calls Ashley in Michigan. Ashley answers. Danielle asks immediately, can you put Duki on? And then Ashley essentially becomes Duki, puts Duki on the phone. Danielle talks to Duki for 15, 20 minutes, and then they both hang up. That's the whole conversation. And they both feel satisfied. Danielle is an editor at a big New York magazine. I adore Duki. I really love Duki. And sometimes I think, like, if he disappeared it would really feel like someone died. I mean, I look at him and he looks really kind of old and ratty. And it really makes me sad. It kind of really-- I feel like-- I mean, it sounds crazy. I mean, it really makes me sad to think about a world without Duki, and it would be a big, empty hole in the world. He kind of takes up as much room in my heart as a lot of people, individually. And if something happened to him, you know, if he were like lost in an airport, or kind of run over by a car, I would be-- I mean, it would really be heart-breaking. So I hope it's becoming clear why, if you eat dinner in the home of Danielle's family, if they're serving some kind of poultry-- you know, chicken or turkey-- if you ask anybody in the family what's for dinner, they'll tell you-- Fish. Right. And the rationale for that is what? It freaks Duki out. It freaks him out, though-- you don't like him to know that perhaps some birds are, in fact, eaten? I think he knows. I think he's in denial about it. He's in denial about most things. He's in denial about the fact that he's totally weak, and tiny, and dirty. He thinks he's really good-looking and strong and that he's really smart and has a lot of friends. He's in denial about the fact that he's actually stuffed, which he is. Sometimes I tell him that. I say, Duki, give me a break. You're just stuffed. And he's like, no way. Now, I thought I would try to book Duki to come on the radio for this program. So I contacted Danielle's sister Ashley and asked her, you know, could Duki come on the air. I received an answer back, not by phone but by electronic mail, that for Duki to appear I'd have to first go through someone named Yona Lu, who I could reach through Danielle and Ashley's mother. And when I talked to Danielle, I asked her about this. I've been informed that the only way that I can reach him is by calling your mom and speaking to Yona Lu. Do I have that name right? Yona Lu, yeah. I think that she's acting as his agent. Yona Lu is? She's a hedgehog. Anything special that I should say to Yona Lu to make this happen? I mean, I don't know. She drives a pretty hard bargain. Hello? Hey, Mrs. Mattoon? Yes? It's Ira Glass. Hi, Ira Glass. Mrs. Mattoon, here's why I called you. I want to do a little story on the radio about Duki. Duki? Duki. And I contacted your daughter Ashley, and she said that for me to book Duki onto my radio show, I was going to first need to contact Yona Lu. [LAUGHS] Yeah, you would need to do that. And that I needed to do that through you. Who is Yona Lu? Yona Lu is-- she's kind of a-- she's a hedgehog. She's basically taken charge of Duki's financial affairs. I presume this is something to do with money? Well, I don't know, actually. I mean, we-- That's probably why she said to contact Yona Lu. Well, so what do I do now? I'm calling. I was told to contact you if I wanted to get in touch with Yona Lu in order to book Duki. What do I do next? Book Duki, OK. You're going to book Duki? That's the whole idea. I want to book Duki for the show, for an interview. Well, I'll just talk to Yona Lu about it. If she says OK, it's OK. I mean, will Yona Lu want to discuss terms or something? She doesn't talk. So what's going to happen? All right. Should I call you back? You could call me back, or I'll just go in and check. You'll just go in and check? Should I wait? Yeah. All right, I'll wait. Ira? Yeah. This is just radio? Not TV? It's just radio. And nobody's going to get to be on TV? No. No one's going to be on TV. No, it's strictly radio. OK. Yona doesn't care what happens then. What if it were TV? I think she'd want to be on, too. I mean, radio doesn't do much for her, she doesn't talk. All right. As you might imagine, not everybody in the family takes all this so lightly. Danielle's father was never too keen on this. He was quite actually bothered by the whole-- he thought we maybe had a problem in the family. Really? I mean, for a while there, we had two daughters that only communicated through a duck. You know, that period that you're describing, when do you mean? I would say they maybe were 10 and 12, or nine and 11. And they would only communicate through the duck? Well, Danielle didn't pay a whole lot of attention to Ashley but she paid quite a lot of attention to the duck. So if Ashley wanted to get Danielle's attention, all she had to do was rev up the duck. How long did this last? Um, I can't remember. She'd also make Danielle laugh that way. Danielle thought Duki was very funny, but I can't remember her thinking Ashley was funny. In terms of the relationship between my sister and me-- I don't know why. I mean, this is probably completely really sick-- but I have so much genuine affection and love for Duki that it's very easy, and it's very easy to demonstrate those feelings, in a way that it's not as easy to kind of demonstrate those feelings toward my sister, just because we never kind of got in the habit of it. What percentage of your relationship with your sister is based on your relationship with Duki? Well, the really fun part of it is based on my relationship with Duki. But I think as we've gotten older and older, we've gotten more and more self-conscious about the Duki factor in our relationship. But I think kind of a big chunk. I mean, it definitely kind of gives me this vision into her brain that I wouldn't have otherwise. Well, I did finally snag an interview with Duki by calling Ashley. Is Duki still up for this? Yeah, he just got back from a party, though. He just got back from a party? Yeah. He was at a happy hour thing with a lot of college students. He's not in college, but he's in a band. So a lot of his friends go to this happy hour on Friday night. All right. Well, could you get him? Uh, sure. He's upstairs. Just a sec. Here he is. Hey, Duki? Yeah? Hey Ira, how you doing? I'm just fine. Long time no see. Long time no see back at you. And welcome to our little radio program. So what's going on here? You've got a whole bunch of celebrities on tonight? Well, we actually have a number of different people-- What abouts, like, Tom Cruise? They're just like Tom Cruise. Now Duki, I was talking to Danielle for our radio program and had her come on and talk about you a little bit. And one of the things that she said was that when she was younger, in order to discipline her if she was doing something that you didn't like, you could pretty much control her with something called nose squeaks. Yeah, because she has this kind of-- it's a prominent nose. You know what I mean? It kind of sticks out and you just want to squeak it. You know, over Thanksgiving, we're watching the Muppet Show, and Miss Piggy was on, and she reminded me a lot of Neelie. Of Danielle? Mm-hmm. And Kermit told Miss Piggy to move the pork. And so I was telling Neelie to move the pork all week. And would she move? Yes, she would. She would. Now, if Ashley would tell her-- if Ashley would sit down on the couch and say to Danielle, move the pork, what would the effect of that be? Kind of-- you know Neelie. You know how she looks at you when she doesn't approve of something you say or do? She gets this kind of ice cold stare and she gives you this sidelong glance that makes you feel like you're about the size of a pea? That's what she does. Is there anything about the life of a duck that perhaps you could tell our radio audience that we might not know? You know, I'm sure that you know much more about it than we do. No, not really. I'm kind of an unusual duck. I'm not really in touch with the whole duck scene. You're not in touch with the whole scene. When I had time, I used to migrate once in a while, because I had some friends who are ducks. And I try to keep in touch with them. But lately I've just started spending more time with people and doing my own thing. And I just don't have time to do those kinds of duck things anymore. I just wanted more out of my life than that. Duki, a stuffed hand puppet, now lives in New York City. Act Two, Still Life with Chicken. It was an accident that Jonathan ended up living with a chicken. He was not living the kind of lifestyle that one usually associates with chicken. This was during the period when I considered myself to be a performance artist of sorts. A naked performance artist, to be specific. These days, Jonathan Gold is a food writer. This all happened 15 years ago in southern California. He was putting together a performance. He had a PA system, which could put out the requisite amount of annoying feedback sound at high decibels. He had the two full bottles of Glade American Beauty air freshener, which he would spray in their entirety in the performance space. And he had a live chicken which he bought the day before the performance from one of those Chinese poultry markets in Los Angeles. And it comes the day of the show. An audience gathers in a darkened warehouse in West LA. I don't know if you've been to a lot of performance art, but this was sort of really typical of the stuff that was going on in the period. And I showed up and I was naked and I was carrying a machete and I was blindfolded. And I stood in the middle of this pile of supermarket chickens. You know, the broilers that you buy. And the chicken that I had bought was tethered to a three-foot rope around me. And I hacked up and down blindly with the machete. Toward the chicken or just in general? Well, I was blindfolded, so I didn't know if it was towards the chicken or not. And I had fully intended that, in fact, I would kill the chicken in the midst of this performance. But chickens aren't that stupid. And this chicken wanted no part of the machete. It stayed at the end of its rope the entire time apparently. And after 10 minutes, when I was completely exhausted, I fell to a heap. And everybody left and the performance was over. I don't know if you've stuck around after an art performance, but the few minutes after an art performance are some of the most depressing in the world. How so? You've done your wad. You've done your sort of bit for art, which has either worked or it hasn't. But you're sitting there, you're covered with chicken effluvium, in my case. It stinks to high hell. Everybody's gone and you've got to clean up. And you're naked. It's really not a pretty picture. So Jonathan cleaned up, and when he was done he had a chicken. And he didn't feel like he could kill the chicken. Destiny had brought them together. He felt like he could not turn his back. He says it was the same as if a kitten shows up on your back door, scratching and lonely and needy. So he took the chicken home. And in doing that, he stumbled across that thin, thin line that separates food items on the one hand from pets on the other, that divides the animals we eat from the animals we love. So I get home and I have this chicken, and I don't know what to do with it. So I spread out some newspaper on the top of my refrigerator and I put the chicken up there. I get a can of Green Giant brand niblets from under the counter. And I open it and I put it in a little bowl for the chicken. And I give the chicken a little water. And the chicken's on top of my refrigerator. Because you think chickens eat corn. You'd read that or something. And that was the available corn. That was the available corn. I wish I had thought better of the niblets idea. Why? Because, in fact, if you're buying three or four cans of niblets a day-- which is what the chicken ate-- and you're existing on almost nothing-- which I was-- then your niblet bill turns out to be like some two-figure percentage of your total income each week. I mean, if you can imagine living on $50 a week, but $10 of it goes for niblets, it's just hard to justify an expense like that. And the chicken stayed there on top of my refrigerator for a long time, months. Six months, I think. Is this like a one-room apartment? A two-room apartment. I had a kitchen and a bedroom. So I didn't have to look at the chicken when I was sleeping. Though I did have to look at it when I was cooking. Did you ever cook chicken? Of course I cooked chicken. Didn't you feel intensely disloyal? No, I felt no particular loyalty to this chicken. I don't know if you've ever had chickens, but it's not like-- I mean, you don't pet chickens. Chickens don't really like you to pet them. And you don't hold them. There's really no love that you feel for a chicken in your life, I don't think. But yet you kept the chicken? I kept the chicken because I couldn't bear to do anything else. And it's not like I could have carried out onto Pico Boulevard and said, be free, little chicken. Be free. Did you give the chicken a name? I never named the chicken. When I referred to the chicken in public, I always called it the hen. How did you not name it? It was a creature in your house. The chicken always seemed temporary. It never occurred to me that I might have the chicken as long as six months. The chicken always seemed like something that I would have for just a couple days. And then what did you think was going to happen? I guess I thought-- A, I thought about the chicken expiring. B, I have to admit that there was a possibility that someday I would actually cook the chicken. I went through a lot of chicken recipes, hundreds and hundreds of chicken recipes. Thinking maybe this'll be the recipe for my niblet-fed chicken? I'm not sure that a recipe existed that would've lived up to the fact of the chicken, this animal who you have come to know on fairly intimate terms, and who you've raised, and you've put a certain amount of emotion into. A chicken, if I might say, who has seen you naked. The chicken did see me naked, damn it. The fact is, we need food to be just food. And as soon as it becomes a living thing, especially if we're city people, you know, we're not used to the conversion of living things into our food, it's hard to handle without thinking it has to be bigger than food, you know, without wanting to make it ritualized or something bigger than food. Exactly. Can I tell you a small story? Yeah, of course. A few weeks ago, I was in this Korean restaurant in Koreatown in Los Angeles. It was this place called The Living Fish Center that I'd always wanted to go because the name of it was so splendid. You know, Living Fish Center. I imagined some sort of vast vivarium where Flipper was jumping through hoops and stuff. And I go in there, and of course it's just like a crummy Korean restaurant. I mean, it's not that clean. And I don't know, there are tanks and stuff, but I didn't know what to order. So I order a fish soup, because it looks like they have a small fish soup specialty on the menu. And it comes and it's just really strong-smelling and not that great. And I try squid fried with bean sauce and onions, which wasn't that happening. And I'm about to give up and pay the check and go home with a vast table filled with uneaten stuff. And it suddenly occurs to me what the specialty of the restaurant is. And I wave the waitress over and I tell her that I'd like a prawn. And she is puzzled. She didn't expect me to ask for a prawn. But I repeat my question, and she shrugs and goes and tells the sushi chef. And he goes to one side of the restaurant and he climbs on this chair, this ordinary folding chair, and he reaches into this long tank that's running just below the ceiling. And he wiggles his fingers in the water. When he wiggles the fingers, the prawns just become enraged. And they start nipping at his fingers and they start attacking him. And he picks out a couple of the liveliest ones and brings them back to his counter and-- without washing his hands, mind you-- makes a few motions over it. And a couple seconds later, the waitress comes over with the prawns on this huge mound of ice. And what he'd done is he'd taken off the exoskeleton. The head was intact, and that little part of the tail that is always on prawns was still there. But the middle part is naked, like a grub. And I picked up the prawn with my chopsticks, and it was not dead, this prawn. It was extremely alive. And it was wiggling its legs, and it was wiggling its antennas, and its eyes were swiveling madly on its eye stalks. And it was looking back at me, seeing me as actually the predator, the creature that was going to eat it. And that was a really freakish moment, because as much stuff as I eat, and as low as I eat on the food chain, and as many prawns as I have dispatched in my life, I have never before killed a living being with my teeth. And the prawn knew what I was going to do and he did not like it. And I wasn't quite sure what to do. But if I put it down, the prawn would have died anyway. I mean, it's not going to live without its shell. Somebody else would have eaten it, blah blah blah. So I bit into it. I bit its body off with my teeth. And the prawn just relaxed in this way that was really eerie. And the taste of the prawn, the taste of the meat of it, was extraordinary. It was sweet. It was like there was life coursing through it. It was the most alive thing I've ever eaten, obviously literally. But again, it was freaky. It was getting too close to the actual nature of consumption, which is killing a living creature with your teeth. And I thought that I'd killed it. But in fact, when I put it down, it still had so much life in it that it grabbed a piece of salmon sashimi and wouldn't let go of it. And I don't think I ever want to do that again. Do you think, in some way, that it's more acceptable to eat an animal if you are more awake to the fact that it is an animal, and what's happened to it? Or do you think it really doesn't matter? I think it matters a great deal. I mean, one of the greatest metaphors in Western civilization is that of, you know, Christ, who gave his life so that others might live. And I don't want to be sacrilegious, and I don't want to belittle that myth in any way, but a pig is giving its life so that we might eat. A chicken is giving its life so that we might eat. And I think the least that we can do is to think about that chicken, to think about that calf that we're eating, not necessarily to be sad for it, but to celebrate it, to be aware of the being that it was, that it wasn't just this bit of bioengineered protein that somehow managed to find its way onto our plates. Jonathan Gold, food writer for Gourmet magazine. Coming up, a chicken diva just a few inches tall, and how a chicken company changed a white man into a black man. That's in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, during this period of greatest poultry consumption in our nation, as we do every year at this time on This American Life, we bring you stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, fowl of all kind, real and imagined. Today we bring you new stories and some favorite from poultry shows past. We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, How to do the Funky Chicken. Well, thus far on our show, we've heard about imaginary poultry in the life of one family. We've heard about poultry as pet and poultry as food. In this act, we examine poultry as a business. It is such a powerful business, says reporter Mark Schone, that it is able to recast human identities. Sometimes. Anyone older than 30 remembers Colonel Harland Sanders. He was that plantation Santa in the white suit and string tie, the ancient Southern chicken hawker on the TV ads and the talk shows. He'd flash a crinkly country smile at Mike Douglas and act all down home, sharing a few cracker barrel truths about staying happy in old age. Colonel Sanders insisted that fried chicken didn't harden your arteries, and he lived to be 90 years old to prove it. Here's the man himself in a promo film from the '60s. So I set my yeast, made the sponge, and made the light bread and baked it all, and it was the prettiest loaf of bread that I believe that I most ever seen. So we take my sister and a loaf of bread, and walked this three miles over to [? Andrewville, ?] across the fields and around the highways, carrying this little sister of mine. And we're taking this loaf of bread in to show mom what we had done, don't you see. Now, two decades after he lay in state at the Kentucky capitol building, the Colonel has come back from the dead. He's returned to deliver a message from the other side, but it's hardly the homespun folk wisdom you'd expect. Hey there! This is your Colonel talking. Now, I've got something here that is downright fun. It's more fun than watchin' me, unless of course Colonel get funky. Go Colonel, go Colonel. Reanimated as a cartoon, the Colonel still has a pink face and white suit, but these days the erstwhile Southern gentleman twirls his cane like Huggy Bear and pimp limps to the greasy beat of old-school '70s funk. When he chants, Go Colonel, he's doing the Cabbage Patch, that annoying end zone celebration of a dance, where the arms stick straight out while the shoulders rotate. Since September 9, 1998, in an ad campaign that began on his 108th birthday, the Colonel has Cabbage Patched, tap danced, rapped, and played basketball. He is not merely risen from the grave, he's risen above the rim, where he catches an alley-oop pass and jams the rock in the hole. The Colonel is now a black man. What's it mean when a redneck who dressed like a slave owner comes back from the dead and gets funky? For people who actually knew the Colonel, like biographer John Ed Pearce, his racial makeover can be a little jarring. I resent it. It depicts the Colonel as a clown, as a song and dance guy. He was a redneck showman and he believed very deeply and thoroughly in publicity. But he was not a clown. He had a certain innate dignity to him. A little chicken music please. [SINGING] The thigh bone's connected to the wing bone. The wing bone's connected to the-- He was a showman, though. Are you saying he would never sing "Dem Bones?" No. Wouldn't do a Cabbage Patch dance? No. That's what I'm trying to say. He was not a clown. Dancing around, twirling his cane, and the Southern accent, which he did not have. The real Harland Sanders was an Indiana hick who left home young and had dozens of different careers. At one point, he dressed up as the Michelin man and worked the county fairs. Finally, he settled in southeastern Kentucky and opened a gas station slash motel slash cafe, which became the lab where he perfected his pressure-cooked fried chicken and secret original recipe. For 30 years, he ran the Sanders cafe in Corbin, Kentucky, and earned a rep as a hardass, redneck, potty mouth who really liked the ladies. A woman at the Chamber of Commerce told me that every time Harland came in, why, she had to beat his hands off of her. And she told him, Harland, get your hands off me. I got all I need at home. When he wasn't cussing and adulterin', he was not loving his neighbor as himself. The Colonel welcomed a fight and fought to win by any means necessary. There are countless tales of him throwing knives, plates, and chunks of concrete, and lashing out with canes and chairs up past the age of 70. This supposed Southern gentleman guarded his turf like a South Central Crip. In 1931, he and his homies confronted a rival who was painting over his billboards. The punk was tagging the Colonel's signs. Sanders let the bullets rip. The original recipe gangsta drilled his foe in the breast and thigh. At KFC, we do chicken right! And not just in a bucket neither. The Colonel? He the man. The most delicious thought about the commercials that turned Colonel Sanders into a black man is the oh-wouldn't-it-be-so-ironic possibility that this elderly Southerner was a racist. He did once ride in a parade with segregationist hero George Wallace. His adopted hometown of Corbin was a don't-let-the-sun-set-on-you kind of place, known and feared among Kentucky blacks, particularly after an episode of ethnic cleansing in 1919, when a posse of whites lynched a few local blacks, burned others, and put the survivors on a train out of town. And it probably didn't help that halfway through the century, at age 60, Harland Sanders decided to become Colonel Sanders. Mimicking a Southern planter, he began sporting a white suit, string tie, and walking stick. A hairdresser died his goatee white to match his hair. In 1974, the freaky blacksploitation flick, Darktown Strutters, channeled the worst suspicions of blacks and liberals. The villain of the film is a Colonel Sanders clone whose fast food empire hides an underground Ku Klux Klavern full of racist bikers. There wasn't a racist bone in his body. For that fact, he bent over backwards to make a change. If the perception of him being a racist was real, he wanted to overcome that. As head of public relations for Kentucky Fried Chicken in the late '70s, Ray Callender traveled the country with the Colonel for several years. He had to kick his boss under the table sometimes to stop him griping to the press about the declining quality of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and he heard a lot of salty language in the back of the Colonel's white Caddy. But as a black man riding shotgun for the very emblem of white southernness, Callender never once caught Sanders saying the n-word. And the only close incident that came like that was when he was writing his own little speech in preparation for whatever was going on, and he turned to me and said, he wanted to know what us nice folks were calling ourselves these days. And I looked up and I said, well, what do you mean? And he said, well, is-- his term was-- he didn't say nigger. It was Negra. And I said, oh, this is where it comes to a stop. Nowadays we call ourselves black. And then he would say, Well, I wouldn't call you nice folks black. To the Colonel, black was a derogatory term to him. And you can imagine coming through that time, that's-- he was raised in that environment. Of course, when we travelled out, we'd rent limousines. And in the case with me traveling with the Colonel, I always sat in the back, believe it or not, and he sat up front with the driver. And what he would do, when we got to the motel where we stayed, he jumped out of the car and ran to the back to open the door for me, and run ahead to the hotel and guide me through the door, and he would carry the bags. And we had, at that point, back in 1976, the doorman came to me, scratching his head, and said, you know, I know that man is Colonel Sanders, that Kentucky Fried Chicken guy, millionaire. And I said, yeah. And he said, well, who the hell are you? And the Colonel said, that's my son, but we don't talk about that. After the Colonel died, his empire got in a mess of trouble, running around like a chicken chain with its head cut off. There was the unhealthy vibe of that bad word, fried, easily fixed by changing the name to KFC. But more importantly, there was the morphing of fast food from carry-out to eat-in. Buckets of chicken were old-timey, like families eating dinner together at home. KFC needed new products, like sandwiches, that people could eat in the store for lunch. And there was the matter of the dead company spokesman. Last year, after many false starts, KFC solved the product and pitching problems in one fell swoop. It debuted a line of sandwiches and other boneless items, and it brought the Colonel back as a cartoon to sell them. The impact, says Peter Folds, KFC's chief image and ad director, was immediate. And that's when we knew we had a hit on our hands, because literally outside of the office you'd have people doing that Cabbage Patch dance and going, go Colonel, go Colonel. So we knew we had something good on our hands then. Out in the street. I mean, people in a store. You'd go in a grocery store, and I'd be in an aisle, and I'd see a little kid doing that, showing her mother that she could do that. So just very spontaneous. I am getting a tan. Folds denies the new animated Colonel is in any way urban, to use ad-speak for black. He confirms, however, that the KFC brand name is more popular among blacks than whites, and he claims the Cabbage Patch Colonel has been embraced by black consumers. According to Folds, the campaign has clicked so well with everybody in America that sales have risen 6% and KFC's once sleepy lunch hour is jumping. Again, Ray Callender. I think the ad campaign is great in more ways than one, because since I did travel with the Colonel, it kind of reminded me of him, kind of nostalgic kind of trip. And you think he would be OK with what they've done with his image? I know that, because I know what he was trying to accomplish when he was alive. I mean, at that time, I was travelling with him, he wanted to be more involved in the minority community. In light of, I think at that time, sales-- more than 40% of our sales-- were from the minority community. And he actually wanted to go learn Spanish and do commercials in Spanish, and visit with the minority community in New York City, in Harlem in particular. So it sounds like he was, you know, if it would sell some chicken, he would do it. If it sold chicken, he would do it. Hello? Keisha, are you ready for this? We can get two pieces of chicken, leg or thigh, a side and a biscuit for just $1.99! Where? At KFC, girl! [CALL WAITING BEEP] One second, Keisha. Hello? Hey, it's the Colonel. The Colonel? I just want to tell you my original recipe chicken is finger-licking kicking! And my square meal deal is for real! The Colonel is free at last. Thank God Almighty, he's free at last. And the black man set him free. An urbanized tune has taken the last lingering stink of the old South off him. Once upon a time, in true American style, he invented himself. And now we are reinventing him. I confess I have a crush on the new, improved, funky Colonel. His patchwork soul is exactly what makes me get all maudlin about America. I'm proud to live in a country where any little white boy, from any small redneck town, through hard work and perseverance, can someday, if he's lucky, grow up to be a black man. Mark Schone is a writer living in Brooklyn. Act Four, Chicken Diva. In the end it seems, when humans are concerned, chickens are what we make of them. For further evidence, we have this story from Jack Hitt. Oddly enough, it wasn't Susan who was obsessed with chickens. It was Kenny, a pal who worked backstage at the 92nd Street Y in New York. His house was filled with chicken cups, chicken masks. He got the whole staff onto chickens, including Susan. For a time there in the '80s, poultry-related jokes and references became the fast way to get a laugh at the Y. I guess most of us are condemned to see nothing more than the easy comedy of chickens. But Susan Vitucci saw something else, their potential greatness, their hidden beauty, their grandeur. One day she glued together some finger puppets for a 10-minute rendition of the Chicken Little story for her nephew. That was 14 years ago. Today it is a full-length opera, enjoyed by a cult following whenever it goes up in a workshop or cafe or small theater. It's still performed with finger puppets, but now it has a complete score written by a noted composer, Henry Krieger, who did Dreamgirls. The Chicken Little opera he wrote with Susan Vitucci is called Love's Fowl. Needless to say, that's F-O-W-L. Well, we were going to start with the opening, the opening [SPEAKING ITALIAN]. We are the Clothespin Repertory Theater. And we have a special singing guest for you, which, I don't know-- Susan and I are sitting at Henry's baby grand piano. Henry's guest is his Maltese terrier named Toby. Perhaps Toby would be kind enough-- Yeah, would she sit on your lap for this? Yeah, let's see what we can do. OK OK, listen carefully, because once Toby gets going, he actually harmonizes with Henry and Susan. You may have noticed that this libretto is in Italian, just like a real opera. Before, it was just a bunch of puppets in a box, you know, with a good idea. And then, suddenly, as soon as it went into Italian, it became something bigger than what it had been. And it's because, when it's in English, we all kind of know it and it's really not that interesting. And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. As soon as it's in Italian, it gives us enough distance that we can come in. It's like the lover who doesn't want you. You don't want anybody more than you want the one who doesn't want you. Right? And so it's sort of the same thing. You may recall that when you last heard of Little, back in kindergarten, she was just an average barn door fowl, who had an acorn drop on her head, which she mistakenly understood to be the sky falling. Her alarms excited her friends, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey, and Ducky Lucky, and they join her for a journey to the king to tell him the important news. On the way, they meet up with Sly Fox. Little's pals eagerly accept his invitation for dinner, literally, as it turns out. Fortunately for Little, hunger is not enough to distract her from her mission, and she treks on. When she meets the king, he tells her that the sky's not falling, it's just an acorn. So the enlightened Chicken Little returns to her coop, and that's where the story ends. What are we to take away from Little's experience? I like to think it's that Little is rewarded with life, precisely because she went off on this quixotic mission, totally in the grip of a wrong idea. The children's fable barely figures into the story. It's just one small episode in the life of Chicken Little, now known as La Pulcina Piccola. After the acorn incident, she goes on to become an internationally renowned figure in almost every field imaginable, a diva of politics, academe, theater, art, derring-do. Like Venus, she arrives from some other world, transported on a scallop shell, but the triumphs of her life begin after a youthful love affair with a fighting cock ends bitterly, and she consoles herself-- as we all do at some point in our lives-- by plunging into Shakespeare. She becomes an overnight sensation as an actress, celebrated all over the world for one role. Juliet? Cleopatra? Ophelia? The company then performs an excerpt, a recreation of her signature role, which is Richard III. Well, you know, I mean, Sarah Bernhardt did Hamlet-- Well, there's a great tradition of women playing the men's roles in Shakespeare, but I think Richard III is one of the more rare roles to be played by a woman. Well, that's how adventuresome an actress this chicken was. I can assure you, there's nothing like watching a four-inch tall finger puppet crying out, a horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! in Italian. Not to mention that that puppet is a chicken, surrounded by a whole supporting cast of poultry, and other avian supernumeraries. Susan says that, artistically, there's something special about chickens. They're a clean slate. You can put anything on them. You can project anything onto them, because it's not like they have, to me at least, a very strong personality. Except for La Pulcina. In the opera, she moves into the field of archaeology, masters it, needless to say, and makes a great discovery, the last tomb of Gallapatra, but not before she sails the Seven Seas, is shipwrecked, gets rescued, but it's by pirates, and then she meets the pirate king. As soon as he meets her, he falls in love with her, because of her sweet spirit. Because she comes in and she says, here you see a little chicken, who, although I'm dripping wet, I'm proud and yellow. Let me repeat that lyric for you, in a purer translation. Although I stand before you, a chicken, who is dripping wet, I am proud and I am yellow. OK, back to Susan. And although I have loved and I have lost, I have learned to follow the call of adventure. So let's sail on. Keep in mind that all of the action, like everything that occurs in every Susan Vitucci production, ever since the first one for her nephew, and continuing to this day, occurs among characters created by sticking a small painted Styrofoam ball onto a larger painted Styrofoam ball, poking in two map tacks for eyes, gluing on a tiny felt beak, and then impaling the whole thing on top of one of those really old-fashioned clothes pins that a '40s cartoon figure would clamp to his nose around a chunk of Limburger cheese. And I could go on. Susan has written, or as she puts it, translated La Pulcina Piccola's diaries, which detail the other adventures that happened in between those in the opera. There are 60 pages so far, excerpts of which have appeared in Clotheslines, the official fan club newsletter of the opera. Love's Fowl has a strange effect on people. I didn't understand it until Susan loaned me a videotape of one performance. To be honest, I thought I would be annoyed at the intentional irony and hokeyness of the puppets. But there I was, with my three-year-old daughter, who loved the show, watching a plastic bird pantomime one of the simplest human moments, but also one of the most profound, the confession of a great love. In this case, with a cock robin. The song that she sings as she enters goes, I am a chicken and ready for love. My heart is as fragile as the egg from which I was born. Treat me gently and so will I treat you. Together from earthly love we will reach for the divine. And then she sings, I am a chicken and I can't fly without love. My heart it is strong as the egg from which I was born. And so forth. And so, it is only with cock robin that she flies. And after they've agreed to fly together, and they're soaring in the air, cock robin is shot and killed, murdered by a jealous sparrow. I couldn't believe it, but I was getting choked up, especially when cock robin appeared on the stage, his Styrofoam body spray painted black for the lament, his little magic marker eyes drawn as X's. I gathered my daughter in my arms and held on tight as I was helplessly drawn into an expression of the grief and suffering of this little sad bird. In this era of slick special effects, there was something unexpectedly liberating in the marriage of this crude medium, painted Styrofoam balls bobbing up and down behind a cardboard box, and the high melodramatic art of Italian opera. Picture it. I want a subscription to that newsletter. Are you going to do this? I mean, are you going to be working with Pulcina Piccola you think for the rest of your life? It's possible. And I like working with her because I get to go into a world that's inhabited by a very sweet spirit and play with the mechanics of the world. And because it's very small-- like, I could never have afforded to produce this show with people. But I could afford to do it with clothespins. So I can do as big a production as I want with clothespins. I can have stuff fly in and out and come in from traps, and I can have all kinds of fancy, flashy stuff that costs millions of dollars to do on Broadway. And it cost me $200 because I had to buy lots and lots of Styrofoam and clothespins and stuff, and all this, and a new table maybe, and I get to do whatever I want. Jack Hitt's a writer who lives in New Haven. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, Alix Spiegel, Julie Snyder, and Nancy Updike. Musical help from John Connors. Thanks also to Larry Josephson and Jay Hedblade. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Susan Vitucci's opera about Chicken Little is available on CD at www.pulcina.org. That's pulcina spelled, of course, P-U-L-C-I-N-A.org. To buy a cassette of this or any of our non-poultry oriented shows, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or visit our website, where you can also listen to our programs for free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who decided he did not want to come onto our program after he asked just one question. This is just radio? Not TV? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Kate Aurthur became the rat columnist for New York magazine because she believed, in some way, that rats were at the heart of life in the Big City. Every New Yorker, she says, has a story about a rat. The singer and actor, Ru Paul, found an alley near City Hall with, he said, a thousand rats in it. If he'd fallen off his bicycle, he swore they'd a killed him. I think he was exaggerating. But I did go to that alley at night and it was, by far, the most rats I've ever seen in one place. I'm picturing like a carpet of rats. I was with a friend of mine who was driving, and we stopped at the end of the alley and turned out her lights. There's so much garbage, first of all, so they were just climbing all over the place. So it was very disturbing, because they were actually at our eye level. And I mean, it was terrifying. We're in a big truck and it didn't seem safe enough, like to be in an Isuzu Trooper. It seemed like they had the advantage. I mean, she was screaming so loudly that I became afraid of her. It was terrible. I was like drive, drive! It was terrible. Well from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, stories of nature creeping into the most man-made environments possible. Nature sneaking in places where it's very existence is a rebuke to the notion that we, as a species, have it under control. When vermin infiltrate your house, or my house, there's this feeling of it's us versus them. It's a contest with nature where it suddenly feels like nature might actually win. I'm from Brooklyn. I mean, I'm from the streets of Brooklyn. I was born, raised, and probably will die. This is from this great documentary by Mark Lewis called-- simply enough-- Rats. And I mean, I know what a mentality is, a street mentality is. I know when somebody takes on that type of a role. And I when I looked into the eyes of the rats, I mean, I could see that they had an intelligence just like in the street where it's not just one kid, you're facing up to 20 kids. They all have the single-minded presence of mind to do what they have to do to you. Usually, when we talk about man versus nature, and we build these urban environments and we quash nature and we control nature, there's a part of us that believes that we should be rooting for nature. That nature means beautiful greenery and the clear blue sky and the deep blue sea. But when weeds breakthrough our perfectly paved sidewalk, when the cockroaches march in, when the rat arrives, we remember why we wanted to tame nature in the first place. Rats showed up at this guy's house, and he tried ceiling walls and he tried poisoning them, he tried chasing them and killing them with a two by four, and still they came, and multiplied. Terrorizing his family, finally forcing them to move. I really do believe that they knew that they won. Because remember, when you do look inside of his eyes, you can see he's got a soul. He's got something inside of him, and he's looking right back at you. He wants you just as bad as you want him. It's you or him. I know when I was there I wished the rats dead. If I could of, I would have killed each one by hand myself personally. It brought my family terror, horror, economic grief. So yeah, I definitely held a grudge against them. They scarred me and they scarred my family, and will always be with us. Well today on our program, five stories of nature seeping into man-made environments, stripping the veneer of civilization off of us in the process. Act one, Interpretation of Dreams. In which we hear how an entire nation has coped with the sheer trauma of what it means to knock down trees, rip into the earth, and all the other things you have to do to nature when you build a modern, industrial city. Act two, One Brave Man Stands Up For What's Right. In which one of America's best known politicians goes mono a mono on behalf of human beings against the untamed wilderness. Act three, Church of Latter Day Snakes. Scott Carrier tells the true story of one family experiment at bringing the outdoors indoors. Act four, God Bless the Hamster Who Has His Own. In which an average high school student explains why it is bad luck for any animal to become her pet. Act five, Waiting For the End of the World. The writer Iggy Scam hits the road to test a theory about the men who fish. Maybe you've seen these guys right in the middle of the Big City. Stay with us. Act one, Interpretation of Dreams. Building everything that we think of as modern life, cities and suburbs both, means trammeling nature. And that bothers some people, they want to keep nature at hand. Even if they're living in the heart of the city. Even if the part of nature they're trying to preserve is something most of us can't see and never notice. David Rakoff brings us this case example. Grasteinn, literally gray rock, is a famous boulder in Reykjavik, Iceland. It sits cracked in two, fat and satisfied on its own square of sod. On two occasions in the last 30 years, plans were underway to expand the road and detonate the rock. Both times, locals came forward and protested the destruction, claiming that the rock was inhabited by "hidden people." Invisible beings from another dimension who, along with elves and trolls, are a mainstay of Icelandic folklore. And both times, despite a complete lack of concrete evidence, indeed despite a complete lack of even a history of tales attached to that rock, the Icelandic Public Roads Administration heeded these protests and spared the boulder. Prior to my arrival, Victor Ingolfsson, chief of the publishing unit for the Public Roads Administration-- their PR guy-- had sent me an article he had written that explained the decision. It is titled, "The Public Roads Administration and the Belief in Elves." It turns out to be quite beautifully written. In addition to his day job, Victor is a novelist. His third book has been on the national bestseller list for months. But its tone is an interesting mixture of exasperation and respect for the feelings of others. He writes, "A lot of time goes into answering the same old questions. It is hope that this text will rectify the situation and it can be looked upon as the author's interpretation of the PRA's view on the issue. It will not answer the question of whether the PRA's employees do or do not believe in elves and hidden people because opinion differs greatly, and it tends to be a rather personal matter. However, you may assume that the author severely doubts the existence of such phenomena." In person, I ask him about this. This belief in these hidden people is primarily a quaint folk tradition, not really believed by many people. Yeah that's right. I wonder why you guys make any concessions? Of this? Because the people who do believe, they are pretty serious about it. But certainly we have people who believe in a lot of things that nobody else believes in, in the larger community, and we would never even think-- But this is a small community. So basically, everyone knows everyone, almost. So you really have to listen to everyone because you are probably going to meet them at a party after awhile. You know, when you scream at someone in traffic in New York, you know you're probably not going to meet them again, so you do it. But not so much here I think. I heard stories as a child, yes. But I don't think that people took it seriously. Arni Bjornsson is a cultural anthropologist and head of the ethnological department of the National Museum. He is a sweet-looking, beetle-browed grandfatherly type. A man in his 70s, who, like Viktor, also seems wistfully regretful that the pretext that gets someone like me onto an airplane and over to Iceland is to scrutinize this daffy, essentially non-representative aspect of their society. Imagine you were outside of a jazz club, a place devoted to a quintessentially American art form, and a reporter from another country comes up and microphone in hand, starts quizzing you on why so many high-rises here don't have 13th floors. Now, but when you were a child, did you believe in them? I didn't believe in them, but I didn't exclude the possibility. In my own farm there were two cliffs, and there was said that there lived some hidden people in there. And you should not cut the grass near the cliffs, because it belonged to the hidden people. Those were the stories. This turns out to be a paradigmatic model, which I hear over and over again. The story of the grass belonging to the hidden people that must never be cut. The other model of story that keeps coming up is one of benevolent wish fulfillment. Mortal women fall into slumbers from which they cannot be woken. In this dream state, they are visited by hidden people. And having performed some service or having been fallen in love with, these mortal women are given pieces of fine cloth. Much finer than anything available to them in their waking lives. The world of the hidden people is a sort of a dream world. They are like human beings, but if anything, they are more beautiful. They had better houses in the hills and the cliffs. They had better furniture. They had better clothes. They had better food. Freud's theory of dreams is ultimately that they are at heart, disguised versions of unacceptable wishes, of infantile desires whose fulfillment is necessarily unhealthy or unattainable. In a country as physically inhospitable as Iceland, its cold, seemingly endless winter with only five hours of smudgy daylight. Things as basic as warmth, clothing, sufficient food and companionship, might all be seen as inappropriate eruptions from the id. But it still begs the question, what possible purpose do these stories serve today? Present day Reykjavik is a completely modern city, essentially immune to the nasty brutishness of nature. Still, the stories that hearken from that hardscrabble time are fondly remembered and closely guarded by nearly everyone I talk to. When I was about 10 years old, I saw an elf. Where? In my house. Let me interrupt here and paint a picture. This is not some sod hat-dwelling yokel I am talking to. This woman works in a trendy clothing store on Laugavegur, Reykjavik's main shopping street. She is wearing a long black skirt, a shiny dark red top, a glittery boa, and black felt platform boots. This is one hip chick. What did he look like? You know, like you see on the drawings of them. Small, a little hat. Do you believe in them? Yes, of course. Really? Yes. Have you seen any? No, I have not seen any. There's so many stories, and people talk a lot about them, so they must be true. I think it's nice to believe it. That's one thing that I like about Iceland. It is that yearning quality. That sense that it's at least nice to believe in hidden people that comes up again and again, even from a skeptic like Arni. The tales are a vestige of a pre-urban Iceland. They are a holdover from what came before. And the physical record of what came before seems to be disappearing at an alarming rate in Reykjavik. Everywhere I look there is new construction. And the city itself, despite being over 200 years old, is counter-intuitively new. I had been expecting a baby Amsterdam, whole spun sugar, northern European architecture, spires, gables, cobblestones. Reykjavik, however, turns out to be very Bauhaus kind of town. A lot of it looks not a little like a vast Audi dealership. Urbanization is intrinsically a violent process. It elicits a terrified nostalgia and perhaps a little bit of guilt. It makes us want to hold fast to what we feel we are destroying. This was at the heart of the arts and crafts movement of the 19th century, with its concentration on handiwork, on the non-industrial. In part, it what's made the Brothers Grimm decide to compile their oral ethnography of indigenous German folktales when they did. Even Martha Stewart's monomaniacal obsession with the homemade is born of a similar impulse, an impulse to, if not stop time, at least slow it down some and preserve some sense of the past. We are here in the library now. We have about 5,000 different books about psychic and spiritual things and also on hidden people. And here we have a classroom, and there are some students here studying as you can hear. This is Magnus Skarpheoinsson, founder of The Elf School, which offers four hour courses, mostly for foreigners. The course includes a bus tour of the main elf and hidden people sites in Reykjavik, followed by a typical Icelandic coffee and pancake breakfast. It's all pleasantly low rent. The sign on the door is a paper flyer with a drawing of a cartoon ghost. Within that demographic of those who yearn for hidden people to exist, Magnus, it seems, yearns the most. But he covers this yearning with a veneer of science. He calls himself a scientist. He is convinced that with properly funded scientific research, the existence of hidden people could be proven conclusively. Magnus speaks about hidden people as an anthropologist or census taker might. The main population of hidden people, he tells me, number some 20,000 to 30,000 individuals. I just would love to see them. Especially I would be wanting to see them and being invited to one cliff. Because I would ask 5,000 questions inside there. Where did you get the carpet? Where did you get the table? Where did you get the stove? Where did you get this? Have you been abroad? That's probably the reason why they haven't invited me. It clearly rankles him a little bit that Erla Steffansdottir, a piano teacher and one of Iceland's most noted elf communicators, claims she has been seeing elves and hidden people her whole life. Magnus has led me to believe that my chances of meeting Erla would be slim to none. That she is difficult. That she will not be helpful. That she traffics in arbitrary rivalries. But when I call without having to push, she tells me to come the next day at 4 o'clock. Erla's maps of hidden people sites around Iceland are on sale in tourist shops in Reykjavik. I was expecting a Stevie Nicks type, wild hair, clanking jewelry, a tatterdemalion velvet cape, cats. Instead, I found a friendly if somewhat shy woman in her 40s living in a lovely apartment on the top floor of a Reykjavik townhouse with a bay window. Erla's house is decorated in the tasteful middle class aesthetic one might expect of a piano teacher-- landscape paintings, old furniture. Erla's friend, Bjork [UNINTELLIGIBLE] is there to help translate Things began a little awkwardly. When did you first see or realize that you could see hidden people? It's a little stupid to ask when I see. Erla says she has always been able to see the various beings who live in dimensions other than our own. Like that one right there she says, indicating a place on the coffee table beside a Danish modern glass ashtray. She then catches herself. Oh, that's right. You can't see it. She shakes her head slightly, amused at her forgetfulness that others do not possess her gift. It's a somewhat disingenuous moment, like when your friend, newly back from a semester in Paris says to you, it's like, uhm, oh, I forget the English word, how you say fromage? When I am playing on the piano they come. They are everywhere. The music attracts them, so when she's playing they come. They gather around her. Are they moving around right here? One sits there. Two are walking over here. One is sitting there. I am suddenly overcome with a completely inappropriate urge, the barely suppressed impulse to slam my hand down on the coffee table really, really hard, right where she's pointing. Obviously, I refrain from doing so. She said, in every home there's a dwarf or an elf who is like the size of a three-year-old child. Every home has it and with those beings, you can communicate. So every house has a house elf? In New York City too? So you have one in your home too. Yeah, exactly. But Bjork points out that house elves are a privilege, not a right. When the energy of a given house gets too negative, she says, when there is drinking or fighting, the elves will leave. Suddenly, mysticism, new age philosophy, recovery speak, and elves our conflated as one. Erla says that elves are a manifestation of nature. They are inherently good. Without them we were choke on our own pollution. There's almost no more urban point of view of nature than this pastoral idyllic one. Humankind bad, nature good. As in, drinking and fighting bad. The elves and flowers good. But it's a false dichotomy. After all, following this logic Sistine Chapel bad, Ebola virus good? The next day on my way to Keflavik Airport, I get a sustained look at the landscape outside the city. In the weak afternoon light, it is an unrelievedly monochromatic view. Flat, vaguely undulating, black rock, cracked all over with a tracery of fissures. To the right, the vast gray sea and to the left, in the distance, the strange hills, looking like whales resting on their sides. Each one isolated against the horizon. At one point, we drive within half a mile of the perfect cone of a young volcano. The rain falls all the while. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare describes the Athenian wood that lies just beyond the gates of the city as "A place where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine, with sweet musk-roses and eglantine." It's crowded in that Athenian forest. You can't take two steps without having to push aside some blossom-heavy branch concealing countless magical fairies. By contrast, Icelanders were frequently all alone in the wilderness. The spaces yawn open, wide and disconnected. And it is our nature to connect, to create for ourselves a fully formed community where none exists. We are hardwired for it. As Oberon says, "The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. And as imagination bodies forth, the form of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them into shapes and gives to airy nothing, a local habitation and a name." David Rakoff lives in New York, where despite his best efforts, he does not believe in magic. He's put a version of this story into his upcoming book, which is called Fraud. Act two. OK, so let's review. In Iceland, the government moves massive boulders because a handful of citizens believe that invisible hidden people live near those boulders. As we look around the world, not every city government is quite as accommodating of people's idiosyncratic wishes. Take this example. This is Rudy Giuliani, back again on the air. Now we're going to go to David in Oceanside. Hello, Mr. Guiliani. We speak again. Hi David. Let me introduce myself again. David Guthartz, executive president of New York Ferrets' Right Advocacy. Last week when we spoke, you said a very disparaging remark to me that I should get a life. That was very unprofessional of you. Here we're trying to get something seriously done-- without you talking over me-- we're trying to get something very seriously done. David, you're on my show. I have the right to talk over you. But here's the thing. You talked over me the last time. OK, let's just stop the tape right there. They're on my show and-- so I guess I have the right to talk over them. This is the mayor of New York, of course. This was recorded July 23, 1999. He was doing his weekly call-in show on WABC AM. This exchange made the news because the mayor got so exercised about whether New Yorkers should be allowed to keep ferrets in their homes. Mr. Giuliani, of course, is famous for having transformed New York City. Sweeping everything, including the homeless people, off the streets. In his view, New York versus ferrets is just a reiteration of the basic question, civilization versus chaos. And he knows where he stands. If you follow the news very, very closely, you may have read about this exchange in the paper. Very few of us actually heard it. We decided to get a copy of the tape. David, you're on my show. I have the right to talk over you. But here's the thing. You talked over me last time. And the fact-- We are trying to get-- David! --important issue taken care of where the city is violating state law. And I had asked you last week if you care about the law. Yes, I do care about the law. I think you have totally and absolutely misinterpreted the law, because there's something deranged about you. No there isn't, sir. The law states-- The excessive concern that you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist. Sir, understand that-- well, first of all-- Not with me. --don't go insulting me again. I'm not insulting you. I'm being honest with you. Maybe nobody in your life has ever been honest with you. But there's an incessant-- Sir, I happen to be more sane than you. David, there is-- First of all, let me explain to you something-- There is a serious-- Mr. Guiliani. David. Rudy. This conversation is over, David. Thank you. There is something really, really very sad about you. You need help. You need somebody to help you. This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness. I'm sorry, that's my opinion. You don't have to accept it. There are probably very few people that would be as honest with you about that. But you should go consult a psychologist or a psychiatrist and have him help you with this excessive concern. How you are devoting your life to weasels. There are people in this city and in this world that need a lot of help. Something has gone wrong with you. Your compulsion about it, your excessive concern with it, is the sign of something wrong in your personality. I do not mean to be insulting. I'm trying to be honest with you, and I'm trying to give you advice for your own good. You have a sickness. And I know it's hard for you to accept that, because you hang on to this sickness. And it's your shield, it's your whatever. You've got to go to somebody who understands this a lot better than I do. And I know you're real angry at me and you're going to attack me. But actually, you're angry at yourself. You're afraid of what I'm raising with you. You need help. And please get it. Now we're going to move onto Richard in the Bronx. Hello? Yes, Richard. Yes. Mr. Mayor, my name is Richard-- Rudolph Giuliani, mayor of New York City. At the time when we first broadcast these comments on our program, he was a candidate for the US Senate. When we contacted the democrat who eventually won that senate seat, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to find out her stance on the ferret issue, her staff never returned the call. Coming up, a story involving Scott Carrier, some explosives, a newspaper reporter, a bunch of kids, and a rattlesnake. Also, can a hamster come back from the grave to haunt you? And other urgent, yet curiously unanswered questions, in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program of course, we chose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program is about those cracks and crevices where nature insinuates itself into environments that are completely man-made, and what that does to people. We've arrived at act three of our program. Act three, Church of the Latter Day Snakes. This is the story of people who want more of nature than the chance to occasionally hike and goof around outside. These are people who bump up against the question, how far should we go in our love of the great outdoors? Can you bring it inside the house? Scott Carrier tells this story from Salt Lake City. We had already brought home the dynamite and blasting caps we found abandoned in the gully by the freeway. Now we prepared to set out for the foothills to capture a rattlesnake. Our father had not let us keep the explosives, and I doubted he would allow a rattlesnake in the house, but my brother, my older brother, had seen the snake and knew where it lived, and he wanted it. He needed it, to study for science. He'd read a book on herpetology and had made a snake catching stick by carving a small fork at one end to pin down the snake's head against the ground. We'd practice with the stick-- my brother, myself, and my best friend, Lenny-- jabbing at imaginary snakes in the backyard. We had a pocket knife sharpened on a whetstone to use to cut open the wound and suck out the poison in case one of us got bit. We felt pretty sure we knew what we were doing. My brother said, we'll keep it in the cage in my room downstairs and feed it mice and toads. As long as we keep it a secret, everything will be fine. He said this looking at me, because the dynamite and blasting caps had also been a secret until I blabbed the whole story one night at dinner. How we found the wooden crates in the cottonwoods along the river. How we recognized the contents because, in those days, they were public service commercials on television during the cartoons, warning kids never to touch blasting caps that might be lying around discarded or forgotten. Kids had died. Kids had had their arms blown off, their faces removed, and so on. So when we found the boxes it was like finding buried treasure. We weren't going to touch the contents, but we weren't going to leave them there either. We were careful, very careful, carrying them home. Walking slowly, smoothly. One false step and it would be all she wrote. Kabloom, sayonara, kiss our own sweet asses goodbye. We brought the boxes home and hid them in the basement where they'd be safe, thinking that there would be endless possibilities. I told this story at dinner hoping that our dad would recognize these possibilities, but he immediately called the cops, and they came and took it all away. Then the next day, the reporter showed up and we were the paper, and it just didn't come out at all like I thought it would. I admitted it was a mistake to talk about the dynamite. I said I'd learned my lesson, and I swore I would not say anything ever about the rattlesnake. Do you swear to God, my friend Lenny said. There is no God, my brother said. Swear on your honor. I swear to God. I swear on my honor, I said. I can keep a secret. But we all knew that I couldn't. I was the type of kid who would try to wrap the truth tightly inside my body only to have it eventually emerge from my mouth, like a hairy moth from a cocoon. We headed out with our knapsacks, the three of us, down the street of our brand new subdivision on the far eastern edge of town, next to the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, a place of natural forces, the line where civilization ended and the wilderness began. Some of the homes in the subdivision were newly occupied, and some were still under construction with piles of scrap wood in the yards, the asphalt black and smooth, the sidewalks and driveways white and shiny and floating six inches above the native sand and gravel, waiting for sprinklers, topsoil, and sod. We cut through a neighbor's backyard, jumped the fence, and then crawled through a three foot diameter drainage pipe under the freeway on-ramp, and we are out of the city walking up into the scrub brush. We didn't know it then, but the entire city was, and still is, surrounded by rattlesnakes. The Salt Lake Valley is shaped like a bull 20 miles in diameter with the Salt Lake itself resting like a pool of mercury at the bottom, and the peaks of the mountains forming the rim 7,000 feet above. The rattlesnakes live at a particular narrow band of elevation on the inside of this bull and their habitat, their niche, is continuous around the contour, like a poisonous belt. A deadly ring of serpents, constricting the City of Saints. As if the battle for the Garden of Eden were still ongoing, which I know the Mormon's believe, and maybe the snakes do as well. But all we knew then was that my brother had seen one rattlesnake and knew where it lived in a crack in an outcrop of rocks. Walking up to the rock outcrop, Lenny was telling us how his cousin, Marlin, had told him that some scientists from the University of Utah had implanted radioactive pellets in the stomachs of some rattlesnakes, and then released them in the foothills. Only to discover them months later down by the Great Salt Lake. That's 15 miles, my brother said. Rattlesnakes don't migrate. How would they get there? By sliding along the streets? They'd get run over by cars. That's just it, Lenny said. The scientists couldn't figure it out either. Until a woman was taking a leak in a toilet and got bit in the butt and died. That's when the scientists realized the snakes were in the sewers. That's ridiculous, my brother said. Rattlesnakes don't like water. They don't swim in sewers. They like to stay in one place and sit in the sun. Lenny said, well, that's what the scientists said. It's not true, my brother said. You don't know that much, Lenny said. You may have read a book, but you're not a scientist. Not yet anyway. Well, my brother said, I know enough to know your cousin's lying to you. When we got close to the rock outcrop, we got down on our hands and knees and crawled to a position where we could look down and see the rattlesnake, right where my brother had said it would be, lying in the sun just outside an off-width crack. It was a little rattlesnake, maybe only two feet long. My brother took the stick and slowly inched his way around to where he was just underneath it. And then he jumped up and jabbed at it. He missed and the snake lunged at him, and he jumped back and fell over. And then he got up and jabbed again. This time, pinning down the snake's tail. It whirled and lunged to bite his hand and my brother jumped back again, releasing his hold. Lenny and I were on our feet yelling, get it, get it, get it. But the snake was quick and slid back into the crack out of reach. The whole thing took maybe five seconds, but I'd never seen anything like it. We were jumping up and down, jumping nearly out of our bodies, wild and insane with excitement. We waited for the snake to come back out of the crack, but we'd scared it pretty bad. And then Lenny and I couldn't be quiet, even though my brother kept telling us to shut up. He was mad at it, and even more upset with himself for missing his chance. I didn't care. My brother had abandoned his fear and faced death, or at least severe injury. In a way we'd seen in movies and read about in books, but had never experienced firsthand. My brother was brave. And if my brother was brave, then maybe I could be brave. And I knew then I wanted to be brave more than anything else in the world. So at that point my life changed. All our exploits of ringing doorbells, getting chased by the security guard on the golf course, throwing snowballs at cars, all these seemed childish. The true object, the true endeavor in life, became the pursuit of the bold initiative. The coming face to face with fear in whatever form or manifestation, and doing battle with it. We waited for the snake for a while and then gave up and went home, telling ourselves that we'd come back the next day. But we never did, and maybe it's just as well. Some things don't belong in the house. Our father would have said that, and now at least I can see his point. My brother, however, has never really given in on this. He continued to hunt and catch snakes as a kid. Not rattlesnakes, but plenty of other ones. And he did grow up to become a scientist. A biologist, in fact. Just last week, at the age of 43, after his wife brought home their firstborn son, he put up a six foot high chain link fence, the kind you normally see outside, right across the middle of their kitchen to keep his pack of wild, neurotic lab dogs from jumping the baby. The dogs have already torn up the grass in the backyard, so it's all mud and dirt. One attacked a neighbor's cat. I haven't actually seen the fence yet. My dad told me about it. But I can picture it. The baby on the kitchen floor, sucking on a pacifier. The five dogs sitting just on the other side of the fence, staring intently at a meal they will never enjoy. Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City. His first book, Running After Antelope, will be in stores any day now. Act four, God Bless the Hamster Who Has His Own. Is it right to bring nature in the house, and then put it into the hands of children? Nearly everybody you meet has the story of some pet, usually a gerbil or a hamster, a tiny fish or an amphibian, where something went terribly, terribly wrong. For the pet, anyway. And if this story didn't happen to your friends, it happened to their brothers or sisters. It is sadly common. So when I was six years old and my younger brother was four, we were at the only hamburger place in my hometown. And he had his pet toad in his left hand, and he had his hamburger is his right hand. And unfortunately, he got his hands mixed up. I had a turtle who died in the fall, and they buried it in the backyard. And then, the following spring they were planting bulbs in the area of the yard where the turtle was and they dug it up and it was alive. It had been hibernating. I don't know. I didn't start out really wanting to kill my fish, but I was cleaning their tank and they were in these little Cool Whip containers. And I just didn't like the way that they looked in the little containers. And then, I don't know, I just flushed them all down the toilet. When Starlee Kine went out talking to people about this, there was one girl, a high school freshman here in Chicago, who seemed just somehow to stand out when it came to these stories. I got my first hamster and I named her Bubbles. Then I had a boy, and he was brown and white. And I named him White Sox. And they had six kids, but she killed them. I don't know. They were smushed. And then she had another set, and she bit one's head off. She smushed four of them, and she ate the other one. But shortly after that, she was getting thin. I noticed that she was getting thin. But we didn't feed her like her hamster food. She always ate table food. It was like, shrimp, lobster, crab, potato chips. They drunk pop, juice, pudding, jello. I mean, like everything except for tofu and sushi. Except for that. I don't know if that would cause her to lose so much weight, but then one day we come home and she was real small. And then when she walked, she would like wobble. And one day me and my mom went to go see my brother. When we came back, she was dead. But I just threw her out. I didn't cry, but I just threw her out. There were crayfish. I had some crayfish. And I was doing a project. Does pesticide have an affect on-- affect the growth on crayfish. And they ate blood worms. They were in my mom's freezer. And I didn't think she liked the idea of worms. Especially blood worms in the freezer. So I just took them out of the freezer and they all melted. It was blood and worms. It just melted. So what I did was-- it was like a big bag of blood worms. And I just dumped the whole thing in the tank. But then I overfed them and they died. I think I'm a pet killer. I don't know, because I had fish. My fish died. I had an amphibian. It died. A snail. The snail, he just kicked over too. After my other pets died, I told my brother and my neighbor, because they did a lot of bad stuff to them. Stuff like with the hot sauce and they used to just flick them in the nose, and they were like scared. So I said, they coming back to haunt you. And they actually got scared. They was like, don't say that. Don't say that. I was like, OK. You think I'm kidding? White Sox and Bubbles are coming back to y'all. And I'm not playing. I actually said I wished they would come back and just haunt them. I mean, I don't believe in all them ghosts and stuff, but I really want them to like just be scared. The next pet I'm getting is a cat. This cat I'm going to get, it'll last, hopefully. Typical high school freshman. She spoke with Starlee Kine. Act five, Waiting For the End of the World. Well, we end our program today with this story of city life and the natural world coexisting peacefully-- sort of-- from Iggy Scam. Take the 22 Fillmore bus in San Francisco south away from downtown to the end of the line. Get off there on the street of dead end railroad tracks where shopping carts drag in the fog. Go down the hill at 20th, past the empty lot on your right, past the old port complex on your left, and past the people living in their cars. When you get to the impound lot, you can see the bay. A walkway takes you past some abandoned warehouses and then abruptly stops at a fence at a no trespassing sign. There is a hole in the fence. On the other side is a rotten dock where on many nights you can find a mysterious group of men. They're not loading smuggled drugs or dumping bodies. They're fishing. The EPA says this rotten dock is one of the most polluted parts of the entire San Francisco Bay. The fishermen say it's a great place to catch halibut. It never fails. The more filthy and polluted a body of water in a city is, and the harder it is to access, the more guys you'll see fishing in it. And this isn't exactly scientific, but it seems like I'm seeing these urban fisherman more and more these days, hearing tales about them as I travel across the country. Men with poles, camped out on a railroad bridge over the Sacramento River. Dark figures with nets in a creek behind a Florida strip mall. And then there's those guys that congregate at the lake in Cleveland where warm water from an electricity plant guarantees good fishing even in the dead of winter. Once a trucker who picked me up when I was hitchhiking on I-75 spent the whole ride excitedly pointing out the roadside ditches where he'd often stop and catch fish. Wherever a ripple breaks the placid, smooth surface of the constructed world, there have been fisherman in there to stick a hook in. Last year, I went out on the road looking for them. Miami. According to the WPA guide to Florida, early settlers to Biscayne Bay described waters, "Of every delicate shade of blue and green and tinged with every color of the spectrum. A sort of liquid light rather than water, so limped and brilliant is it. By all accounts, the fish are practically jumping into the boat." Today in Miami, it's still possible to live that early settler life. Orange, mango, and avocado trees, their branches heavy with fruit line many residential streets. And anyone with a machete can harvest the coconuts that grow wild, even on Flagler Street in the heart of downtown. And of course, despite the official health warnings about lead poisoning and the occasional leak of raw sewage into the bay, there's still plenty of fish. Most of the Miami River isn't publicly accessible. It runs through some boat yards and past residences. But still, I found a group of Latin guys fishing behind the old Shiners' temple. The had no fishing poles, but they had rigged up some pretty inspired do-it-yourself gear. They had tied their lines through holes that they had punched through empty tall cans of malt liquor. And then they had wrapped the slack line around their cans. Then they unraveled their lines, held their cans with both hands, and waited. I walked up and said, [SPEAKING SPANISH]? One guy, rapidly rolling up his line said in a thick Spanish accent, yeah, I got one now. And sure enough, he pulled up a small, black and white spotted fish and laid it out on the concrete seawall. All five of us gathered around it for a couple excited moments as a ripple of joy spread among us-- strangers. The guy who caught it declared, este for fry pan and dropped it into the bucket. But even more sought after in Miami than the free spotted fish dinner are pink gold-- Biscayne Bay shrimp. Shrimping works like this. First you drive the boat to where you think the shrimp are going to be. Which is often in the warm water around the Turkey Point nuclear reactor south of Miami. Then you put the huge net in the water and drive the boat in a circle. Guys called pickers sort the stuff the net brings in and the shrimp go into buckets, and broken glass and tires go back into the water. It's illegal to sell the shrimp for anything but bait. But back on the docks, shrimp are like money. In Miami, it is still possible to buy car parts, new shoes, and tickets to basketball games with a bucket of shrimp. Detroit. The best way to see Detroit and all its glorious decay is to hop a fence and climb 14 flights of stairs to the roof of the abandoned train station just west of downtown. From this height, the city appears oddly green, as empty lots and wilderness slowly overtake the old metropolis. Trees grow out of the remains of crumbled houses. Seeing how nature has begun to reclaim the Motor City, I could only think of Henry Ford's famous line, "History is bunk." My friend, Mitchell, and I drove into Detroit on a bitterly cold morning. It was a lonely day in a lonely town. We went over to Riverside Park. I had been there once last summer when the sea wall was lined with guys drinking beer and tossing lines. On one side of the park there were the old-timers, listening to radios playing soul tunes. And on the other side, there were kids who had pulled up and left their car radios on, blasting bass. But today the park was frozen and empty. Mitchell and I took turns halfheartedly tossing our line into the slushy river. I wondered what kind of stuff you'd find at the bottom. Detroit makes today's obsession with the Millennium and the end of the world seem absurd. What are people talking about when they talk about the end of the world anyway? I've begun to realize that they're not talking about the actual destruction of the planet. They're talking about something more or like Detroit, the end of a certain way of life. The end of the world means no more CNN, no more air conditioning, no more ATM machines. And what of the scattered survivors who are already pushing their shopping carts around toxic devastated cities do while they wait for this end of the world? Go fishing, of course. Chicago. My friend, [? Joaquin, ?] and I arrived in Chicago and decided to test my theory that the urban fishermen will instinctively find the most polluted waterway in any city. We got out a city map and traced the course of the Chicago River south into Lake Calumet, down near the Indiana border. Lake Calumet has been used as a garbage dump and now serves as a port for ships navigating the St. Lawrence Seaway. On the map, it's surrounded by huge, mysterious, blank white spaces, the real life home of a sewage treatment facility, rail yards, a Ford Motor Company assembly plant, and the now mostly unused sites of an entire century's steel production. The blank white space was exciting. It was like the [? Yee ?] dragons here of ancient maps. We hit the 94 and headed south. Nearing Lake Calumet, we past blackened smokestacks and iron pipes belching a sick blue flame and came to a dead end at the base of the lake. Getting out of the car, we saw that the road appeared to crumble directly into a river of thick black muck. The stench of sewage was overwhelming. On a fence was a sign that said sludge drying trough. Looking around at what appeared to be miles of such troughs, I thought, here we are, the blank white space on the map. And of course, at the tip of the dead end was a parked car and two guys drinking beer and fishing. Joaquin ?] went over and did the talking, but it wasn't much of an exchange. The two guys seemed nervous that we were going to try and steal their secret spot. Anything you can catch in Lake Michigan you can catch here, one guy said, as if that explained everything. Sure, why go all the way to Lake Michigan when you can just mosey on down to your neighborhood sludge drying trough. San Francisco. The city of San Francisco's official fishing pier is Pier 7 downtown. Every morning the benches at the end of the pier fill up with old Asian guys who come down the hill from Chinatown and spend all day there on the pier, doing some of the most breathtaking, artful fishing that I've ever seen. With absolute concentration, never saying a word, they race back and forth between three or four poles as they slowly fill their buckets with fish. The stocks are trading a couple blocks away in the financial district, cars and crowds of tourists race by on the Embarcadero. But at the end of the pier, all is quiet. It's almost as if the fishermen themselves create silence. The fishermen seem so out of place in today's downtown San Francisco, that it's almost like they've been patiently fishing on the spot for centuries, while the city's great buildings rose and fell around them like the tides. I watched one guy who hadn't made a catch all day. Almost imperceptibly, he started working it. His face was as calm and distant as a large ship on the horizon. Suddenly, he stood up with a flourish and reeled it in, a small two-foot shark. It went into the empty bucket. In the buildings all around us, this decade's fabled economic boom is written in concrete and glass. But the fisherman's near empty bucket suggested that there are some who will remember this time differently. As he leaned his arm back for another cast of the line, the Transamerica Pyramid stood directly behind him, confident of its own indestructibility. Seeming to say, the big one will never come. These buildings will always grow taller. The fisherman's bucket will always be empty. But as the late afternoon fog surrounded us and the line hit the water, you couldn't help but think to yourself that anything could happen. Iggy Scam writes a zine called Scam. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, and Starlee Kine. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann. Musical help from Marika Partridge and [? Terry Hecker. ?] Marketing by [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and the friendly folks at PRI. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. If you would like to buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. The phone number 312-832-3380. Or you know you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website www.thislife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who reminds you-- White Sox and Bubbles are coming back to y'all. And I'm not playing. I'm not playing either. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Not long ago, the guy who headed the youth group at Covenant Presbyterian Church decided to hold a debate. Half the kids in the youth group had to argue for Christianity. Half the kids had to make the case that Christianity was all made up, a fairy tale. And the Christians lost. And I think the number one reason why is because they tried to just come at it with a lot of facts. Dan Adamson is the youth leader. And it was amazing to watch these-- the ones that were debating Christianity said, Jesus is real. There's people that found him, and there's proof on this, and they-- evidence. Archaeological records. Archaeological records. And what was so awesome, by the non-Christian debate team, is they said, fine. We totally acknowledge that Jesus is real. But so was Mohammed. So was Buddha. So was this. And the Christians were like, yeah, but Jesus is real. And he died on the cross and he rose again. And the non-Christians came back and said, well, there's people that believe that. But there's also people that believe Mohammed was this. And what I wish the Christians would have done, would have bee said, here am I. I believe God is real because He's changed my life. And put myself on the witness stand and say, here's what I was before God and here's who I am now. The problem is, for the teenagers in this youth group, the phrase, here's who I was before I found God, it has no meaning. They all come from families that discuss the Bible at dinner. They go to church every Sunday. They come from the kind of homes where all the kids can tell you how many swears are in the movie Titanic, because every TV show and film is pre-screened. I have kids that are willing to serve, kids that know the Bible, kids that know their theology. This is the only truth they've known. They've been told from the very beginning God loves them, God has a plan for them. Jesus is their Savior. They've been singing "Jesus Loves Me" since they've been five years old. It's time for them to develop their own faith, not just to parrot back what their parents say. Dan says this. Most of the parents say it. They need to question what they've learned and come to their own conclusions. If they don't do it now, Dan says, they'll do it later, without parents and a youth pastor to nudge them toward God. So Dan decided to take them to West Virginia. It will be a mission trip, the youth group's first mission trip. They'd have to help poor people. They'd have to testify about God's word to strangers. It would be hard, and hardship can make you turn to God. And they'd see the kind of things that make people engage serious questions about their faith. If they begin doubting because they look in this world and they see hard lives in West Virginia, they see people that are hurting, and they see this and they look up and they think, why would God allow that to happen? That's like an example of I think where I'd start seeing more growth. So that was the plan. Now, let's meet some of the teenagers. Kelly Hoover's age 14, long brown hair, braces, lip gloss. Kelly's outgoing and bright and she's somebody capable of saying exactly what is on her mind. Well, I really want to meet the kids there and just-- because I mean, I don't want to sound snotty or anything but-- I'm more privileged than most people. I mean, I live in a big house. I have a pool. And I don't really see kids a lot who don't have as much as I do. And I really just want to see what it's like, and how living with them is. And I really just want to teach them about Jesus, because I don't know how I could live without Him. And sometimes I think how blessed I was to be born in such a family. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, A Teenager's Guide to God, the story of five adults, 11 kids, and six days in West Virginia. Of adults trying to mold the faith of teenagers and things not working out quite as planned. It's an odd fact of religious life in America that in this country founded by Christians, in which a majority of people say they believe in God and identify themselves as Christians, that so many religious Christians feel that they are an oppressed minority. They say the media doesn't share their values, that secular institutions undermine their beliefs. And the job of raising Christian children, they'll tell you, is like trying to do God's work from behind enemy lines. Today we are devoting our entire program to the kids that they're struggling to bring up. This American Life producer Susan Burton and I spent a week this August recording these teenagers, day and night, throughout their mission trip. And we bring you this portrait of what it means to be a Christian teenager in America, for some kids anyway, around the turn of the millennium. Stay with us. Act One, Exodus. The youth group is part of Covenant Presbyterian Church here in Chicago, a city church with lots of members who live out in the suburbs. A number of their parents were founding members of the church, less than two decades ago. These teenagers are 13 to 17. They all grew up attending Christian schools or homeschools. Our trip began with a 14-hour drive in two rented vans to West Virginia. Can we hear LFO? Because Ira has never heard it. Ira, have you heard the summer girls song? Summertime girls? Oh, it's so funny. Where's my bag? We were barely in the van 10 minutes when Marisa and Kelly asked Dan to play the song that became the unofficial theme song to our trip. It wasn't by Jars of Clay or dc Talk or any of the other Christian pop bands whose CDs we'd brought. It was a rap song, by a white, one-hit wonder boy band called LFO. Everybody spent the ride down trying to memorize the lyrics. Ah! I missed it! I missed the Billy Shakespeare-- that's the-- I wait. Sonnets! OK, OK, OK -- start it over. I got it. So it's after the Larry Bird. What does he say? Dan is 29, married, with a new baby. But in the van, he's more like a counselor adored by his campers than youth pastor. The girls strain their necks and try to meet his eyes in the rear-view mirror as they talk, asking what he and one of the other leaders, Dave, were like back in college together at the evocatively named Moody Bible Institute. Teasing him about the songs he likes, which, as far as they're concerned, are impossibly old-- 10, maybe 15 years. He tries just as hard as anybody to learn the words to "Summer Girls." [SINGING] Macaulay Culkin was home alone. [SINGING] --was Alex P. Keaton. What is that from? You know, Family Ties? Oh, I never watched that show. I did. Sometimes. And Mallory, and what was that other girl's name? That's too '80s for me, Arden says, I couldn't watch it. These girls are the children that the Christian right has in mind when it holds press conferences on what's at stake in America's culture war. They are cannon fodder in that war. Just a few years before they were born, a child psychologist named Dr. James Dobson founded a group called Focus on the Family. It is an enormous religious organization based in Colorado Springs. Dobson's genius is that he offers exhaustive, concrete advice on everything from child discipline to movie-going to a generation of parents who are trying to raise their kids in a new way, or rather, in a very old way. As part of that, Dobson has built an entire superstructure to shield young people from Hollywood, from rap music, from the WB. Focus on the Family publishes an ongoing encyclopedic guide which evaluates pop culture from a Christian perspective for parents. In addition, they've created an empire of Christian pop of their own-- original radio dramas and children's videos, books, websites, and several magazines. It is a remarkably effective social experiment. These teenagers don't even fight with their parents about what they can watch and listen to. At this point, they generally agree that certain films and shows are bad for them. And if you ask them about any of the TV shows targeted at and beloved by so many of their 14- and 15-year-old peers-- Dawson's, Buffy, Felicity-- you can hear their parents' voices and Dr. Dobson's voice in their replies. You feel really guilty walking away, that you just totally perverted your mind with all this stuff. It's so unrealistic and sick. The fact that a boy is sleeping with his teacher, and he's like 15 years old. I mean, and these people are supposed to be 15 and 16 years old. And if that was how my life was, I would be dead right now. Because that's just ridiculous. Everybody is jumping in bed with everyone else and is all switching. I mean, by the middle of the series, I was hearing through rumors that so-and-so, who had been with the teacher, is now with this girl, who was actually on depressants. I mean, I have no idea what's going on. It's Andie, one of the supposed non-viewers pipes up from the back. What's so interesting about these girls is the odd mix of Christian and secular pop in their lives. Despite their Christian schools, despite their carefully monitored TV viewing, they do not seem out of touch. They're not un-hip. And here is the most important thing that they would want you to know about them. They like being Christians. This is Lauren. It's hard for people to understand that we really enjoy this religion. That us, as teenagers, who are the ones who are out to have fun and whatever, that this is actually something that means something to us, and that we are having fun doing this. As they've gotten older, some of them have taken more steps, carefully measured steps, into the secular world. Ruth and Jessica and Anna go to a public high school, and it isn't that kids at the school are hostile to Christianity, as they were, Dan says, when he was a teenager. These days, the attitude at the school is, if Christianity is your thing, that's fine, just so long as you don't push it onto other people. Of all the teenagers in the youth group, the one struggling the most with how to live as a religious person in the secular world is one of the two boys on the trip, Joel. I've had my share of dealings with kids who've been at public school, and I just don't really like what I see. Joel's 13 and probably the most sheltered person in the group. His mother's always homeschooled him because, he says, she feels that Christian schools only teach Christian values during Bible class. She feels it should be enunciated in all the subjects. Joel's getting out more and more. Just this summer, he spent three weeks away from home for the first time in his life. And it was with non-Christian kids on a soccer trip to England. I don't know. I mean, I learned a lot of stories and jokes and stuff. But they were all really nasty and unrepeatable, if that gives you an idea of, you know, what kids learn in public schools. And it's like, the boys are always talking about sex or things that have to do with sex. And you know, I mean, at this age, yeah, I'm starting to think about that, but still I don't like talking about it. A typical joke? The only one that I could drag out of him involved a boy, a girl having her period, a car late at night, a policeman, and a pizza. Believe me, you don't want to know. It was just incredible. I mean, they were-- it's just, they were the most-- and they didn't-- but-- He is literally at a loss for words. And then some of the guys just got a kick out of acting like they were gay or something. On the bus ride they found out that that annoyed me, so they did that the rest of the trip. Acting like they were after me, if you know what I mean. They would say stuff in kind of an exaggerated, effeminate kind of accent. There was one guy who would always wink at me. And I'm like, Matt, knock it off. And he's like, oh, come on. You know you want it. And I'm like, no, I don't. Up until this point, you've been homeschooled. You haven't been around other kids. And so, was this literally the first time this had happened to you? Yes. Compared with all the other kids on the trip, Joel's family is much more fundamentalist in the way that it incorporates the Bible into their daily lives. Whatever benefits he gets from that, the kids whose parents try to balance secular and Christian influences all seem way more at ease in themselves and in the world. [SINGING] I like girls that wear Abercrombie and Fitch. I'd take her if I had one wish. For the rest of the drive, the girls sing the LFO song every few hours. They ruffle through the pages of Teen People, read stories out loud to each other, close the magazine in their laps, flip it over and begin again. By the time we arrive in West Virginia, this is the first accomplishment of the trip. Nearly everybody has memorized all the words. [SINGING] New Kids on the Block had a bunch of hits. Chinese food makes me sick. And I think it's fly when girls stop by for the summer, for the summer. These are the vessels that God has chosen to come here to help others. [SINGING] I'll take her if I had one wish. But she's been gone since that summer, since that summer. Act Two, Unto the Uttermost Part of the Earth. Everybody stays at an old 4-H camp that had been taken over by the Presbyterian Church of America's national missionary organization, Mission to the World. Kids and adults from all over the country filled the various cabins. Prayers were held in the campfire circle. It was green, shady, spectacularly pretty, with daily sermons from a tattooed ex-Marine everybody called Pastor Kenny. We've had people come up here for-- this is our sixth summer. And every year, someone comes with the idea that we're going to win West Virginia over to Jesus this week. I'm serious. Now this is true. I'm here to tell you that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. But if you will open your heart to God this week, God will change your life, and you will never be the same. Right now there's a boom in church projects like this one, that send people on one-to-two-week mission trips. This boom crosses all denominations. There are no great national estimates, but in this one Presbyterian denomination, not the biggest one, the number of short-term missionaries has more than doubled in just three years. Now it's over 5,000 souls. 750 of them came through this West Virginia summer camp this year, and the number's still climbing. And so, among certain groups of Christian teenagers, going on a mission trip has become a rite of passage. There are upbeat articles and ads in the Christian teen magazines. One of the Chicago girls, Anna, says that of the 11 girls in her class at her old school, a small Christian junior high, all 11 went on mission trips this summer. And when they got to where they were going, they often got a jolt of culture shock. Our group found itself in a small town fixing up a house that had a beautiful sloping yard, apple trees, two porches. Sure, there were trailer homes up the street, but this house was, all and all, not what the kids thought of when they signed up to help the unfortunate. One girl said that she had envisioned something more like Cabrini-Green, the high-rise Chicago public housing project. Kelly, the one whose family has a pool, put it this way. I didn't picture-- I mean, this house is a lot bigger than I thought it'd be. I thought it'd be like a rundown little shack. I mean, I didn't picture like, rat clothes, you know? Rat clothes, did you say? I don't know. Like, I don't know, like dirt poor. I mean, but it's nice. I mean, it definitely needs some painting work, but you know. You might think it would be awkward for the recipients of this charity work. If nothing else, to have all the neighbors see a team of out-of-state church kids working on their house. But as it turned out, the neighbors saw the kids and thought that perhaps they were from some kind of work-release boot camp kind of program, like they saw on NBC Dateline, they told us. My dad-- not my family, my husband's family-- all worked in a coal mine. Pebble Cunningham is 80 years old. She lives in the house that the Chicago group was painting, along with her daughter, who is in her 50s, and her granddaughter, Angie. I would expect, for somebody like you, whose family's always worked, is it strange to have these people come in and help you out like this? It's strange, but it's nice. Because we have no man-power at all. We ain't got no men to help us. This house was going down fast. But I would think that because you've always been a working family, the notion of having people come in and help out and do charity-- First time. But we loved it. Because we needed it, you know. Now, were you worried, having all these Bible kids come to you, that they'll be trying to preach to you the whole time? Nah, let 'em talk about it. I [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to look forward to Jesus. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] got to look forward to. Act Three, Wise as Serpents and Harmless as Doves. Back in Chicago, Dan had said that part of what would bring everybody on the trip closer to God was facing hardship together. And, as if on schedule, the difficulties began our first morning. Give me yellow hair. No, give me-- give me blue hair. You've got to give me like-- you've got to give me Scully hair. The girls sit on the porch of their cabin, bent in concentration with crayons and paper, drawing a get-well card for Dan, with everybody on it. They also gave him Gatorade. Dan's probably going to have to go to the hospital. Yeah, he's really sick. He's like vomiting, barfing, vomiting, violently. Maybe the Gatorade will just do a-- Yeah, maybe the Gatorade will work miracles. Miracles can happen. That's like in our devotion. Dan has some sort of food poisoning. When he goes into the hospital, it sends the four adult leaders on the trip lurching into a dispute over what to do next. And some of Dan's best-laid plans begin to go awry. Take the vacation Bible school. The original plan for the week was that, every morning for a few hours, the kids would split into two different groups. Half would work on painting the Cunninghams' house, half would work on what they call a VBS, which is church-speak for Vacation Bible School, which itself is church-speak for trying to bring the word of God to local kids with games, skits, candy, a brief lesson. What do we say? We say, we're doing a club. We're a youth group from Chicago. Anna and Lauren practice what they'll say to round up kids. If you have any kids-- should we ask if they have any kids? Or just say, if you have any kids-- if you're interested-- Feel free to have them come. But the group got bad advice about where to hold the vacation Bible school. We set up about a 10-minute drive from the Cunningham house in a big, empty public park. And as we went knocking from door to door to advertise the event to kids, it was like a fairy tale, where at each house, the person at the door was slightly more infirm, slightly more elderly, than the person at the house before. I don't have any children. I don't have any grandchildren here and I don't know anybody that has kids. OK. Thank you. Hi, we were wondering if you had any kids that wanted to come to the backyard Bible club at Worthington Park. I don't have any. Do you have any kids? Do you have-- do you have any children? And the next day, when we went out to hold the vacation Bible school, with props and costumes and games, with a pre-rehearsed skit and more candy than you might imagine, Karen, Marie, Jessica, Nora, Laura, Kelly, and Arden sat on the edge of an outdoor stage in the park, waiting. Nobody showed up. The closest they came was when a white pickup turned into the parking area. Look it! Child! Child? Looks like it could be a family vehicle. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Oh, please! Maybe they have seven kids. They didn't have seven. Or even one. Oh well. So are we going to come back every day if nobody comes? Is this going to be like three hours of wasted time every day? Two. Two hours. One of the group leaders, Nora, gathers them around. You know, I think that anyone who is led to pray should pray. Chris, can you start us off? And then Laura, can you just finish? Thanks. They bow their heads. Here's one of the advantages of Christian life over secular life-- that at any moment of trouble, when somebody might get frustrated or mad, or for that matter, at any turning point in the day, when one thing ends and another's about to begin, our group takes a quiet moment and reflects. Dear Lord, we came here today, and we were really hoping that we'd be able to teach some kids about God, but it didn't work out that way. And maybe you're just showing us that it's better to go back to the house and work with the family there. But please show us some more signs. Dear Lord, I want to thank you so much for this day, and that it was nice. And I just pray that we won't be discouraged that no kids will come. And that maybe-- well, you said that everything is worked for the good. And maybe we needed more time on the house, Lord. And I just pray that whatever happens, that good things will come out of this and we'll all do it for your glory. Talking with the kids afterwards, I found that the lesson that they took from this experience was not that they could have chosen a better location or done a better job finding kids. It was not that they could have tried harder. What they all told me simply was, was that this was God's will. It's a lesson that seems, to a secular person, strangely at odds with the job of raising children. It seems, in fact, to be exactly the opposite of what you would want to teach a child. Raising kids is, after all, a process of convincing them that they have to be responsible. That if something goes wrong, they have to figure out if there was anything they could have done to prevent it. I talked to Dan about this. I talked to the other adult leaders about it. And finally, the only person on the trip who says anything convincing about why this notion of God's will might be a good thing to teach teenagers is Ruth, the oldest girl in the youth group. That helps me through the day. Because you see kids who don't care at all, you know, about Jesus and all of that, and they seem to be doing just fine. They seem to be doing a lot better. Because I'm in this really competitive program. And a lot of the kids are not Christians. And a lot of kids do really well. One of my classmates, I think, scored a perfect on the ACT. And I didn't. I mean, I wasn't very close. And I may take it over, I may not. The point is that, I don't know, they seem to be doing better. And sometimes I think, boy, I wish that I could do that well. And I guess it wasn't God's plan for me to do that well. It just seems like just knowing that, it's not all under our control, and that maybe that God does have a plan, so whatever He chooses-- though I may not like it, and I certainly don't like not coming out on top or not being the best. Act Four, Your Name Is Ointment Poured Forth. One great thing about staying in a camp with 130 other Christians, if you're a young Christian girl who has never had a boyfriend, is the much-better-than-in-school chance of meeting a nice, cute, Christian boy. Though, of course, camp rules prohibit anything more than having a crush from afar. This turns out not to cramp the style of the Chicago girls, however. A crush from afar is exactly as far as they could handle. Monday night, after services and after devotions, everybody is milling around the volleyball court in the center of camp. There are boys and girls there. And one of the adult leaders, Nora, comes down carrying a word game for everybody to play. A word game. What could be more embarrassing? First, Nora comes out. She's like, anyone up for a game of Boggle? She comes marching down. These kids start staring at her. And now everyone in our [? deal ?] just starts laughing. Kelly, who cheerfully describes herself as the most boy crazy of the group, explains that it was Anna, who just didn't care what anyone thought, who spoke up to say that she liked Boggle. Which turned out to be a master stroke. --Boggle. And so then we end up starting to play this Boggle game and other people come by. Like-- These two guys from Virginia. Ran. I found barn. Sun. Nor. Shay. Band. First it started with Lauren and Ruthie. They like Jimbo. I mean, he's too old, but he's really cute. Then there is Andy, who Jessica and Anna think is cute. And then there's Ben who's really-- everyone thinks he's cute. But not-- but they all have their first choice. But he looks like-- Jessica thinks he looks like an Abercrombie model. He does. All right, yes. I am extremely ticklish. Thank you for reminding me. During the game, a girl came over and started rubbing Ben's shoulders. His little massage girlfriend came over and was massaging him, and he was like, you know what? Stop. Didn't he get a little aggravated? Well, he did get a little aggravated. Did you guys make eye contact or talk? Yes, we did! He first-- it was eye contact. [INAUDIBLE] Hey, she asked me! And so first, we were like, we were playing Boggle. You know how to play. You find the words. And I was like, oh, I found a word. And he's like, I already found that word. I was like, oh, I'm sorry. And so then, at the end of the game, he was telling me how he really stunk at the game. And that was basically it. Not very romantic, Kelly admits. But after that, every night after their missionary work, the Chicago girls shower, apply lip gloss, and blow dry their hair straight, so they're ready for the volleyball court after devotions. Joel, who has the most protective parents of anybody in the group, is not indulging any crushy feelings very far on this trip. This plan I'm kind of laying off, because my parents-- they're kind of strict on this issue. So like you're not allowed to date until we're dead. Seriously, I'm not allowed to date anybody until they're dead. Until they're dead? Until they're dead. That is not the rule. That is too. I'm not allowed to date. They're into this new-- this courtship idea where the families, both the families get together, and then the two people get to know each other in the family setting. But you know, not going out by ourselves where our parents can't keep track of us. I mean we can sit and talk, you know, with our parents across the room or whatever. And it starts getting farther and farther away until-- as we get older and more responsible and more mature, then it starts getting a little more one on one. As we get more responsible then it's going out to dinner and stuff. Joel says that he's going through a period of questioning his faith right now. And the most emotionally charged questions that he's asking have to do with sex, the outright ban on premarital sex. What is a 13-year-old boy supposed to think? Joel says that he's planning on reading all the Biblical references on it so he can understand the reasoning and so he can see for himself if there's any wiggle room in the whole thing. He borrows his mom's theological books on hard subjects like this. When producer Susan Burton asks him if he has a Bible verse that's a particular favorite, he pulls a scrap of paper from his wallet. I have it written down. I always keep it with me. My mom gave it to me, actually. So this is a-- it's a little piece of paper cut out in a circle. Is that your writing? No, this is my mom's writing. She wrote it down for me. 2 Timothy 2:22. "Flee also youthful lusts. But pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart." Which basically means, for me, stay away from what I want to do at this time. It was sometime early in the week that Susan and I met Matt [? Gerkin ?] and Eric [? Highland. ?] They saw us standing with our Chicago interviewees, holding our tape recorders and boom mics, and strolled right up. We were thinking we heard something in the woods here last night. We're investigating it. This is just weeks after the movie Blair Witch Project hit theaters. Matt is 18, Eric's 23, and it becomes clear after some questioning that, in fact, they have no intention of going into the woods. They just said that, trying to get on the radio. So what really gets on the radio? Do you have to do something dramatic to get on the radio? Or you want real life? We explain that we're doing a documentary story, which means we tell him that he'd have a better chance of getting on the air if he goes through some sort of change over the course of his week of missionary work. So if we can find something that would really change our lives, and we wanted it documented and broadcasted across the nation, we'd call you guys, and we'd like-- If something happens to you this week that changed your life, you find me, and you'll be on the radio. Really? Wow. So you know what we need to do, is just check in with you every half hour and let you know how we're progressing and how things are happening with us. Change is bad. What's the name of this show? Change? What's with this change talk? If we want to change--! After that, as you'd expect, we ran into them every single day. And every single day, they had so much to say to us about all the changes they were going through. Coming up, how even M&Ms and Starburst can serve the Lord. In a minute, on Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Most weeks on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today we are devoting our entire show to just one story about a group of suburban Chicago teenagers on their first church mission trip to West Virginia to fix up the house of a family who needs some help, and to witness for God. We've arrived at Act Five of our show. Act Five, The Substance of Things Hoped For. By Tuesday, Dan's feeling better, and one of the first things he does at the work site is drop in on the neighbors. I'm Dan. What was your name again? Crystal and Paula. And this is Marisa. Hi. When Dan came out during the winter to see the house that they would be fixing up, he met these teenage girls. Back then, one of them, Crystal, said the month that Dan was bringing the group out was going to be the same month as her birthday, and Dan came back prepared. Well, are we going to celebrate the birthday? You said we were going to celebrate when we came here. His accent migrates below the Mason-Dixon as he explains. We actually have a little present for you. Because we knew it was going to be your birthday, so one of the girls went out and got a little present for you. So. Well, if you guys ever get bored and want to come over there, there's a bunch of people. We're going to be here all week. We'd love to talk to you. We got some candy and stuff. Introduce yourself to them. And if you want to come by, we're going to be eating lunch. What time do we eat lunch? Like 12:00. 12:00. We got some-- you can eat with us. We've got some candy and food and drinks. Back next door, everybody works on the Cunninghams' house. Scraping off the old paint, rolling on the new, trimming back bushes, climbing up ladders. Everybody dressed in surgical scrubs, those blue-green cotton pajamas that you see the doctors wear on ER. That is, if your faith allows you to watch ER. They're light, they're disposable, and they let you call each other doctor all day long. The work goes quickly. At some point, to dislodge some ancient paint off aluminum siding, the adults drag in an industrial power washer that they warn the kids about so frighteningly, some get sort of spooked. I don't know. I'm afraid to use the power hose thing. Because I feel like I'm going to kill somebody. And I mean seriously kill somebody. Lindsay stands in line, deciding if she'll take a turn. I don't want to see it. Once the power washer gets going, Ruth is the first one to use it to actually remove paint. It's fun, yeah. I'm the oldest, so I like the power. Among an earlier generation of Christian women, or among more fundamentalist Christian women, there might be some question about whether it is a woman's place to run the power tools in the family. This question is so irrelevant to these Presbyterian teenagers that when I bring it up they literally do not know what I'm talking about. While they all work on the house, every now and then somebody from the Cunningham family is spotted. And every single time, it is like the experience that you have when you spot a minor celebrity. Your heart leaps. It's all you can think about. And then, if you're brave enough to stroll over and chat, you try to play it casual. Like, oh, we're just talking here. I'm relaxed. It's just like talking to anybody. After all, they are here to minister to this family. When the Cunninghams' daughter, Angie, comes out on the porch one afternoon, Kelly and Jessica do their best to be friendly. And for once, Kelly's mother might feel like she did the right thing buying her daughter all those Backstreet Boy CDs. Because now they get the chance to talk Backstreet Boys on the Lord's behalf. Paula and Crystal, the girls from next door, bring over a Backstreet Boys poster. Angie owns a t-shirt from the '98 tour. Angie is actually in her late 20s. She has a small disability in one of her arms. It's shorter than the other and her hand on that arm isn't fully functional. Most days she stays at home, watching TV. It is inherently difficult for the Chicago teenagers to figure out how to interact with, even how to react to, somebody from such a different background. And there's a certain amount of raw confusion as they feel their way forward. Every night back at camp, after prayers and devotionals, they all debrief about the day. So anyone have any thoughts about today? Positive, negative feedback? Anything? Kelly uses the chance to speak up. I thought, at first, it was kind of hard to talk to Angie, just because, I mean, I didn't like staring. I mean, I didn't want to. And it's not just because of her arm. It's because it is hard to understand her, and she didn't really get what you said sometimes. But at first I was kind of doing it out of pity for her, and then that didn't feel right, you know? I didn't want to do it out of pity for her. And I don't know if it's wrong or right to do it out of pity for her. But that's how I'm doing it. And I don't know if that's right. I just-- and it makes me so happy when I see her smile. And it's just-- I guess I don't know if it's right or wrong to do it out of pity. I know I keep asking that. So someone answer. Nobody does for a while, until later, when Dan says the perfect thing, that when Jesus walked the earth, he didn't feel pity for the sick and handicapped. He felt compassion, empathy. Lauren offers this optimistic thought. She obviously has a lot of problems with her deformity and whatever. And I was just thinking, in heaven, she's not going to have any deformity. And if we can reach her that way-- Over and over, Dan tells the group that their main purpose in coming to West Virginia is to minister to the family whose house they're working on. Getting to know Angie is important, he says. Remember the names. I know I need it. I kept telling Carol, Carol, what were their names again? Really, they love that they're going to know their names. I thought it was great you guys were showing your boy bands. I thought that was great. I thought that was great. And they say they go to that church. I asked them if they have youth group events and they said they've done a couple youth group events. So I think, you know, if the timing is right, I think you have a good opportunity to just ask them, well, what do you think about God? I mean, I don't think it would be awkward at all. I just think I would encourage you, and be praying about it, that if you feel like the motivation is there, man, just plant a seed. Just see what happens, and maybe you're going to go with it. Listening to all this, I imagine how disturbed Angie and Crystal and Paula might be if they overheard all the scheming of how they'll be befriended. From their point of view, after all, their interaction with the Chicago girls is as simple as, they seem sort of cool. They like them. But missionary work is, at some level, like any sales work. There's no way to do it without discussing some sort of sales strategy. All of these evening sessions end with prayer, in which anybody who wants to say something simply speaks up. And a lot of the prayers are about Angie, and the two neighbors, Crystal and Paula. Kelly was among those offering a prayer. I just pray that tomorrow we'd really get to talk to Mrs. Cunningham and Angela and just really be a witness for you, Lord. I especially pray for Angela, and just help us to ask the right questions, and to think of things to say and talk about with her. And to find out exactly what makes her tick inside and what makes her special. Pray for Angela, that she'll just really get to know us. That we won't be like every other group and that we'll just really, really get to know her as a really good friend. And from there, everybody headed to the volleyball court, where-- I am sorry to report-- the Chicagoans lost. Lauren's second serve went straight to the guy she sort of had a crush on, and he spiked it like he didn't even know she existed. Come on, Lindsay! Susan, meanwhile, is watching the volleyball game from the sidelines when those two guys, Matt and Eric, who want to be on the radio, show right up. All right, the game is getting very exciting at this point. Yeah, why don't you guys narrate the rest of the game for me, OK? All right. It has been-- [INTERPOSING VOICES]. Ball returned to the Chicago team and Chicago returns with a bunt over the net! It is returned! And it is on! Chicago has done it! Oh! [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Afterwards, naturally, they insist that-- guess what?-- this has changed them. This game just now has made us appreciate volleyball even less than we ever did before. --on the American volleyball team. I'm going to be the official spiker. The evening ended the way every other evening did on the trip. In the cabin, the Chicago crew sang a doxology and then one other song. [SINGING] When I say that I want it that way. The Backstreet Boys, "Tell Me Why." [SINGING] Tell me why, ain't nothin' but a heartache. Tell me why. Ain't nothin' but a mistake-- Act Six, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Well, if any of your buddies live around here that didn't get candy, you let us know and we'll get them some. This is Dan, trying to attract kids to vacation Bible school, literally by walking down the street and passing out handfuls of candy. You guys just been hanging out? Which turns out to be surprisingly effective. Is this your brother? You got some candy, too, Christopher? Excellent. The idea is give up on their first location where nobody showed up for Bible school. Just do it around the corner from the house they're painting. And what clinched the whole deal, the two teenage girls from next door, Crystal and Paula, took Dan and the Chicago kids from door to door, rounding up prospects. In all, about a dozen kids showed up Thursday morning for games, t-shirt painting, and a lesson from the Bible presented in the form of a skit. So let's everyone close their eyes and we're going to pray. God, we thank you for this day. We thank you for everyone that made it here today. And I pray that we can have a fun time now, we can learn through your skit, and then we could also enjoy doing our craft and playing some more games, and having a snack. In your precious name, amen. Now, with no further ado-- The whole Bible school turns out to be really fun, for the West Virginia kids and the Chicago ones, too. The games go over great. The crafts absorb everybody. Some of the kids clearly have hard lives and are excited at all the attention they're getting. The only thing lacking is nonbelievers. All the kids say they go to church. When it comes time to make beaded faith bracelets, they already know what all the beads stand for. During Dan's homily, most of the kids know the Bible stories he tells. You guys know the story about the Red Sea, though, right? Well, here's a good story about the Red Sea. He just tapped the water and-- Right, tapped the water and what happened? It split. Later, Carol and Marisa are kneeling in the grass doing Bible study when Angie and Crystal just walk right up to them. This is pretty much a situation that any missionary would regard as ideal. And, having no choice, as if a greater plan is, in fact, at work, the Chicagoans get down to the hardcore work of talking about religion. Crystal goes home to get her Bible. One of the adult leaders, Carol, does most of the talking, with Jessica and Kelly and Marisa piping in from time to time. Does Paula have a Bible, too, that she reads? Yeah? So that's interesting that your school gave you a Bible. Is it like-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] a religious school? Your school did it, too. Is it a religious school? Do they talk about God at school? No. No? They just gave you a Bible? That's kind of cool. Yeah, if any of the public schools gave us a Bible in Chicago, they'd be in trouble. They're not allowed to do that. During breaks, all the girls chat happily with the neighborhood kids. And later, back at camp, Dan congratulated them all. You guys did so well today. I'm so proud of you, of how you guys were. All of you just seemed to-- really, when you saw them, you were very friendly. With Paula, Crystal, and with Angie. Thank you so much. And let's keep that up tomorrow. This is a great-- I mean, I would say that, of all the people, including all the VBS kids that we've had, the most seeds that we've been planting have been with those three girls. It had been Dan's hope that on this trip, the group's faith would deepen. That they would make a step toward having a faith that was independent of what their parents taught them. This would partly happen through service, by helping others, and partly by being forced to articulate their faith to others. And it would happen by facing hardship on the trip and turning to God to help with the difficulties. But the fact is the hardships on the trip turned out to be not very hard at all, and most of them only had to articulate their faith to six-year-olds, who had mostly already accepted Jesus into their hearts. This was not enough to launch a round of soul searching and prayer. Instead, what happened was that the kids who didn't doubt their faith at home didn't doubt it here either. And the kids who had all sorts of questions at home continued to gnaw at those questions on the mission trip. The teenager with the most doubts was Arden, who mostly kept her doubts to herself. Which is really, it's frustrating. It makes it hard. To be-- wanting to be part of the group, and being part of the group, and yet knowing that in some way you're not part of the group because you question what the group is about. Arden holds a special symbolic place in her church. She was the first baby born to the young congregation, 15 years ago. Whenever the kids in church formed their own ad hoc church youth groups, Arden was always president. But about a year ago, even this carefully raised girl started to grapple with doubt. And her doubt began, not because of something she saw on television, not because of peer pressure from attractive, cigarette-smoking, alcohol-drinking, pornographic-website-using fans of the South Park movie. No. Her doubts began at church camp. She was there for six weeks, at a program called Discipleship Training, which sent her and five girls that she'd never met before into the woods for two weeks of camping and hiking and canoeing together. And we were really tight. I mean, we just did everything together. We prayed and we would sing songs together at night. And when we'd get lost, I mean, the first thing we'd do would be like, it's time to pray. And when we got to Lake Superior at midnight, we were like, it's time to pray. We were just really-- I mean, it was a wonderful experience. I had a lot of fun. And if you had to describe your feelings about God during those first two weeks, how would you describe Him? He was incredibly real. I felt like He was there. That was the only way I could describe it, is that He was really there for me. After two weeks, Arden and her five new friends came in from the woods to rejoin the rest of the camp. My friends suddenly changed, like who I'd thought they were-- they suddenly became different. And I don't think-- I think it was just that I hadn't seen them with other people besides our group. And they were-- they would-- it all became-- you know, there was the popular one, and then there was the really helpful one, and there was the boy chaser. I mean, it was just like, I didn't know how to handle it. I was still hoping to have that intimate friendship among the five of us. And I thought I was going to die. I just couldn't take it. And then I sort of dropped into my spiritual low. And so I started having trouble praying. I didn't want to pray. And I was starting go, well, you know, what's up with this? What is real? If I can't even-- when I feel like God's there, and then I suddenly feel like He's not, where is He this whole time? You know? So that's when I really started to question. And I had all these doubts and I felt like God wasn't anywhere near me at all and He didn't care. One of the traditions in Christianity is that great faith often comes only after great doubt. The New Testament is filled with one story after another like this. Even Jesus grapples with his conscience in the desert before he begins his ministry. He prays again in Gethsemane. And listening to Arden, I begin to wonder if all new believers have to go through that trial in the desert themselves if they're going to arrive at a mature faith. This is what Dan and a number of the parents believe will keep Christianity as part of these teenagers' lives as they grow older. But it is enormously difficult to go through this kind of doubt. It makes Arden unhappy. She says she does not want another big spiritual moment, feeling close to God, like she had in the woods. I don't trust that anymore. I don't trust, you know, just your emotions, and where they may take you. And at the same time, she knows that without a pure leap of faith, she's nowhere. That's the thing that worries me the most, is that I may never find what I'm looking for. I may never find out who God is. And that worries me. Like sometimes I think, oh my gosh, you know, because I don't know where I would be. I don't know. I'd have to start all over again. Abraham our father answered his Hineni when the Lord commanded him to offer up his son. He took the wood and fire and journeyed to Moriah, and there he built an altar to complete what he'd begun. Pastor Kenny actually broke into song during his sermon on Thursday. The subject of the sermon was how the Lord calls certain people to serve him, and how when he does, they usually do not want to go. We hear the story of Abraham being called to slay Isaac, of Moses being ordered to go to Pharaoh. Kenny talks from the heart about the moment he felt he was called to preach. And then he asks all of us to look into our own hearts. Has God been speaking to us during our week in West Virginia? Maybe God is speaking to you. That you want to be a missionary. Now over here under my Bible, I've got a legal pad. And if you think that God is calling you to serve Him, maybe that's what God wants you to do. I'm just going to leave this pad out here and I want you to just come put your name on it. I'm not going to sell your name to any list. I'm not going to turn it in to Mission to the World. This is between-- I think you need to do that. You need to make that commitment, if God is calling you. After the service ends, a few people mill around. The Chicago teenagers head off to the cabins, except for Joel, who walks over to the legal pad, picks it up, and writes his name. I catch up with him a few minutes later. So I saw what you just did. Yeah, I signed the list. It was-- for me-- to me-- it was the most powerful sermon I've ever heard. Joel tells me he now knows what he wants to do with his life. Although parts of his faith clearly still chafe at him, although he's always saying how hard it is for him to talk to people, although he still has a long way to go before he's actually at ease in the bigger secular world, he's the one member of the youth group who decided that he wants to head out into that world, as a missionary teaching in another country. When Kenny was praying, I was just like, man, what have you been thinking all these years? No, I'm not going to be a professional soccer player. That's totally out now. Is that what you thought up until that point? Yeah, it is. Given how restrictive-- I hope you don't take this the wrong way-- but given how restrictive your family is, I can see why you might jump at a chance to go overseas and get away. Yeah, I mean, some of the rules I can understand why. I accept it because it's a good idea. But it is getting kind of restrictive now that I'm getting older. Act Seven, Made to Stumble Because of Me. All week I kept running into those guys who wanted to be on the radio, Matt and Eric. And on the last morning in West Virginia, I see Eric out by his car. The night before, he had driven some kids from his VBS back home after dinner. Eric's group was running this huge vacation Bible school at a place called Windmill Park in a tough section of Fairmont, West Virginia. Eric had gotten close to a lot of the kids. Yeah, it was really hard last night, taking them home. Some car was coming too close and they're like, it's a drive-by! And they're ducking under and they were scared. One of the kids left his bike at the park and he was all afraid that it was stolen. And stuff like that. And while we were pulling in there, they were like, keep your head low because there's bullets around here, and stuff like that. It's just really hard to think of these little first through fourth graders having to deal with this stuff every day. And we gave out prizes on our last day and a kid had to run home so that he could get the prizes to his house without having them taken from him. So it's rough. I mean, that's why I think, I'm almost-- I was almost like kind of down on the whole idea of VBS, because it's like you invest in these kids for a week, and they get close, and relationships are built. And then it's cut off. So I just felt like emotionally, it was just too hard on them. And last night I was really struggling with that whole idea. That's interesting. Earlier in the week, we were talking about if you guys were going to change, and in the end, you did see something you hadn't seen before. Definitely. I mean, definitely. Because that was really hard. I was very broken up by the thought of whether it's right to do these one-week VBSs. And invest in this kids just to then leave them. At the end of their week, the Chicagoans are feeling proud of how far they've come-- with the vacation Bible school, with Angie and Paula and Crystal, who they invited to dinner out at the campsite on the last night. People promise to write to each other. When we ask Crystal which parts of the Bible did she think that she would be reading, now that Carol had pointed out some sections to her, she can't remember which sections Carol had said. She says she doesn't really read anything on her own. At services that last night, some kids from the East Coast get up to perform a song. They're in a band called Iris and the song is about one of the unique burdens of being a teenager and a Christian. So, hopefully, I'd like to encourage you all to not let it stop here, but when you go back, if you have friends or family that you can witness to, continue to share the love of Christ with people. [SINGING] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you so self-assured in everything you confide? Are my beliefs so absurd? I would not try to hide. I'm not trying to push you, but I hate to see you like this. I love you too much to let you die in ignorance. You're on a ledge and the ground beneath is breaking. You try to swim, you're sinking slow but surely grab his hands. Hey, friend, I won't have your blood upon my hands. Hey friend, what can I do to make you understand? To make you understand? As for whether the Chicago kids are up to the task of actually proselytizing their non-Christian friends, they do not seem eager or ready. It's one thing to befriend strangers in another state. It's another kind of commitment to their faith to try it at home. It's a sacrifice. But on the long drive home, Joel, the future missionary, says he doesn't think it'll happen with the group. Either the people won't want to come, or at least as far as I'm concerned, I'm too nervous to ask them. And I already-- and I also-- in the case of most of my non-Christian friends, I already know what their answer would be. They don't-- they're fine with me being Christian. But they don't have any interest in it themselves, at least not at this point. In the four months since the trip, only one member of the group has brought a non-Christian friend to youth group. As for contact with Crystal and Paula and Angie, an adult leader wrote a letter to Angie, and sent a Bible that they all signed. There hasn't been a lot more. And maybe this lack of proselytizing energy is not such a bad thing. If Dan is going to stick to his goal from the trip, helping the kids examine what they believe, the real tests of faith for most people are not usually in interactions with people hundreds of miles away, or with people they're trying to convert. Real tests of faith happen with the people closest to you, with parents and friends. It was a bunch of Christians who made Arden question her faith. It's a desire to kiss a nice Christian girl that made Joel question his. Those questions are likely to continue. Well, our program was produced and reported today by Susan Burton and myself, with help from Alex Blumberg, Nancy Updike, Blue Chevigny, Starlee Kine, and Todd Bachmann. Julie Snyder was our editor on the story. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. And if you're still somehow mulling over that perfect Christmas gift, even today, our double CD, Lies, Sissies, and Fiascoes, The Best of This American Life, is available at our website, at www.thislife.org. At the site you can also listen to our program for free, and listen to more music from the Christian rock band, Iris. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who taunts me-- taunts me!-- all the time. Oh, come on, you know you want it. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. And I'm like, no, I don't. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Oh come all ye faithful, joyful, and triumphant, and let us have, for once, a rational, adult conversation about Santa Claus. You're listening to a special Christmas edition of This American Life from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. And let us head back my friend, back for a moment before Christmas lights were invented, back before Macy's department store goes up on 34th Street, back before the moment Charles Dickens writes A Christmas Carol, back, my friend, to the molten lava core at the very center of modern Christmas, the day that someone first believed in Santa Claus. Someone has actually figured out when this happened. And it's in 1822, in America, in New York City. And who do we have to thank for the whole thing? A bunch of rich guys. And not just any rich guys. Aristocratic rich guys who all agreed that there were big, big problems with the entire American experiment, then very young, then more young to them than the Star Wars trilogy is to us. And these guys did not like it one little bit. They were very suspicious of democracy, modern capitalism, Thomas Jefferson. They just saw it as chaos, and as a takeover of the city, and, really, the whole country, by the mob. This is Stephen Nissenbaum, who has written a history about all of this called The Battle for Christmas. Ordinary people, by which they really meant the middle classes, were taking over the city commercially and politically. They called these people the mob. Now one of the dreadful areas of mob rule, from their point of view, was what happened at Christmas every year. There was all this public rowdiness at Christmas. It was celebrated the way we celebrate New Year's Eve now. Yes, exactly. If you were worried about the mob, the one time of year when you probably had to be most on your guard was the Christmas season. During Christmas, roving bands of toughs went from door to door, demanding drinks and making threats. There was riotous noise-making, massive public drunkenness. You can understand why these rich guys just hated it. And so they set out to create new traditions, traditions that they hoped might replace all this debauchery. Starting around 1810, they tried to convince people that a certain fourth century Catholic saint, Saint Nicholas-- you may recognize the name-- was, in fact, the patron saint of New York. For about a decade after that, they tried to make his saint's day, which is December 6, into a regular December holiday on the island of Manhattan. Now these guys were very serious about the whole business of creating new holidays for the new nation. At least one of them was involved in the creation of Washington's birthday, Columbus Day, and the Fourth of July. But this Saint Nicholas thing, it was just not catching on. And if you saw the way that they portrayed Saint Nicholas in a handout that one of these guys had printed in 1810, you might see why. That picture doesn't look at all like the modern Christmas Santa Claus that we know. In fact, he's a very dignified, magisterial bishop. He's in clerical robes. He's in clerical robes. He has a bishop's mitre and sceptre, a cross. Everything about him looks like one of those medieval saints. He has a halo. He has a halo around him. That Saint Nicholas comes to punish every bit as much as he does to reward. Saint Nicholas appears in a book in 1809 and a couple of poems over the next few years. It is not until 1821 that somebody mentions him arriving on Christmas Eve or describes him in a sleigh pulled by a reindeer, one reindeer in this case. And then in 1822, one of these rich guys, a man named Clement Clarke Moore, changes everything when he writes a poem. How often do you ever get to say that? He changes everything when he writes a poem. This is the poem that begins, "Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse." I actually find it kind of incredible in reading this history a century and a half later that the poem that actually created Santa Claus is one that is still around. Yeah. But what he did was he transformed Saint Nicholas utterly. No longer in this poem is Saint Nicholas a dignified bishop. In fact, there's nothing bishop-like about him. He's short. He smiles. He's fat. A guy who just loves kids. It's all there in the poem, the stockings hung with care, the reindeers' names, the fact that he comes down the chimney. And note Santa's clothes the next time that you hear the poem, a fur coat, a short pipe, a bag that he carries over his shoulder, like an ordinary Yankee trader, not a bishop. This was the key to the whole thing, Nissenbaum says. This takes him out of the aristocracy and makes him a regular working man. Middle class, even before there was a name for middle class. A perfect hero for the new nation. And Clement Clarke Moore didn't have any idea how popular his vision of Santa might get. And so, incredibly, he didn't publish the poem. He just passed it around to a few friends. If he had wanted this to become the American ritual, he probably would have taken steps to publish it. But he didn't. The story has it that a niece of his took it upon herself to publish it the following year in a newspaper in the Hudson River town of Troy. And it was republished, and republished after that. And within a few decades, the Christmas described in the poem, a Christmas spent at home, with Santa bringing toys and kids with parents all indoors, that Christmas replaced the big, drunken, loud, carousing out on the street kind of Christmas. So the aristocrats got their way. They killed the noisy version of Christmas, though accidentally. Well, today on our program, we bring you stories about Santa and the many, many ways in which he is seen. Act One, The Red Velvet Underground, in which one brave man heads out into the desert to wrestle with a devil named Claus. Act Two, If This Sleigh is A-Rockin', Don't Come A-Knockin', in which Sarah Vowell explains why so many pop songs show Santa getting all jiggy. Act Three, It Takes a Nation of Santas to Hold Us Back, a story of two little boys and a man that they hope at least has some pull with Santa. Act Four, Santa in Handcuffs, Prometheus in Chains, in which we are proud to present an all-new story of The Most Fantastic Crimefighter The World Has Ever Known, who single-handedly heads from department store to department store to stop a red and white menace. Act Five, Santa Versus the Easter Bunny, in which writer David Sedaris tries to promote cross-cultural understanding-- so badly needed everywhere these days, my friend-- for the holiday season. Stay with us. Act One, The Red Velvet Underground. We begin our program today with a story with the most idealistic possible vision of Santa and a quest for something lost about Santa. From Mike Paterniti. I guess I'd somehow become OK with the death of everything, the death of faith, honor, idealism. I thrived in the country club of the death of everything until a newspaper headline caught my eye, "Santa Faces the Sack." Bloomingdale's in Manhattan had fired its store Santa, and Macy's was adopting an interactive North Pole. Santa Claus was on the verge of extinction. I got thinking about that, and, I don't know, something in me kind of snapped. I can't recall the exact Christmas I parted ways with Santa, nor am I sure how I lost him. As a kid and as the oldest of four brothers, I believed in Santa Claus way past the point of healthy. I was a fanatic. At the slightest provocation, I'd defend Santa's honor with a flurry of punches against any nay-saying elementary school punk. My fervor was pure and scary. I remembered that feeling now. And I knew one thing, I wanted it back. It's a couple weeks before Christmas. One minute, I'm futzing with recyclables, living what constitutes a basically normal life. And the next, a plain brown package arrives at the door, a little gift I've sent myself, something I'm not sure I want the neighbors to know about. I'm 33 years old, and I bought myself a Santa suit. It's a strange moment unwrapping that box, cardboard and paper giving way to rich, red cloth and oodles of white wig hair. It stirs a feeling. You really can't explain something like this to the people in your life. What? You're going to infiltrate the Santa underworld as Santa yourself in the name of proving he exists? So you don't explain. Here's what you do. You stick that Santa suit in your garment bag and go. You let momentum take your body, rocket it from a tarmac, hurtle it through space like a satellite, and land it on another planet, changed, a place that looks a lot like the Pole itself. It's Minnesota actually, but close enough. The night before my first appearance as Claus, I take my Santa suit from the garment bag. It's a deluxe model with luxurious, deep red velvet, faux fox fur trim, blacks spats to wear over my boots, and Santa glasses with little, square, plastic lenses. To beef up my belly, there is a big cushion like a catcher's protector. Christmas in America means a trip to the mall. And tomorrow, I'll show up at the biggest one I could find, the mall of malls, the Mall of America. I've already been given a crash course in Santa 101 by the mall star Santa. But it doesn't matter. I fall asleep with pangs of doubt. Do I have what it takes? And what the hell does it take? Morning comes. An inauspicious start. The costume is hot and itchy, especially the wig and the beard. And until you're Santa, you never know little things about yourself, like I'm a real peripheral vision guy. I like to know who's coming at me with a blackjack. Also, I enjoy oxygen. Trapped in all that synthetic filament, I find myself gasping for air. Finally, and perhaps most damning, I don't like being the center of attention at all. I mumble at people, unreeling halfhearted ho, ho, hos. Attempting something more theatrical, I lift my hand and wave mechanically. "Maaa-reee Chrees-maas, everyone." It comes out as if I were just off the boat from Transylvania. Moving on, I spy a group of older kids, maybe 12-year-olds, wearing baggy jeans pulled low, delinquent skateboard nihilist types. My first impulse is to try to slip by them, make it seem as if I'm window shopping. But of course, I'm not. The fact that they're looking at me requires a response. But before I've thought it through, I actually hear myself addressing their leader. "What's up, cuz?" Someone giggles. Everyone else starts backing away. A sober and depressing thought occurs to me. I make a sucky Santa. Even if I have been a disservice to Christmas, my failure drives me forth. Out of curiosity and secret shame, out of righteousness and mad purpose, I take to the sky in the spirit of Claus and make house calls. In New York, I ride a bus along Fifth Avenue with 50 volunteer street corner Kringles on our way to a Santa parade. "You got to get down with the people," one of them, a man named Socrates, tells me. "You got to jing-a-ling for the cha-ching." In California, I lay a wreath on the grave of the great Jewish Santa, Herman Epstein. He would eat his latkes and matzah balls and then suit up as Big Red to visit sick kids at a local hospital. He did it for 50 years. And then in Redmond, Washington, I go to Microsoft headquarters dressed as Santa just to see. I camp myself on a corner, and a Mercedes sedan pulls up. A middle-aged man leaps out, piping mad. He's a Microsoft public relations person. He points at me, Santa, and sputters, "I am god damn sick of your guerrilla tactics," as if life at Microsoft is a constant parade of angry trolls and elves. I have a friend in Los Angeles named David Punch. And when he hears what I'm up to, he decides to join me. He instantly comes up with a green felt elf costume with impressive knee-high candy cane socks and a cap that makes him look a bit like a Danish sous chef. He's an unusual elf at six foot, three inches, but he too wants to believe. Santa christens him Fancy, and we take to the streets with no particular plan. We get in a rental car and track the planes to LAX at sunset, then decide to meet and greet the hordes as they arrive from Asia and Africa. Even if Santa is in decline here in America, he's still big-time abroad and growing in places where you would least expect it. In baggage claim, I'm received like a celebrity. A flight from Taiwan, they pat my stomach wide-eyed, and so I share a good belly laugh with them. A flight from Egypt, they want to touch my impressive beard. A flight from Sierra Leone, they want pictures with their extended families. When I wander outside, a cab driver pulls over and rolls down his window. "Hello, my friend Mr. Claus," he says, gesturing for me to come over. "Hello, yes, you are American?" I tell him, "Yes. But, ho, ho, ho. I'm also a citizen of all nations. And I live at the North Pole." "Yes, a citizen," he says. But he is oddly intense and emotional. And though he knows I'm not looking for a ride, he has pulled his banged-up car on the curb to-- to what? Say hello to Santa Claus? Yesterday, I was a refugee from Afghanistan. And today, I am a citizen too. He reaches into his glove compartment and pulls out a fresh envelope. "My papers, Mr. Claus. I'm an American like you." He smiles, eyes watering and grabs my hand. "Merry Christmas, Mr. Claus," he says. And then suddenly, he's gone, two more taillights lost in the sea of traffic. Fancy and I hit the road, headed east toward Vegas into the desert, driving with several bag lunches because Santa's appetite has become insatiable. Gassing up in Barstow, I chat with a nice fellow in a cowboy hat at the self-serve, quiz him about the local color in these high desert parts. "You like drinking?" "There are really only bars in Barstow," he says, "and I don't recommend them unless you feel like getting beat up." Still, there's something about the look of this place, the weird metallic taste of it in the air, the dead-endedness of it. So we take a drive around, me in my red cap, Fancy in his pointy hat, and happen upon a four-corner with a cement structure and neon beer signs lit in the windows, one of those promised rough and tumble bars of Barstow. It's a bleak, Santa-less place. Inside are a couple of pool tables, a dartboard, and a long row of weathered-looking, tattooed human beings, still parched after guzzling an afternoon's worth of drinks. As Santa bellies up to the bar, everyone stares, including the bartender, who says, "What do you need?" "I'll have what he's having," Santa says, pointing to the first broken-down hombre to his left, "and he'll have another." Suddenly, everybody wants something, tequila or whiskey shots, a pack of cigarettes, and Santa flutters more bills at the bartender. "There's nothing rough-and-tumble about it at all," thinks Santa. But just as that thought arrives, a voice slurs over Santa's left shoulder. "Who the [BLEEP] are you?" When I turn around, I'm standing nose to nose with a man wearing a camouflage jacket. Long, stringy hair falls from his baseball cap. His knuckles are dirty and scabbed. His breath smells of mash and lighter fluid. His smile is lopsided, not friendly, but menacing. "Who the holy freaking [BLEEP] are you?" He says again. It's a fair question, one that maybe should have occurred to me before now, before I came in here looking as I look, in red coat and fake, hoary beard. Or, for that matter, before barnstorming the country in search of something that is nearly impossible to explain and perhaps more impossible to find, but boils down to a simple belief in, well, Santa. But then there doesn't seem to be a lot of him here at the booze-hole. My answer is automatic and uncensored. "I'm Santa Claus," I say, "and who the [BLEEP] are you?" There is stunned silence at the bar until somebody snorts. Someone else guffaws. And then, like a wave crashing and unfurling along a shoreline, there's hooting, and hollering, and laughing that passes down the length of the entire bar. "You hear that, boys? Santa's about to rip Billy a new [BLEEP] hole." The distraction confuses my new friend. "His name's Billy Budd, and he ain't going to touch you," says a kind-looking man with a Van Dyke and a cigarette who has abruptly stepped between us. "Because if he does, I'm going to run his head through that window, right Billy?" "Oh yeah, Donald," Billy says with a sudden smile. Billy Budd is drunk and perhaps just bipolar enough to immediately forget that we were in the middle of a conversation full of passion and unanswered queries. And now we're suddenly chatting, Billy, Donald, and I. They're both homeless. Billy Budd counts himself as an anarchist. And they sell crystals. I buy them a couple beers. And in return, they give me a crystal, a special Brazilian one with amazing properties meant to protect me against evil and bring light into my world. When I insist on paying for it, Billy Budd says, "Your money's no good with us, man. When you're with us, you're a brother." It's Santa's first gift. "What do you want for Christmas?" I say to Billy Budd. We're standing nose to nose again. It seems that's the way Billy Budd likes it. "If I tell you, are you going to give it to me?" "Yeah, I am. I'm Santa Claus, right?" "Anything?" "Anything at all." He ponders, begins to speak, stops. "Yeah, I reckon we could use a few cases of Natural Ice." So I go with them and another one of their friends-- a man who looks just like Santa too, but without the outfit-- to buy beer. Afterward, we drive up to their encampment on a ridge north of town, just some sleeping bags and empty beer cans and the embers of a fire flickering in the desert, somewhere that seems utterly nowhere. Billy Budd presses a can into my hand. "Here you go, Santa." Together, we drink. The air is cold, and the sky is spackled with stars, the brightest at the highest point above our heads. The beer tastes salty and good going down. And when Donald offers me a cigarette, I take it, though I don't normally smoke. When I go to light up, I nearly set my beard on fire. We talk about everything, about America, its prettiest spots, its most lowdown. We talk about home, where it is, why we're not there right now. These men, dressed in dirty jeans and jackets, slugging Natural Ice, open up to Santa. Not to me, but to Santa. They're good people who have drawn a hard lot and then somehow have been dismissed, driven out of America to live at its forgotten edges. Not that they see it that way. No, the amazing thing is that they're standing here with pockets full of crystals. They gave Santa his first gift. And now Donald is talking about God and how Christmas will probably be spent right here on this patch of sand. And it will be the holiest, most rollicking beer-swilling day of celebration they can put on. Billy Budd says, he's going to cook a turkey with stuffing. And Donald smiles at him and says, they'll give thanks to the Lord for their freedom, for all of this. Then he points up at the sky, to the North Star. "I know it don't seem like it," says Billy Budd, "but we're looking for the answers too." Christmas Eve, a mall somewhere in the middle of America. A grown man dressed in a red hat, and red jacket, and red pants with white fur trim. It seems he's worn his Santa robes for so long they've become comfortable. And the beard, it almost feels natural. He keeps a Brazilian crystal in his pocket. He catches a reflection of himself in a store window. Santa. The people here come fast and furious. An old woman reaching out for his hand now. A teenage punk strung out on something saying, "Hey, Santa, don't forget me. OK?" A Jamaican man calls him "Papa Noel," and tells him he needs his wife back for Christmas. They come in all ages. They come to touch him, or stand nearby, or flash a picture, to confess or ask a kindness, to make it real. Every time he thinks he might feel tired, after all the hard work of bringing Christmas to the world, he feels energized. Somewhere near the mall fountain, just beyond the food court, humanity parts in a light-filled glade. And there are two twin brothers, clutching hands, wearing the same blue corduroy overalls, pointing at Santa in complete shock and awe. They don't know whether to run for him or run far, far away. But then it doesn't take much. Santa comes down on one knee and opens his arms. And the two boys break into huge toothless grins and bust into a sprint, just leap right into Santa's arms simultaneously, one in either arm. Sometimes people wonder what it's like to be Santa, if it gets heavy carrying kids like that. But I'm here to tell you, you never felt something so light. Like birds when they lift off the ground, they don't weigh anything at all. Mike Paterniti lives in Portland, Maine. A version of this story has appeared in Esquire magazine. Act Two, If This Sleigh is A-Rockin', Don't Come A-Knockin'. When the poem says that Saint Nick has a little, round belly that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly, for most of us, that is about as real as we want to get when it comes to Santa getting all physical. But the makers of popular music do not respect this simple boundary. No, no, no. And in today's program, as we try to understand all the various sides of Santa, Sarah Vowell decided to explain this one. Even as a child, I loved Christmas songs almost as much as Christmas itself. I loved their arcane language, "round yon virgin," "feast of Stephen," verbs like "hark" and "deck." But there was one Christmas song I couldn't stand, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." That one made me nervous. And it made me suspicious of Santa's good intentions. I thought, if he went after someone else's mother, mine might be next. Yeah, what a laugh. My poor, unsuspecting father, the man who went to all that trouble setting out the milk and cookies, catches mom in the act with Father Christmas? What happens then? She ditches us, runs off to the North Pole, and my sister and I are latch key kids by New Year's Eve. I was probably 21 before I figured out that the smoocher in that song was supposed to be the dad. But still, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" is just one of the many gossipy, musical reports about that sexpot Saint Nick. A sweep through the Santa song catalog corroborates my childhood suspicion that Santa is not just a friend to children, he is a ladies' man. December 1976 was Elvis Presley's final holiday season, but it was my first with his Christmas record. And this became my favorite Christmas song, "Santa Claus Is Back In Town." [SINGING] Got no sleigh with reindeer, no sack on my back, you want to see me coming in a big, black Cadillac. Oh, it's Christmas time, pretty baby. I hear that song now, and I can not believe my parents gave me this as a gift on Jesus's birthday. It is filthy, which you could expect from a home wrecker like Santa. Listen to this part. [SINGING] Hang up your pretty stockings, turn off the light, Santa Claus is coming down your chimney tonight. Oh, it's Christmas time, little baby. You think that's dirty? Get a load of Clarence Carter's song "Back Door Santa," and you'll know why Santa goes around saying, ho, ho, ho. Because he is a ho. He's less interested in little children than in their mothers. [SINGING] I keep some change in my pocket in case the children at home. I give 'em a few pennies, so that we can be alone. I leave the back door open so if anybody smells a mouse. And wouldn't old Santa be in trouble if there ain't no chimney in the house? They call me back door Santa. I make my runs about the break of day. Looky here. I make all the little girls happy while the boys are out to play. This is what happens when pop music and Christmas collide. The project of Christmas, to celebrate the birth of a messiah who will die to save our souls, is at odds with the project of pop music. The project of pop music is love, specifically, romantic love and not the for-God-so-loved-the-world kind. If a pop musician is going to perform a Christmas song, he or she doesn't have that much to work with from a let's do it point of view. There's the infant Jesus in swaddling clothes. There's Bethlehem, that swaddling town. There's Joseph and his wife Mary, a virgin, assorted wise men and animals, and there's Santa Claus. From a getting it on perspective, you can see how the craggy, old, fat man wins by default. Take Madonna. Though most famous for being named after Jesus Christ's mother, Madonna took some time out of her busy missionary schedule to cover this Eartha Kitt classic as a benefit for charity. It is not the babe Jesus she croons to, but the babe magnet, Santa. [SINGING] Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree for me. I've been an awful good girl, Santa baby. And hurry down the chimney tonight. Santa's job is to fulfill a child's wishes. And it makes sense that, as a child grows up, she might wish for something a little steamier than two front teeth. A letter to Santa, then, is a blank page on which the heart writes what the heart wants. Listen, for example, to that six-foot-tall valentine, RuPaul. [SINGING] I saw daddy kissing Santa Claus underneath the mistletoe last night. In all these songs, Santa does not live on the North Pole. He lives among us. Santa is us with all our flaws, flaws like lust, infidelity, and all the pleasures of the flesh. Experts no less than Cheech and Chong point out that Mrs. Claus is famous in their neighborhood for her brownies. Martin Mull does a song in which Santa is giving up dope. And here's the subtly-titled ditty, "Santa Came Home Drunk." [SINGING] You talk about Santa Claus. You want to know what he's all about? Santa Claus got drunk last night. Everybody tried to throw him out. And I want to tell you, folks, how it all began. Santa stopped at a neighbor's house and started drinking good gin. At some point in our lives, most of us were at least a little afraid of Santa's judgment, of that list he's checking twice, who's naughty, who's nice. What a relief to picture a Santa with all our human frailties, all our sex, and drugs, and rock and roll. A mommy-kissing chimney-comer-downer, bottle-hitting, sugar daddy Christmas. That's a Santa who would do well to remember the words of the birthday boy, Jesus Christ. "Thus saith the Lord, judge not that ye be not judged." And you know what they say about Jesus, don't you, Santa? He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows when you've been bad or good. So be good for goodness sake. Sarah Vowell lives essentially on the same block-- no kidding-- where Clement Clarke Moore, the author of the poem "'Twas the Night before Christmas," once lived on Manhattan island nearly two centuries ago. She's a columnist for the online magazine Salon. Coming up, when is Santa not Santa? Another riddle solved in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of different people to tackle that theme. Today's program, The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Suit, stories about Santa and the many different ways that we see him. We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, It Takes a Nation of Santas to Hold Us Back. As we said in the first part of today's program, belief in a Santa who comes down chimneys on Christmas Eve bearing gifts is, at best as anybody can tell, something that began here in America. And so many other variations on what Santa means are also American inventions. Riz Rollins tells this story from his boyhood here in Chicago. Rosie only dresses us like this when we're going somewhere really important. Even the weekly haul to church doesn't get the matching gray, flannel outfits, the ones that cause everybody to ask whether my brother and I are twins, which we adamantly are not. We wear these clothes usually only when we're going downtown. And we only go downtown when there is a local premiere of a new Disney feature, after which we might lunch at the counter of Woolworth's, co-mingling like immigrants in the new world of de facto integration. My grandmother works as a laundress in an orphanage in Chicago's North Side and makes the long trip to the city's downtown area daily. But she rarely stops there to visit a shop. She prefers to do most of her shopping on the commercial strip that crawls under the elevated train on 63rd Street on the South Side, closer to her home. It's not just that the goods and services she seeks are less expensive on the South Side. In many cases, they aren't. But commerce there wears a face that closely resembles her own. Even now, after living here for over half a century, there is much of the city she has not seen. The rules of interracial decorum will never change for her. They are God-made. Each with their own kind, the Bible says. But both my brother and I are sure that the Bible is not the only word of authority in life. Today, as my well-dressed brother and I are led through the high stone corridors of this world by Grandma's hand, we never notice the bitter cold. We are blinded by the lights of Christmas and the season of getting. Grandma Rosie is taking us to meet the man. He has made his way from the northern land, perhaps just this day, to receive the supplications and petitions of children who have kept his precepts and awaited his graces. While we have been raised to fear the mysterious grace of God, the grace of the fat man in the red and white suit means more. Children know Santa keeps residence in one place in every city. In Chicago, his cathedral is in Marshall Field's. And his holy-of-holies is somewhere on the third floor near the toys. My brother and I have been here many times before through many years. So imagine our panic as we continue walking past the first entrance of the block-long store. We say nothing, not even to each other. Perhaps Rosie is taking us on a shortcut to see the crimson saint. We maintain silence until we stand at the end of the street beyond the last entrance to Marshall Field's. This is our last chance to make our desires plain. "I thought you were going to take us to see Santa Claus," I blurt out in desperation. My grandmother replies with unbelievable patience considering the stakes of her mistake, "We are, but this year we're going to a different place." My brother and I can not conceive of Santa at a different place, for even we know that there isn't any store downtown or anywhere else that matches the commercial grandeur or Marshall Field's. So where else would Santa want to be? We pass the various stores along the main downtown shopping strip, disheartened with each passing block. We bypass Carson's, then Montgomery Ward, then smaller shops and boutiques further away from the expensive deities, closer to the affordable ones. At this rate, we'll be lucky if we see any elves or reindeer poo. Finally, we stop at our destination, Sears, Roebuck and Company. This is where Grandma intends us to have an audience with the king of dreams? We stand shivering with horror at the obvious heresy. "This is where Santa is this year," Rosie postulates confidently. She is full of adult authority. And we know that we should take what she says with the same faith as we do all her other gospel. But how can we? She has never been so obviously mistaken in all the time I've known her. We enter Sears through two large doors, rather than the perpetually revolving doors of Marshall Field's. We march up a stairwell, rather than ascending by escalator or elevator. And towards the back, next to a section of toys that have their source in the pages of Sears catalog, rather than in the frigid magic of the North Pole, sits my grandmother's version of Santa. His throne is not raised like the throne of the Santa we have come to believe in. It's mundane and accessible. There is no line of acolytes waiting to petition Santa. There's no promise, or grandeur, or terror. In fact, it is as plain to me as the nose on my face that the man in loose-fitting, red and white uniform is the biggest impostor that I've ever had the chance to lay eyes on. For the man underneath the fake, silver beard is black like me. My grandmother had not prepared us to expect this change in Santa's ethnicity. Most likely, she was trying to provide a vision of goodness that resembled us. Maybe she was secretly tired of relying on the white Jesus, watching her children gyrate to their white Elvis, losing sleep waiting for white Santa. But what she did not know was that until that day I hadn't noticed any difference between black and white people. I'm sure that we had seen white people before, but usually from afar. Santa was the only white man we had a personal relationship with. That day, my brother and I silently agreed to let the ruse continue. I remember half-hoping even if this man wasn't Santa that perhaps he had connections to someone who might know Santa. But unknown to me, or my brother, or Grandma Rosie, was the fact that now the lid was off the box that held the knots and confusions I'd wrestle with for the next 20 years. Nothing would be safe from doubt, no benevolence, sincerity, or article of faith. For the first time, I saw things are not what they appear. And I thus began to search for the little lies behind every truth. And I learned that every gift is purchased with sweat, and tears, and sacrifice. Riz Rollins is a DJ and writer in Seattle. Act Four, Santa in Handcuffs, Prometheus in Chains. What if someone actually did patrol the department store Santas for the forces of good? You know what? We do not even need to speculate about what would happen. Because right now, right at this moment, we can bring you a brand new episode of a very old radio serial that answers this very question. And now another exciting episode in the life of The Most Fantastic Crimefighter The World Has Ever Known. Chickenman. He's everywhere. He's everywhere. And Santa Claus, I want a Tiffany doll. Not the Tiffany doll that wets herself. The Tiffany doll that is a nightclub singer. Ho, ho, ho, ho. Well, if you're a good little girl, Santa will see what he can do. Are you really Santa Claus? Well, of course I am. Halt, vicious criminal impostor. I'm arresting you for being a vicious criminal impostor. Hey, bird-face, who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? I know who I am. I'm the manager of this department store. Oh. Well, I am the wonderful, white-winged warrior, Chickenman, fighter of crime and/or evil, defender of those who are undefendable. That doesn't sound right. Oh, don't I look impressed? You can not come into this department store and arrest our Santa. Well, your Santa is not a real Santa. And he fibbed his fat face off to that little girl. How do you know he's not Santa? Because I can pull on this phony beard, and it will come right off. Boy, it's really glued on tight. Oh, will you stop, you silly goose? Actually, I'm a chicken. The beard will not come off because it's a real beard. Winged warrior, what's going on here? Commissioner Norton, what are you doing here? I am waiting to see Santa. Oh, don't be a dope. You've been duped, dope. All right, Commissioner. Thank you for apprehending a major threat to the holiday dreams of our children, not to mention the American way of life. Thank you, Officer-- It's Kowalski. And I'm talking about you, bird-brain. Moi? The wonderful, white-winged warrior, defender of the defensible? Still doesn't sound right. This is the 17th Santa Claus you've arrested, including his honor, the mayor, who was playing Santa at the Midland City Community Center Christmas party for underprivileged politicians. He was an impostor. Oh, how nice, a gift of matching bracelets for the holidays. I think they're called handcuffs, winged warrior. Hold everything. The commissioner of police will vouch for me. Go ahead, sir. I've never seen this chicken before in my life. How long before I can see Santa? Oh, for crying out loud. I'm allowed one phone call, am I not? All right. But make it fast, feather-face. My phone is in my beak. It will just take a second. 555-876-5436-8907. Mayor's office. Miss Manley? It's me, the winged warrior, defender of-- Yeah, what do you want this time? Well, I've gotten myself into a little trouble here by apprehending all the Santa Clauses in town, including his honor, the mayor. I heard about that. And I will be forever in your debt because he is such a noodge. Good. And I need someone from the mayor's office to vouch for me, since the Commissioner is here, and he won't. Well, I do not vouch, honey, during the holiday season. I am too busy dreaming of a white Christmas, walking in a winter wonderland, and getting my chestnuts to roast by the open fire. Oh, well, I'm sorry to have troubled you. Well, I have to leave now, officer. I have to find a Santa chicken-puss, here, hasn't arrested. What about me, commissioner? I never saw you before in my life. Well, if the commissioner doesn't recognize the winged warrior and Miss Manley is busy roasting chestnuts by an open fire, pray tell, what will happen to our hero? Thank you. At least someone cares what-- Not you. I mean the one in the red suit with the big belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly. Oh, I hope the jail holiday meal isn't chicken. This has been another exciting episode in the life of The Most Fantastic Crimefighter The World Has Ever Known. Chickenman. He's everywhere. He's everywhere. That episode of Chickenman was written and produced for our program at the Radio Ranch in Los Angeles by Christine Coyle and Dick Orkin. It featured the voices of Christine Coyle, Dick Orkin, and Rod Roddy. Act Five, Santa Claus Versus the Easter Bunny. A while back, writer David Sedaris moved to France, where he enrolled in a school to study French. He was the only American there. As he explained to an audience at City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco, the teacher could be kind of mean. Oh, she would throw chalk at people, and stabbed someone in the eye with a pencil one day, and would hold your homework paper over your head and show everyone the mistakes that you made. So I wrote a story about her. And she read it, and I got thrown out of school. This is another story about her, and about the big religious holidays, and the sheer arbitrariness of the way we celebrate sometimes. Easter eggs, Santa filling the stockings, all the non-religious icons. Printed in our textbooks was a brief list of major holidays alongside a scattered arrangement of photos capturing French people in the act of celebration. The object was to match the holiday with the corresponding picture. Today's discussion was dominated by a Russian nanny, two chatty Poles, and a pouty, plump Moroccan woman who had grown up speaking French and had enrolled in the class hoping to improve her spelling. She had covered these lessons back in the third grade, and took every opportunity to demonstrate her superiority. She had recently transferred to the class. And we could not wait until she was booted up to her appropriate level. Midway through the first day, she had raised her hand so many times her shoulder had given out. Now she just leaned back in her seat and shouted the answers, her bronzed arms folded across her chest like some great grammar genie. We had finished discussing New Year's Eve, and the teacher had moved on to Easter, which was represented in our textbook by a black and white photograph of a chocolate bell lying upon a bed of palm fronds. "And what does one do on Easter? Would anyone like to tell us?" It was, for me, another one of those holidays I'd just as soon avoid. Growing up, my family had generally ignored the Easter celebrated by our non-Orthodox friends and neighbors, leading to the suspicion that we might be either Jews or Communists. As Greeks, we had our own Easter which was usually observed anywhere from two to four weeks after what was known in our circle as "the American version." The reason had to do with the moon or the Orthodox calendar, something mysterious like that. Though our mother always suspected it was scheduled at a later date so that the Greeks could buy their marshmallow chicks and plastic grass at drastically reduced sale prices. "The cheap sons of bitches," she'd say, "If they had their way, we'd be celebrating Christmas in the middle of god damn February." A brave Italian was attempting to answer the teacher's latest question, when the Moroccan student interrupted, shouting, "Excuse me, but what's an Easter?" Despite having grown up in a Muslim country, it seems she might have heard it mentioned once or twice, but no. "I mean it," she said, "I have no idea what you people are talking about." The teacher then called upon the rest of us to explain. The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. "It is," said one, "a party for the little boy of God who call hisself Jesus and-- you know, like that." She faltered, and her fellow countrymen came to her aid. "He call hisself Jesus, and then he die one day on two morsels of lumber." The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the Pope an aneurysm. "He die one day. And then he go above of my head to live with your father." "He weared the long hair. And after he died the first day, he come back here for to say hello to the peoples." "He nice. He make the good thing. And on the Easter, we be sad, because someone made him dead today." Part of the problem had to do with grammar. Simple nouns, such as "cross" and "Resurrection," were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive verbs as "to give of yourself your only begotten son." Faced with the challenge of explaining the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead. "Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb," an Italian student explained. "One, too, may eat of the chocolate." "And who brings the chocolate?" The teacher asked. I knew the word, and so I raised my hand saying, "The rabbit of Easter." "He bring of the chocolate." My classmates reacted as though I had pinned the delivery on a house cat. They were mortified. A rabbit? A rabbit? The teacher, assuming I had used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wiggling them as though they were ears. "You mean one of these? A rabbit, rabbit?" "Well, sure," I said, "he come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand, he have the basket, like for a bread." The Moroccan rolled her eyes, and the teacher sadly shook her head as if this explained everything that was wrong with my country. "No, no," she said, "here in France, the chocolate is brought by a big bell that flies in from Rome." I called for a time-out. "But how do the bell know where you live?" "Well," she said, "how does a rabbit?" It was a decent point, but at least a rabbit has eyes. That's a start. Rabbits move from place to place, while most bells can only go back and forth. And they can't even do that on their own power. On top of that, the Easter bunny has character. He's someone you'd like to meet. A bell has all the personality of a cast iron skillet. It's like saying that come Christmas, a magic dust pan flies in from the North Pole, led by eight flying cinder blocks. Who wants to stay up all night, so they can see a bell? And why fly one in from Rome when they've got more bells than they know what to do with right there in Paris? That's the most implausible aspect of the whole story. Because there's no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in. There's no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in and take their job. That Roman bell would be lucky to get work cleaning up after a French bell's dog. And how does a bell hold the candy if it doesn't have any arms? How does it get into your house without being heard? It just didn't add up. I suppose similar questions could be asked of the Easter bunny. I had just never thought about it that hard. Nothing we said was of any help whatsoever to the Moroccan woman. Clearly disgusted, she just sat there, her lips positioned as if to spit. I wondered then if, without the language barrier, my classmates and I could have done a better job making sense of Christianity, an idea that sounds pretty far-fetched to begin with. In communicating any religious belief, the operative word is faith, a concept illustrated by our very presence in that classroom. Why bother struggling with the lessons of a six-year-old if each of us didn't believe that, against all reason, we might eventually improve? I'm not sure how that fits in with the Resurrection, but if I could hope to one day carry on a fluent conversation, it was a relatively short leap to believing that a rabbit might visit my home in the middle of the night, leaving behind a handful of chocolate kisses and a carton of menthol cigarettes. A bell though, that's [BLEEP] up. Here, I had spent all this time feeling intimidated by French people and for nothing. The next time the teacher humiliated me or someone at the market gave me a hard time, I'd just roll my eyes like the Moroccan woman, thinking, "Well, what can you do with a nation of people who'll apparently believe in anything?" Writer David Sedaris. Well, our program was produced today by Blue Chevigny and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, and Julie Snyder. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who I would describe this way. His knuckles are dirty and scabbed. His breath smells of mash and lighter fluid. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Not friendly, but menacing. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Robert had a friend whose mother was a feared and powerful judge in New York City. And at some point, she got sick and had to go into the hospital. Surrounded by doctors kind of shuttling in at a teaching hospital, this old lady kind of looks up from her pillow and she says, do you know the sweetest words in the English language? Not being English majors, all these doctors kind of shook their heads. And she said the sweetest words are "don't be afraid, I'm a doctor." And after that, there was nothing that she couldn't get in that hospital. How smart. Yeah, how smart. In the hospital, we give up our normal schedule and sleep patterns. We give up our normal food and clothing. We're in a place that has its own rules and its own language and its own customs. We're not exactly helpless, but often we're not far from it. And in the midst of all this, there is this delicate human interaction which we have to negotiate. And it's one on which our lives, our actual lives, can depend. We have to deal with doctors and nurses, and all sorts of other staff. We have to get what we need from them, in a situation where they have all the power and knowledge, and they may not be as concerned with our care as we are ourselves. Robert Lipsyte wrote all about this in his book, In the Country of Illness. When he got chemotherapy, he says, it meant dealing with a lot of different people in the hospital. People who check you in, people who weighed you, took your blood pressure, gave you a finger stick because there would have to be a little blood test. And there would be these little interactions with all the people, which always seemed really important. They could hurt you, more or less, depending on the mood. Certainly, they could keep you waiting long or less. And it was almost kind of a ritualistic dance to see how you would really deal with them. Some liked to be joked with, some didn't. Anatole Broyard wrote wonderfully about the need to seduce your doctor, to make medical personnel interested in you. In the hospital, we're reduced to the tactics that people have always used throughout human history when they have no power. We yell and scream, hoping that they'll give us what we want, just to shut us up if nothing else. Or we act like supplicants, beggars before the medici, all sweetness and goodwill. Well, today on our program, diplomacy does not just happen at Camp David and in Geneva and at the UN. Some of the most delicate and charged diplomatic negotiations happen every day over matters of life and death at your local neighborhood hospital, as patients try to get what they want, and staff tries to do what they think is best. Act One of our program today, Is That Your Final Answer?, the story of a family in a hospital and why dressing well might get you better medical care. Act Two, The Other Nursing Staff, in which reporter Nancy Updike answers this question, do Rosie O'Donnell and Jerry Springer have healing powers? Act Three, Fire and Ice Cream, a 14-year-old boy tries to figure out what it means when his nurse asks him out for dessert. Act Four, Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places, the story of what happens when a patient violates one of the most basic rules of what to do in a hospital over and over again, and survives, for a while anyway. Stay with us. Act One, Is That Your Final Answer? When Terry Shine's father was in hospital, bleeding in his brain, Terry and his four brothers rushed into action. Of course, as anybody who's ever been in this kind of situation knows, action mostly just means sitting around the hospital room trying to figure out what might possibly help things, which is made all the more difficult by the fact that figuring out what might help first requires learning the language and customs of the average American hospital, which Terry Shine's family diligently tried to do. Nothing's changed. He just lies there. Everything's changed. No one goes to work. No one goes to the store. No one makes any plans other than to be at our father's bedside. We've become hospital rats. By day two, we know where the best soda machine is. It has Fresca. By day three, we're no longer using the pay phone, but making free calls from deep inside nursing station B2. By day four, we know who the good nurses are. They're so much smarter here in ICU. In the bed, here comes that bitch. By day five, Bill somehow knows what kind of car every doctor drives. The neurosurgeon has an STS Cadillac Seville. The cardiologist, the classic Corvette, The internist, the GMC Yukon. But I think it's his wife's, Bill says. He's got an eye for that kind of thing. By day six, we know the orderly's hobbies. Gerard flies those radio-controlled airplanes, the big ones. But we know no more about my father's condition. After the surgery, it was all about the swelling going down. The brain has been through two surgeries within a week, the doctor said. Once the swelling goes down, we'll see where we're at. Well, the swelling must have gone down by now, but we don't see a thing. Bill has been personalizing the room, bringing in photos and hanging up an article from a Valley Stream, New York newspaper that recently chronicled my father's feats during World War II. There's a photo of 24-year-old Daniel Lawrence Shine in a cool, fur-colored bomber jacket. Bill has marked details in the story with a yellow highlighter. I want the photos by his headboard so the army of medical workers taking blood every hour and constantly needling him for tests can see he's not just a gown and limbs. He's a person who stood next to a Christmas tree two weeks ago in a Pebble Beach golf sweater with grandchildren wrapped around his legs. But my brothers think the pictures should be on the far wall, in his line of sight, so they will be immediately visible when he becomes coherent. They win. We've had a breakdown in communication with hospital personnel this past week. And I believe I've nailed down the reason. It's fashion. That's what it's come to now. Something tells me that the nurses will start giving us respect. The doctors will start returning our calls. The lady in the gift shop will stop following us to see what we're doing behind that rack of Beanie Babies. All this will happen if we step up our appearance. We're a motley crew, and the shorts and Pete's Wicked Ale T-shirts, and Danny always wearing that stupid Fanny pack with his sweat pants are not helping. We've been dressing like emergency room people. The family of citizens who have cut their hands at barbecues or get in freak car accidents on the way home from the beach and have to show up in flip-flops and half-shirts, these poor people are caught with their pants down, but we have no excuse. We have days and days to plan our wardrobe. We have to start dressing like intensive care people, I tell my wife. I'm certain that the doctors and the nurses will be much more attentive of my father's needs if we only put a little more effort into our appearance. I can hear a nurse now. I know, I just checked on Mr. Shine, but I'm going to check on him again. Those boys of his are so well-groomed So today, I am meticulously laying out my best clothes, running my thumb and forefinger along the sharp creases in my trousers, spray starching my withered collars. Maybe we should get a second opinion, Bill said yesterday, questioning the diagnosis so far. We haven't got a first opinion yet, I told him. Nobody's talking to us anymore. Peter has a million questions about the blood thinner, Coumadin. He's adamant that the doctor should never have prescribed it for my father's heart condition to begin with. From what he's heard, it could have been the cause of the excessive bleeding. I looked it up on the computer, and you can't eat salad when you're on it, he says. What kind of medication doesn't allow you to eat salad? Dad loved salad, I say. I want some answers, he says. One doctor up here told me he would never prescribe it for his heart patients. He says something as simple as stopping short in your car can cause bleeding in the brain when you're on that stuff. Someone has to give us some answers. But we keep getting passed up and down the chain of command. No one explained the fact that one doctor becomes the primary on the case and coordinates all procedures until after we call half a dozen of the doctors listed on his charts. Not that any of them called us back to tell us that. We had to hear it from a college kid in the snack bar who was recuperating from a street hockey accident. The primary, he said, that's the guy you've got to get to. Once he put us on the right trail, the nurse told us that we had to talk to our father's cardiologist. But it's his brain that-- He's the primary, she said. But the cardiologist has yet to return our phone calls. Not that we're sitting by the phone anyway. When I get to his room, the nurse tells me the doctor was just in. Which one? I ask. Oh, I haven't seen him before, she says. This is how it works. No matter when you're in the room, the doctor has just been there. We decide the one thing that would probably make us feel better on a day like this would be if we stop respecting doctors. We won't call them doctor anymore. We'll leave off the title and only call them by their last names, I say. They hate that. As the day drags on, we reach a point where not calling doctors doctor doesn't seem extreme enough. We should start calling them by their first name. That'll get 'em, Bill says. But how are we going to find out their first names? Well, Bill says, we'll just call them all Jim. The physician who's been the primary case, the one who's supposed to coordinate all the others and keep the family up to date, finally phones us to tell me he's putting another doctor in charge of my father because, well, I'm not as knowledgeable about the neurological stuff, he says. He schedules a meeting for this evening. You'll meet Dr. Bozeki in the conference room near the ICU, he says. She'll take care of everything from here on out. I wonder what her first name is. The conference room turns out to be the nurses' break room, and they're just getting ready to have a platter of neatly rolled cold cuts and cake for a staffer's birthday. All this for us? Danny says. Dr. Bozeki, who looks like an actress playing a doctor, very ER, can't be more than 27, but she still has the power to get her party moved down the hall with a mere "please move it." She asks us to stand around the garbage can by the phone because my brother Pete in New York is being patched in on the speaker phone. "Hello," Pete says. The doctor starts talking quickly. I don't know your father. I saw some pictures in there. War hero, whatever. But anyway, you have to start thinking about his quality of life from this point on. "Did your father ever talk about death with any of you? Did the subject come up in conversation," she says. Each of the questions is landing with a thud, like mangoes from a tree. We are not yet aware that this subject will come up in every conversation we have from this point on, but right now it seems to soon. We were in shock. "You still there, Peter," the doctor asks. Peter's still there. All our days till now have been spend waiting for the swelling to go down so we'll have him back. We know he's still in there. We've seen glimpses of the real him in a squeeze of a hand, a hint of expression, a fleeting moment of eye contact. The nurses aren't seeing those things, Dr. Bozeki says. A couple of nurses boisterously fling open the door and then go speechless as they gaze upon us all standing around the garbage can talking about death. The party moved, I say. Anyway, the doctor continues, it's time for you to decide this. If your father's heart stops, do we restart it? The consensus of all us doctors is not to. Our consensus is to. The doctor also has one of my father's nurses, a good one, on hand for support. And she asks her to step forward. You shouldn't restart it, the nurse says. She steps backward. We don't know what to say. Up until now, the biggest decision most of us have made in our lives is whether to buy or lease. Our minds are reeling. How much recovery time is a person allowed? I ask. It depends, she answers. Would not restarting his heart include withholding sustenance and water? Bill says. Has your father talked to you about this? Bozeki asks pointedly. Bill says yeah but doesn't give her any more detail. He wants to know more about how much progress they actually think my father could make. Would he be able to watch TV? Yes. There's more to life than watching TV, the doctor says. We all look at one another. It is times like this when I know my brothers and I are truly related. God, I wish I had a sister. So you're saying he'll be able to watch TV, Danny says. The doctor sees she's getting nowhere, tells us to sleep on it and quickly exits, probably in a hurry to get to the party. Peter, are you still there? the nurse asks. Peter's still there. OK, we're going to hang up on you now, the nurse says. OK, Peter says. His legs are kicking and his arms are flailing, and this is no seizure. After the doomsday talk from Bozeki, while the rest of us were whining, Bill has spent hours with Dad, barking directly into his ear, telling him he had to put on a show or the doctors were going to give up on him. And something must have clicked, because today he's dancing. We brought in some of his CDs. Louis and Ella are on the boombox, and his toe is tapping. We are impressed, but the nurses aren't. They look at us like, yeah, that's OK if you want someone who's just going to tap his toe for the rest of his life. They want to see more than instinctive movement and the following of commands. They want to see communication. Dad, can you respond to a question by holding up one finger for yes and two for no? Bill says. Nothing. But we keep working, trying different things. I tickle his feet, but Danny scolds me. You don't tickle a man's feet when he's in this condition. New family rule. We're to do everything in our power to bring him back around, but we draw the line at tickling. Our brother, Pete, bursts into the room. There's no door to swing open or even a curtain to throw aside, but he always oozes adrenalin and his stocky Beretta build pushes you aside. He's come directly from the airport and he's desperately charged up. Dad, it's me, Pete. Nod if you can hear me. He nods. We jump in the air. How could we not think of the nod? How come you didn't think of the nod? I punch Danny. Why do we have to fly a guy in from New York to come up with the nod? Shouldn't the doctors have thought of the nod? Danny says. Believe me, we're not high-five people, but we're high-fiving. For me, it's a first. You're not good at it, Danny says. I've got a copy of the living will in my pocket, but there's no need for it now. If they want to know if he wants his heart restarted, they can ask him. We've got his attention. If anyone can pull through this, you can, Dad, Bill says. We run into the hallway and drag a nurse in. Ask him a question, Peter demands. She asks, he nods yes. He shakes no. So what are you going to tell the doctors if they ask you if he's able to communicate? Peter corners her. What are you going to say? She nods yes. Yes, victory. We have communication. We have confirmation. We have progress. We're progress in motion. We've got all four corners of his bed covered. We don't know how long this window of coherency is going to last, so we're frantically asking yes and no questions and manipulating his arms and legs. He's shuffling his legs around like he's restless and he wants to get up and walk. I take my hands and apply pressure to the soles of his feet, and he starts pumping his legs. His knees are up and he's wildly peddling against my hands. Yeah, this is OK, if you want someone who's just going to ride a bike around for the rest of his life, I howl. I ask him for the thumbs up, he delivers. Applause breaks out. The nurse catches the erect thumb out of the corner of her eye and gives us a sort of pitiful grin. Yeah, that's OK, if you want someone who's just going to give you the thumbs up for the rest of his life. She's the rain pouring through our open window, but we're not going to let her bring it all down. Our blue eyes are clear. I love you, Dad, Pete says. I can't believe we didn't think of the nod, Danny says. We're coming from opposite ends of the hospital parking lot. We've got newspapers tucked under our arms. We both have big plans today. I'm going to turn that corner of the hospital room and Dad's going to be feeling good enough to sit up, and I'm going to read him current events. The prime is down and John Glenn's going up. Bill has bigger plans. I brought his reading glasses, he says, so he can read the paper himself. We're only a couple of days away from the thumbs up, but he's a million miles away. There'll be no reaching him today. For the first time, I not only feel sorry for my father, but I feel sorry for us. We are standing on opposite sides of the bed, our papers in hand, and we do look pitiful. It's just what the nurses had been saying. My father lying there motionless, us incessantly, relentlessly trying to get a rise, a trick out of him like he's a show pony. Maybe all he needs is some peace. I wonder if our one great day with Louis and Ella wasn't quite the glorious lift toward the plateau we'd been hoping for, but more of a gift, a chance for us to openly profess our love and for him to give us the nod of acceptance. You know, when he was responding with hand signals and whatnot, I had asked Bozeki if we could hold up the living will and ask him for a yes or no. She said, absolutely not. I scoffed at her at the time, but I realize now how any man at this point, lying there clamped down like a trapped animal with burning medicine chasing the pain through his veins, any man in that condition is going to want desperately to fight to the end. Just as they say the soul is the last thing to leave the body, mental confidence must be the first thing to flee in a situation such as this, not only for him, but for all of us, I'm afraid. We're like a crazed animal. At this point, the only thing his body has left to offer is instinct and insanity. And it's become so hard to trust our judgment, because I wonder if we are not on the same course. The pulmonary doctor, a young guy who looks sort of like a QVC fitness guru, charges in and gives us a little pep talk, tells us to keep it up. Don't worry about what the nurses think. He responds to you guys. You've got to keep working it, he says. He's fiddling with the end of his stethoscope, as if any second he's going to put it to his lips, blow it like a whistle, and my father's going to shoot out of the starting blocks. Before you know it, he'll be ready for aggressive rehab, he says. Just keep it up, up, up. You're making a difference. As soon as he leaves the room, Bill says, Mitsubishi 3000GT, black. I mentioned to one of the nurses that we really like that doctor. And she explains to me in her own convoluted way that the personable doctors are the bad doctors. And the ones with no personality are the ones you'd actually want operating on you. Well, in that case, I think we've got some of the best in the business. Terry Shine. This is an excerpt from his book, Fathers Aren't Supposed to Die. Act Two, The Other Nursing Staff. It seemed to us that no radio program about caregivers in a hospital could be complete without a few words about the caregiver that is the most omnipresent, in every room, 24/7, in the waiting rooms, at the nurses station a lot of times. I'm talking, of course, about television. To investigate its power in a medical facility, reporter Nancy Updike went to the most television-friendly hospital imaginable, the one that actual television stars go to when they get sick, Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles. After staying at Cedar Sinai and seeing the quality of what was on the tube there, Milton Berle and Johnny Carson both donated old shows of theirs to broadcast in-house. Here's Nancy's report. This is how a lot of people feel about watching television in the hospital. I should be a much better person and I should've tried to improve my mind while I'm here, but I just don't have the patience for it. So I slip into the degradation of this crap television. I would like to think that I'm the kind of person that could just turn it off and that it wouldn't affect me. Do you know this is what alcoholics say? Oh, I could quit any time. But when I think about it, if I couldn't watch TV, I'm not, you know-- I don't know, I think that maybe I would go a little nuts. These are two of the patients I talked to at Cedar Sinai. The guy is Jay Mason, a 74-year-old with a nasty scar running from just under his adam's apple all the way down his chest. He's had a lot of heart surgery. The woman is LeShaun Smith, who's been lying in the same uncomfortable position for almost a month. She's 31 and having her first baby, and she has to stay in bed with her whole body angled head downwards so that her water doesn't break too soon. She'll stay in that position until the baby's born. She has three months to go. And to begin our discussion, let's start here, in this very hospital. So OK, even if you've never actually been a patient in a hospital, you kind of already know what it's like, right? There is no such thing as privacy. You know, people going in and out of your room, looking at you and peeking at you, wondering what's wrong with you. Taking your temperature, taking blood. They wake me up early to do vital signs and stuff, and I try to go back to sleep. I mean, we're talking, like, 5:30. The day goes very, very, very laboriously. You know, having people to have to do everything for you, and not being able to do things for yourself. You know, you live for the day you get outta here. So let's summarize. You're sick, you're lonely, but also completely without privacy. You're exhausted, helpless, and you are so, so, so bored. The culture of the hospital is divided into one group of people that is rushing around from the moment they walk in the door in the morning until the second they leave at night, and another group that is just languishing, numb. And you and I are probably going to be in that second group, right? So we comfort ourselves. And we're not too choosy about how. 7:00 in the morning, watch the news. Then I watch Sally Jesse. One night stands become booty-calls, next Ricky. I just watch crap here. And like anything, a cooking show, a-- Steve Harvey, Moesha, The Parkers, Malcolm & Eddie. I love seeing black people on televisions. Channel 2, Young and the Restless. And then Channel 7, All My Children. Then Channel 4, Days of Our Lives. So you're just as bad as Sasha here. you slept with your best friend's man. It's almost as provocative in America to say that television has therapeutic value as it is to say that smoking pot does. We associate both with wayward teenagers, wasting their lives and rotting their brains, engaging in insidious activities like hanging out and chilling. But TV is so important to the patients at Cedar Sinai that the woman who runs the video department there has been paged at home, on weekends and at night, by irate patients complaining about missing a ballgame or a movie because of some technical problem or programming change. One patient I talked to had even been so desperate to amuse herself that she hunkered down one day and became the world's leading expert on-- Weekend at Bernie's. I think I must have saw it, like, four times on Saturday, because I couldn't find anything else on there that I wanted to watch. Talk about making lemonade from lemons. What is this except the mind tenderly saying to the body, listen, don't you worry about me for a while, I'll take care of myself, you just focus on getting better? This is the life-changing lesson hospitals have to offer-- TV is good for you. This is unbelievable. Can you imagine people before used to lay in hospital beds for days and weeks on end, and just stared at this wall, and sometimes turned their head sideways and looked at that wall? That's horrendous. But my god, you've got to-- you know, you can turn loose a little bit of fantasy. And if it's junk, what the hell's the difference? It's junk, so who cares? At least it's killing time. I guess I'm sort of arguing that, in that sense, it's not junk. Well, I think that you're right. In that sense, it is not junk. It fills my lonely hours and kind of gets me through the day. And that's a good thing. Outside the hospital, people call TV crap, because it's an anesthetic. Watching hours and hours of TV makes us feel spoiled, self-indulgent, numb. But so what? I mean, think about it. Novocaine and morphine make you feel numb, too, and no one's calling them crap. Nancy Updike in Los Angeles. Coming up, an argument that Medicare payments should cover trips to pick up Ben and Jerry's, and somebody who actually liked staying in the hospital, liked it so much that it got her in trouble. That's all in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Hospital Diplomacy, stories of the delicate and sometimes less-than-delicate interaction of patients and hospital staff in a setting where lives are at stake. We have arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Fire and Ice Cream. This is a story about how patients and medical staff actually can get along just fine, but how when that happens, it can still leave everybody involved scratching their heads with unanswered questions. About a decade ago, when Brent Runyon was 14, he was burned badly enough that he ended up in Children's National Medical Center's burn unit in Washington, DC. Burns covered 85% of his body. He put together this story about it with the help of radio producer, Jay Allison. During the first weeks in the burn unit, pain blurred from my ones like airhorns at a high school football game. I hated my body, my nerves, my brain. I wanted them all to just shut up. There were only a few times I wasn't in pain. Once before burn therapy, Tina, my nurse, pushed morphine straight into my bloodstream instead of dripping it through the IV. I asked her to push it. I begged her to let me feel it all at once, to blow out my mind like an overexposed photograph, and she did. For 30 seconds, I couldn't feel my body. My vision was whitewashed, and I understood why someone would want to be an addict. When I could talk again, I mumbled, why don't they sell this stuff on the streets? They could make a fortune. Tina unwrapped my bandages, exposing my legs to the air. I looked down. They didn't look like legs at all. They were skinny and useless, so many shades of purple they didn't even look real. I saw the massive wound, as big as a mailbox on my left thigh, where the fire had burned all the way through to the muscle. Tina saw me looking, leaned over and whispered what she always said, it's OK. It's going to get better. The redness means that it's healing. I closed my eyes and braced myself for what was coming next. She would begin by cleaning each open wound on my feet, working up to my thighs, and then she would turn me on my stomach to clean the holes on my back. The pain roared from my legs as she cleaned the first wound. Tina explained that my body was healing, and that healing was one of the most painful things a body could do. She said that pain meant I was getting better. It didn't feel like I was getting better. My skin was tissue paper, and she was tearing at it with steel wool. She told me that if it hurt too much, that I should scream as loud as I could. And at first, I didn't want to. I thought it would be rude or disruptive, and that I could just close my mind to the pain if I tried. But she said that I should scream, and that would let some of the pain out. And so she cleaned every wound three times, I screamed, and it became a kind of Waltz, with Tina counting her swipes aloud, and me screaming, 1, 2, 3, scream. 1, 2, 3, scream. After she covered me in gauze and Ace bandages, my body was shivering. I was exhausted, crying a little bit, trying not to think about how I'd have to do it all over again in eight hours. Tina stood at the head of my bed, her thick black curls spiraled toward my face. Brent, she said, do you like ice cream? It seemed like a silly question, since I was still getting fed through a tube in my nose. When you get that nose tube out, when you can walk again, I'm going to take you to the best ice cream shop in DC. It had been weeks since I'd eaten anything, and I hadn't even thought about ice cream. I couldn't believe it. Tina and I would go out for ice cream when I could walk. We would go on a date. It was eight weeks later, and it was going to be my first time outside the burn unit. Most of the pain had gone and been replaced by the itch. Anyone who's ever had a burn can tell you that the itch comes after the pain, and that it's sometimes worse because it's constant. It made me feel like the skin on my body didn't belong to me, as if it had been stripped away in my sleep and replaced with raw wool. I prepared for hours for my date with Tina. My mom and another nurse named Barbara picked out the loosest, least-irritating clothing, and they helped me into a pair of baggy athletic pants and a Hard Rock Cafe London T-shirt that my mom said looked really cool. They discussed whether I should wear the pressure bandage that masked part of my face. And then Barbara slipped the chin strap over my head and Velcroed it behind my neck. She put a purple Los Angeles Lakers cap on me to cover part of the bandage. They both said that I looked handsome. I didn't look in a mirror. Finally, Tina came to pick me up for our date. She had taken off her scrubs and put on a loose white sweater. Her functional shoes were replaced with green All Stars, and she was wearing shorts. I'd never seen her in shorts before. She looked so relaxed, not like a nurse at all. She smiled at me from the doorway. As a burn nurse in a children's hospital, Tina rarely had patients that she could talk to. Most of the kids she took care of were two-year-olds, kids that could walk well enough to pull boiling water down from the stove, but couldn't understand that it wasn't her fault that they were in pain. Those kids hated her for hurting them. They panicked every time she came near them. But I knew that the pain wasn't her fault. I talked to her, and we made each other laugh. Could a 26-year-old burn nurse be interested in her 14-year-old patient? I was in love with Tina, and I was sure that she was at least a little bit in love with me, too. Why else would she take me out on a date? And she had called it a date. Why else would she wear shorts, or green shoes, a clear sign to a 14-year-old boy that says, go, go, go? We waited for the elevator next to a hospital directory sign, and I decided to make my first joke. I cleared my throat and said, spina bifida, that sounds like some sort of Greek food. Tina made a face and said, you wouldn't say that if you knew what it was. The elevator doors opened. Walking out of the hospital with Tina made me feel like I was on a real date, although I had never been on a date before. Something about being on my own feet, walking into the fresh air, the afternoon sunlight, a woman next to me, a woman who had, I reminded myself, already seen me naked. But by the time we got the car, I was exhausted. Sweating from the few remaining pores in my forehead and armpits, the itch which had been mercifully quiet during the first few minutes of our date started buzzing in my legs. Tina must have noticed that I was uncomfortable, because she put the back of her hand-- no rubber glove, her actual hand-- against my forehead, and wiped the beading sweat away. What did that mean? I wondered to myself. Tina parked about a block away from the ice cream place she'd been telling me about, got out of the car and rushed around to my side to open the door. That's sweet, I thought. I wish I had done that for her. She helped me on to my feet, and we began walking towards the ice cream place. You OK? she asked. Sure, I said. You? I was trying to ignore the itch that had spread up my legs and into my back. I was walking. That was the important thing. And I was on a date. Inside, the cool air dried the sweat on my forehead, and I began to feel more confident. I let out a sigh of relief just to let her know that the worst was over, and that we would start to have fun any second. We stood in line behind a few senior citizens that were deciding between pistachio and butter pecan. I smiled at her and rolled my eyes a little as if to say, can you believe these old people? They're so slow. And she smiled back. This is working, I thought. This is really working. It was then that I saw the ice cream guy checking Tina out from behind the counter. He was college-aged, handsome. I knew what he was thinking. We stepped up to the counter and I prepared myself for the flirting. And then he looked at me, and a smile dropped into an expression of mock pain as he said, ouch, what happened to you? As soon as he said it, I felt the blood pool in my legs and the itch throb all over my body. I backed up a little, stepped away from the counter. I looked down at my feet. I put my hands in my pockets. I didn't want to talk to him anymore. I didn't want to say anything. Tina finally broke the spell and asked me what kind of ice cream I wanted. It was all I could do to mumble, chocolate. My head still cast downward, studying the tile patterns, I asked her if we could eat it in the car on the way back to the hospital. And she said that we could. On the way home, I reached up and touched the long purple scar on my cheek. I pinched the edge and blanched it white between my fingers. The scar was numb on my cheek, lifeless and hard, like a wad of gum under a school desk. Thanks to ice cream guy, I realized that redness didn't mean I was healing anymore. It meant that I was disfigured. I understood that I wasn't going to get much better. Despite all the reassuring things Tina had said to me in the burn unit, this was it. Ice cream boy saw me for what I was, scarred. All I wanted then was to go back to the hospital. I wanted to climb into my mechanical bed and watch Regis and Kathie Lee for the rest of my life. I wanted to eat chocky pudding and flirt with the nurses. I wanted to be able to scream. When we got back to the hospital, Tina walked me to the elevator, and we rode up to the third floor. We hadn't said anything on the ride back. She never asked me how I liked the ice cream, which is good because I wouldn't have known what to say. Right before the doors opened, she put her hand on my forehead. I looked at her, and she said, good night, beautiful. And I walked back to the burn unit, the safest place in the world. My name is Tina Bobo, and I am a nurse. And I worked at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC for about eight years as a burn nurse there. How old were most of the kids who were there? Well, primarily the kids that we saw there were toddlers, because children have thinner skin than adults do, so an injury, a cup of coffee from a microwave would severely burn a young child, whereas for you it might make just some redness and maybe a blister. Actually, as you say this, I'm picturing little kids' skin, where you can see all the capillaries on the surface. You can just see the blood moving through it in a way, where-- This is much thinner. Now, you were in the unit for eight years? Mmm-hmm. How often would you take a patient to go and get ice cream? Once in eight years. Really? I should say here that you are the nurse in Brent's story, and we tracked you down. You live here in Chicago now. And I'm surprised to hear that he was the only one. Somehow, when I heard his story, I thought, oh, well, this is a nurse who, like, at some point, in her arsenal of tricks to help a kid keep a good attitude and get better, she'll just do the ice cream thing at some point. No. I wanted to do something for him. I wanted to do something outside the hospital with him. Why? Why him? Because he and I had developed a very strong bond over those few months. We spent-- you know, I worked day, during the day, so I was there during most of the waking hours. The one thing, too, that was so special about Brent was that he was an adolescent. I identified. I was still very young. I was in my early 20s to mid-20s, which was very young, and you can't help but feel-- I don't want to say sympathy, but it is sympathy. I felt sorry for him. I really did. And so I wanted to do something to make his life better. It must have been strange when you took him into the outside world and then there are the two of you, and you're not in your nurse's uniform, and he's not the patient. And there you are-- Feeling like I was supposed to protect him, and feeling very uncomfortable with that, because you can't-- I couldn't prevent what people were going to say or how they were going to look at him. And I couldn't control how he was going to feel. On these trips, do you remember noticing other people reacting to Brent and him noticing them reacting? Oh, certainly. I remember in the ice cream shop in particular, even the people who worked in the ice cream shop staring at him. And I remember being just really nervous that someone might say something that would really hurt his feelings, or stare for a prolonged period of time, or have some strange expression or something from seeing him. The thought must have flashed through your mind at some point when you were out with him that maybe he thought of this as a date. You think? Well, not really. He was only 14. It never-- not really, no. I didn't think of it that way at all. It was just a really special friendship and bond that I had with him. But I didn't think of it that way. I don't know. Did he think of it that way? I think, yes. I think the thought went-- Really? --through his mind that, well, maybe. Yeah, kinda. Really? I'm just so flattered. He-- Wow. Well, I hope that was in some way beneficial to him to think that an older women with, you know-- and maybe that helped somewhat with his self-image. And I hope that's not a disappointment to him if he hears that it wasn't that way. But it doesn't mean that I didn't care about him any less. It just was very different. You know, when you think about becoming a nurse, I would imagine the picture in your head is, you're going to be caring for people and helping them through this really hard time. And part of that picture must be that certain people you'll get close to and you'll really help them and be this person for them. How often do you get to feel that connection? I mean, would you actually accomplish it every day? No, you don't. In reality, you don't. You don't make those kind of bonds on a-- I can think back, of all the children I took care of-- and there was probably thousands of children-- and I remember distinctly probably 20 of those thousand in that eight years. And again, that was a special place, because it was all children, and it was a place where we had such great resources and wonderful people. It seems like, because back then, resources for health care weren't like it is now, so it was kind of like an ideal world then. And every time I think back, oh, I wish I had that kind of job again. But that doesn't exist anymore. Wonderful place. You're saying, literally, like, places like that don't exist? I just can't find it if it's out there. This is just 10 years ago or something. I know, but-- It's changed that much? --things are so dramatically different, just in terms even of staffing. Today, because there's such restraint issues with money, it seems as if staff are kind of in opposition with administration. And hospital, it just doesn't seem cohesive. Back then, it was just, the whole hospital, it just felt this cohesiveness. And I've been back, it's very different. In fact, the burn unit doesn't exist there anymore. Things are so different now than they used to be. I remember thinking that something had changed in America when I saw this movie, that was not a very good movie, called As Good As It Gets last year. It was Jack Nicholson and-- what's her name? Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt, right. And I realized, god, something has happened in America if you can have a movie and the heroic thing that the guy does is get the kid off the HMO and get him to a private doctor, like that's the heroic act. Right. It was incredible, right? Uh-huh. Kind of like Santa Claus, almost. Well, no, like, people clapped. You know what I mean? I was like, what has happened in this country that, like, just getting somebody out of regular health care can be, like-- Did you see this movie? Do you know what I'm talking about? Oh, sure. I've seen it, like, two or three times. And did it strike you too? The fact that, like, what's going on here? Well, for me, it wasn't so amazing because I know, well, that is a big deal. My husband was just like, who cares? OK, fine. The kid got to go see a good doctor. I was going to say one more thing. Say it. [SIGHS] I remember, when I would do Brent's wound care, I felt like, because it was difficult to make an emotional detachment, oftentimes I felt like I didn't do a very good job doing that, because it was hard to push myself to do something that I knew was going to hurt him so badly. I'm not sure that was necessary to his benefit. I'm not saying it caused him any harm, but it was difficult to do. It's so interesting talking to you, that even now when you think about it, you worry that you went too far and got too close. Mmm-hmm. I often wonder if that was beneficial to me at that time, too. It didn't make my life easy. When I talked to Brent, he asked me-- When you talked to him just recently? When I talked to him just recently, he was telling me that what he had written, the story that he had written, and he basically said, one of his big questions, he would lie in his bed and wonder what the heck I was doing when I left his bedside. Like, why isn't she in here? I'm going through all this pain. I am totally alone. Someone should be with me. Why isn't she in here? What is she doing? And it was important for me to get away, too. Like, after I had been through that with him, I needed to kind of cleanse myself, too, of-- you know, get myself together. That was one very difficult thing for me to go through, too. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It affects you. It's not like you can just shut it off when you come home. You're supposed to be able to, and most of the time you can. But in a situation like that, it's impossible. But in a way, if you think about the kind of nurse you'd want to have, you'd want the nurse who would be affected by it outside of the hospital. Mmm-hmm. You would, if it were you, if it were me. But you're saying, from a nurse's perspective, that it's too much to ask a person to do, it's too much to ask a nurse to do. It's just like, as the health care provider, you have to be able to have your own life or you'd go nuts. You do. You have to be able to separate. Tina Bobo. Brent Runyon's story was produced by Jay Allison as part of his Life Stories series, with help from Christina Egloff and funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Act Four, Looking For Love in all the Wrong Places. So what if you don't obey the rules and customs of the hospital? Wendy Dorr has this story of one woman who did, over and over, disobey those rules, and what happened to her. The first time Wendy Scott went into a hospital, she was 15. She had her appendix out. And she was surprised how much she enjoyed it. This was back in her hometown of Wemyss Bay, Scotland. I enjoyed it when the nurses would come and fluff up my pillows and ask me how I was, and how was the night, show a little bit that they cared, which is something I never really had at home. A year later, feeling depressed and alone, working at a holiday camp on the east coast of Scotland, she got the idea to walk herself into an emergency room and tell them that she was feeling sick when she wasn't. I knew I wasn't sick, but I wanted somebody to care about me. They kept me in a few days. They did a few blood tests, a few X-rays, said you're fine, you can go home. For a long time, that was all it ever was, which suited me. I mean, they took me into hospital, they cared about me, they gave me the attention I wanted. If you like, they recharged my batteries, and I was able to go back out and face the world and try and be normal again for a while. In the same way that prison can be the best place to learn how to become a better criminal, in hospitals Wendy learned how to become a better invalid. Over time, she came up with her own set of rules. Number one, always pause after the doctor asks you a question. It makes it look like you're thinking about the answer. Number two, never change your story. Number three, when all else fails, tell the doctor you have a stomach ache. They can't prove you don't, and stomach pain can mean 100 different things. Number four, listen closely to what the doctor says. He'll tell you everything you need to know. Doctors taught me most of what I know. I mean, I would go into the emergence room saying I've got a stomach ache, and they would examine me, and then they'd say, have you got Crohn's disease? No, what's Crohn's disease? And then they'd tell you all but Crohn's disease and how it affects people and things. And of course, you're lying there taking all this in, ready for the next time you might want to use it. Wendy claims to have been a patient 850 times at over 650 different hospitals all over Europe and Great Britain. It's hard to confirm these stats, as nearly all her hospital visits were registered under different names, names she'd randomly chosen out of the phone book. What she had was a psychological disorder called Munchausen syndrome. People with this syndrome go to extreme measures pretending to be sick just to get attention. And it's shocking how successful some of them can be. There are cases of people having amputations of one or more limbs, performed by doctors who believed they were ill. I mean, I've had 42 abdominal operations on my stomach. And I never wanted them, but if I've gone to a hospital and the doctor comes and says he doesn't know what's causing this stomach ache and maybe he better have a look and see, if I say no, he's going to wonder why I don't want to find out what's causing this pain that I'm supposed to have. And so you go ahead and you have the operation. Sometimes, during the operation, the staff would realize that she was faking it. And then she'd be stuck in the hospital, recovering from her surgery with everyone knowing she lied. Twice, she was even sent to prison, charged with illegally obtaining drugs, food, and lodging. The hospital, like any other ecosystem, has a set of rules, and there are certain rules you simply can't break and survive in the system. For 12 years, Wendy lied to doctors and nurses and shuttled from hospital to hospital. It was all she did with her life between the ages of 16 and 28, she says. She never held a job or had any close relationships. It was just too risky. As a result, her name and photo were permanently included in hospital blacklists all over the UK and Europe. Hospital blacklists are illegal here in the US, but not in countries with nationalized health plans. Finally, when she actually got her wish and needed hospitalization, she couldn't get medical care. About 18 months ago, she started to feel a pain in her groin while she was driving. I saw a surgeon and, well, he poked me around. And he said he couldn't feel a lump in my groin. And as for the pain I had in my stomach, well, that was payment for my past and I just had to put up with it. Payment for my past. And I just sat there in tears. She finally got medical attention through a doctor she'd met on the internet a couple of years ago. Doctor Marc Feldman is an expert on Munchausen syndrome. And Wendy contacted him through his website after she started a Munchausen support group in London. Two and a half years and 100 emails later, they were friends. Wendy phoned him this past summer for advice about this pain she'd been having, so Doctor Feldman invited her to his hospital. When the doctors went into her abdomen, they spent about two hours just cutting through the scar tissue that had resulted from all of those abdominal procedures she had had in the past. But once they had done that, they found what they described as a tumor the size of a small soccer ball. People lie in all sorts of institutional settings, in schools, at their jobs, on loan applications at banks, but most of us don't lie in hospitals. And it's not because we're worried about wasting hospital resources or humiliating doctors. We don't lie in hospitals because it's just too frightening. We worry there'll be mortal consequences. And in Wendy Scott's case, there were, because she violated the rules of medicine and she couldn't get care for 18 months. And in that time, the cancer spread to the point where there was nothing that could be done to save her. Though doctors told her she had two years to live, she died this fall, just a month after our interview. I'm not proud of what I did, in that I spent many thousands of pounds, wasted hospital time and money, but I couldn't help it. It was something I had to do. I just didn't know any other way to get somebody to care. And although it wasn't exactly the kind of caring I wanted, it was better than no caring at all. So you accept it. And in the end, Wendy got over her attachment to hospitals. When her illness got more advanced and she could've spent her remaining days on a ward, she instead chose to leave the hospital and spend the rest of her days at home. That story from Wendy Dorr. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, and Starlee Kine. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380, or visit our website, where you can order tapes or you can listen to our programs for free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who will tell you that when he and I went out just last week for that drink, he'll say it was not a date. I didn't think of it that way at all. It was just a really special friendship and bond that I had with him. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. Public Radio. Public Radio International. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And I'm here to tell you first today about Mr. Lewis. And I call him Mr. Lewis because, although I have asked him what his first name is and I found out, like a good journalist, I've never actually heard anybody use his first name. So it seems kind of wrong to use it here. Mr. Lewis is the kind of man who has a certain effect on people. And if you visit the school where he works, James McCosh Elementary, on Chicago's South Side, you can hear what that effect is. At Halloween, Mr. Lewis helps the kids convert the field house out on the school's parking lot into a two-room haunted house. It's a low-budget, handmade affair, but done so effectively that when the kindergarten, first grade, and second grade children walk in, they panic with the kind of panic that makes them drop things, that makes them scream and not stop screaming. They do not notice that the two monsters writhing on top of open graves are really just two sixth graders lying on top of barely disguised ping pong tables. They do not catch that the undead are wearing Nike cross trainers, or that sometimes, when the monsters flail about, yellow student IDs on neck chains come flopping out. I want your brain. I want your brain. I'm hungry. This sixth grader extends her arms and sends a bunch of kids running in the other direction. The older kids play their parts with hilarious abandon, so happy they can't help grinning from ear to ear at moments when they're supposed to be scary. Come on. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Come on. They won't mess with you. Mr. Lewis is with you. Into the fray, in baseball cap and yellow jacket, walks Mr. Lewis. In theory, he's the school disciplinarian, but his reign is one of love more than fear. Three or four small children grip onto each of his hands, and he walks them past the ping pong table of terror, telling them he'd never let anything bad happen to any of them. Until, suddenly, they bolt for the door. My group left me. Hey, come on, Mr. Lewis is here. That group went back out that door. He heads off for another group of kids to protect. The crowds thin after a while, and the girls on the ping pong table consent to an interview. One of them is holding forth on the thesis that, sure, a person could look at their outfits as striped referee jerseys, or you could choose to see them as pirate costumes. When the other girl volunteers, without any prompting, this-- Mr. Lewis is like a father to all of us at James McCosh School. He nice and he fun to be with. He makes us feel good. He been here for a long time. He knows most of our parents that went to this school and he just knows us. When we're sad, sometimes he makes us happy and stuff. When were frowning, he make us laugh. He funny. He like the jokester. He like to talk about people. They tell me about their favorite activities at McCosh, the Student Leaders of Tomorrow Club, the peer leadership workshops, cheerleading. Mr. Lewis is a big part of all these. It's Mr. Lewis who made the tombstones on their ping pong table that read, "RIP, Cause of death: Gym." It's Mr. Lewis who mediates their fights. It's Mr. Lewis who really knows them. A month after I record this tape, a child is shot after school on the parking lot just outside this building. Just a few yards from the ping pong table these girls sit on. McCosh sits in a neighborhood that has all the problems of any inner city neighborhood, and it's easy to see why the students at McCosh need someone like Mr. Lewis so badly. And it's easy to imagine these girls, decades from now, remembering Mr. Lewis, talking about him, wondering what became of him. All of us have certain figures from our childhood who assume a kind of mythic status later when we remember them. Sometimes they're people who loved us. Sometimes they're more disturbing figures. Well, today, we've devoted much of our show to a story about a man who not only had one of these legendary figures in his childhood, he decided recently he was going to track down the legend, and along the way, stumbled into this kind of odd, epic story. It is a story of the Old South, the New South, Chihuahuas, high society manners, homosexuals, and some [UNINTELLIGIBLE] changes in American journalism. Stay with us won't you? OK, I'm going to begin things with this song about respecting those who came before you and influenced you. Act one. So many stories about childhood are set at the first moment of adolescence, that moment when we first try to cope with the giddy, nauseating fact of what it's going to be like for us as adults. The sixth grade. This is where Jack Hitt's story and his search begin. A quick warning before we start. Parts of this story might not be suitable for younger listeners. Most people have a funny little story about finding out where babies come from. I've got one. My friend Parker Coleman told me about it. We were playing in his backyard at this particular time and place. That being 1967 in Charleston, South Carolina. Until then, I knew about the sex act only from cuss words. In my mind, it was earthy, nasty, certainly forbidden. From the air, I had picked up the idea that sex was something black folks did. Maybe whites without the right breeding. Proper people did not really have sex. A youthful impression that I've since learned is true. But when Parker told me that babies and sex were connected my sister Diane was pregnant for the first time. So I punched him in the face, hopped on my bicycle, and sped on home. But this rather standard tale of sexual awakening occurs within a larger story. For me, a much larger story. See, in my neighborhood, we lived down the street from a British writer named Gordon Langley Hall. A slim man who preferred bow ties. I remember hearing one day that Gordon had left for a distant hospital-- Johns Hopkins-- and returned fully reconstituted as a woman who now preferred to be known as Dawn Pepita Langley Hall. My new neighbor favored Jackie Kennedy dresses and pillbox hats. Her hair was grown out until it curled at the collar in the fashion of that time. She wore lipstick. A modest '60s bosom appeared. Not long after her operations, she announced her engagement to a handsome shrimper named John-Paul Simmons. John-Paul also worked as Dawn's butler, and John-Paul was also black. I remember hearing that Dawn's adopted mother, the British film actress Dame Margaret Rutherford, was quoted to the effect that she didn't mind Gordon changing his sex, or Gordon marrying a man of another race, or Gordon marrying into a lower station. But she did wish that the young man was not Baptist. Such anecdotes never seemed to cease, especially after Dawn announced that she was pregnant by John-Paul. I can remember seeing her a lot during this period, walking down the street, heavy with child. Everyone said it was a pillow under her dress. The town began to freak, and properly did so when she returned from the secret birthing-- it was in England-- with a beautiful mulatto baby. Well, that was the last straw for Charleston. Unseen pressures were applied and one day I heard that the house was sold. Almost overnight Dawn disappeared, and almost as quickly, became a bizarre Gothic yarn I told to stunned audiences. But over the years, even I no longer believed the story and just quit telling it. Eventually, one ceased to hear about Dawn at all. Now around the time she announced her marriage, I remember being sent to my brother's room. Bobby, who was 17, was given the task of setting me straight on the facts of life. Given what was going on down the street, Bobby had a lot of ground to cover. I remember he confirmed Parker Coleman's story. Then by way of bridging his material to Dawn, he told me what homosexuals were and what they did. Then he told me about transsexuals with complete details on cutting up the penis and surgically fashioning a vagina. I was 10. Part of what I remember of that era is that the media arrived every time there was a new outrage in the ongoing Dawn saga and that the story went national many times over the next few years. I can remember sneaking down to that house, trying to catch a peep of anything through the wrought iron gates. Dawn. She became my own Boo Radley, a sexual parable, a Zen koan of the bizarre. For me, the mystery of sex still has an overwrought tabloid grandeur to it. Almost three decades have passed, and like I said, I've come to doubt the entire Dawn epic cycle. I knew there had to be some truth to it, but I also know that childhood memory is a net, snagging and shaping every little fact and rumor into the stuff of symbolic language. I assume that there is a little nugget of truth in Dawn, and I wanted to find out what it was. So I ran back to mom. She has lived in Charleston all her life. We poured some iced tea one afternoon and sat at her dining room table. When Gordon was still a guy-- Can you say that? Yeah, I can say that. That's my mom whispering. You can't really hear her. What's she saying is, "Can you say that on the radio?" Here, listen again. When Gordon was still a guy-- Can you say that? Yeah, I can say that. When Gordon was still a guy-- You see, good Charlestonians do not discuss private affairs openly. If at all, we discuss them sotto voce, sometimes literally in a whisper. This impulse is compounded by the fact that Dawn's story is so over the top that my mom can't really talk about it, even still. Dawn can not be considered seriously. Dawn can not even be considered. The very question is preposterous. No, I never really had anything to do with him at all. We never had him over for dinner. Are you kidding? I didn't even hardly speak to him. My goodness, Jack. I'm sorry, Mom. I can't get Mom to really remember much about Dawn. As we talk, she whispered to me a number of times that she really has nothing to say, would rather not talk about it, and would prefer I turn off the tape recorder. So I tried to change the subject to the neighborhood we shared with Dawn because it's part of the story. In the mid '60s, Daddy had moved the family out of the historic part of downtown Charleston, a white neighborhood, into an uptown slum called Ansonborough, predominately black. The few whites in the area were mainly homosexuals who had moved there, as we did, to buy an antebellum home for cheap and fix it up. In this context, Gordon was just one of what was known as the "confirmed bachelors" in the 'hood. He seemed to be very [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. He'd written a couple of things that, whether anybody read them or not, I don't know. But they were written up nicely in the papers. And the people mostly that entertained him were-- he did socialize a little bit with some writers and all. And a few of the dowagers, so to speak, really had him for entertainment value, and they liked him. And then of course, later when they found out about him, they didn't. They cut him off fast. But he was a kind of a semi-sensation for a while around Charleston. Now what made him sensational? Was it that he was a writer, or that he was flamboyant, or what? No, he was very different. And then he had-- I mean, did people understand that he was possibly a homosexual? No. No, I don't think they-- this was the beginning of a lot of people like that coming to Charleston. And a lot of them have added a lot to Charleston. After 45 minutes of tea drinking and considering the cultural contributions of homosexuals, mom did remember one story. It was not about race, or class, or genitals, or sex. But like every Dawn account, it was Gothic, almost supernatural. It concerned Dawn's restored mansion. When a friend of your sister's bought the house it was so horrible inside. Like what? Just pretty bad. In what way? All of the floors had to be re-sanded and everything. It had animals in there. They had kept a pig in there. That type of thing. Just filthy. Just filthy. He kept a pig in there? Well, he kept some kind of animals. Yeah, there was a pig in there. And there was all kind of animals. Just everything had to be sanded and scoured, and all like that. That's right, a pig. See, that's how Dawn's stories kind of go. Anyway, Mom did suddenly recall one important detail of Dawn the person. He had piercing brown eyes. I remember, he would look at you, and it would kind of almost be scary, I thought. For you Yankees who have never heard a pure Charleston accent, that's piercing brown eyes. I remember their haunting quality too. And as I talked to people in town, both on and off the radio, it was all they remembered of Dawn, the person. Otherwise, the tales sounded like an emerging mythology. Cloven-hooved animals, Medusa-like stare. Dawn, a Charleston legend. For most of my adult life, especially as I became a reporter, I have also seen the story cycle as a parable of modern journalism, the last stand of an old fashioned media that struggled not to let scandalous claims dictate the headlines. In my own personal history, Dawn was the first Lorena Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, or Joey Buttafuoco. I only mention this because my father was the editor of the Afternoon Daily in Charleston, and he never ran a single article about the Dawn scandal. He thought it was all a publicity stunt to sell Gordon's treacly books that had titles like Golden Boats to Burma. My father died before the wedding. But even afterwards, the local coverage was subdued. Dawn's wedding announcement appeared as a filler on the obituary page. Meanwhile, this was a national story in the tabloids and on television. Newsweek splashed a full page spread of Dawn's wedding, complete with controversial photos of the interracial couple. And the New York Daily News ran some classic headlines, "Troth is Stranger Than Fiction," said their first story on the nuptials. In another edition, there is a first person account of the wedding. Here, let me read it. "Dawn Pepita Hall, a British born male before a sex change operation last October, changed her name tonight, marrying her former butler, a negro. Wearing a full-length white gown with a 12 foot train, the thin, brown-haired Miss Hall entered the wedding room in her restored Charleston mansion to the strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and was married to John-Paul Simmons, 30. 25 guests and a handful of newsmen witnessed the 20-minute ceremony, performed by the Reverend William Singleton, a negro who appeared ill at ease." That might be my favorite sentence of the Dawn coverage, although this one, also from the same tabloid, is close. Quote, "Miss Hall said the news had not been received so joyfully in Charleston's top society, in which Gordon Langley Hall, the man, once moved freely." The writer of these sentences, it turns out, is an old family friend, Jack Leland. He worked for my dad as a writer on the paper. But given the local embargo, and being no fool, Jack started stringing for the Daily News. Jack is now the town elder in Charleston, a famous storyteller and authority. Everyone knows him, and anyone who writes about Charleston must obtain an audience with Jack. When V. S. Naipaul wrote his book, A Turn in the South, the entire Charleston chapter is basically a long dinner and late afternoon constitutional with Jack Leland. These days, Jack has trouble walking. He is living with his daughter, [? Chivas, ?] way outside of town at a spit of land in the woods. [? Chivas' ?] new house, provided by post hurricane Hugo funds, has stunning views past a yard full of oaks, the obligatory Spanish moss snagging every branch, and then a small creek and a vista of brown green marsh grass out to the horizon. Jack spends his morning with an attendant in the quiet of the house taking in the view. So I stopped by. He remembered Gordon. He came down there with a very good recommendation. He knew the proper people in New York, and he had written a book, and he had an English accent. And that was enough to make him the darling of Charleston society for a while. Until they found out he was a homosexual, then they dropped him. Because at that time, being a homosexual wasn't exactly proper in Charleston. At that time. I forgot to ask Jack when it became proper to be a homosexual in Charleston. Anyway, Jack is the only person I know who attended the famous wedding of Dawn Langley Hall and John-Paul Simmons, at the house on 56 Society Street. It was a farce. They were all gathered in the living room, the big living room. There was a group of people in there, and the bride wasn't present. They had a negro minister who couldn't read the prayer book properly. And they had a makeshift altar in front of the fireplace. There was a TV station there. And when the bridal party came down the stairs to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which I thought was the beginning of a farce at the moment. They came into the living room and he discovered that he would have his back to the camera. So he made the preacher turn around and put his back to the camera and let him face the audience. There were two little babies toting the train. He had a regular wedding gown on, with a mantilla on his head over a wig. And the train was attached to the mantilla in some way and those two little ones, when they went to swing around, were swinging in a wide circle, and almost pulled his wig off. And what happened after the vows were exchanged? Were you there for the reception? It was a wang bang affair with a lot of people, all black. Very much all black. There were just a few whites. Who was there? Well, I can't remember the names now. But there were people who worked in the furniture business. And that business generally attracted homosexuals. The furniture business attracted homosexuals? In Charleston it did, the antique business. Oh, right. It turns out Jack was right about homosexuals and antiques. In the 1960s, there was a well known, though never admitted, gay aristocracy in Charleston, centered in part on antiques, and located in my neighborhood. One of those men was [? Jay Romp, ?] who's still a family friend. We spent a lot of time together when I was little. I can remember as a boy climbing through a dense garden down the street, up a high wall to get onto his balcony. To hang around and crack jokes and gossip with Jay and his hilarious friends. I don't think I ever walked through his front door. I thought maybe Jay would remember Dawn, maybe even Gordon, and who they were. So I called him up and one warm afternoon, he picked me up in his convertible. As is still the custom in Charleston, despite all the moral outrage elsewhere, we fixed ourselves what are known locally as travelers. Drinks, that in case the vice squad is listening, we'll describe as [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And we drove uptown to Ansonborough. Now that's where you lived. That's where you lived. I remember I used to climb in the second story window. We've got to go see that gate. We've got to see the wall, because the other thing is that wall-- Jack, when I think about it, that wall was like 18 feet high. There's monkey blood in you, young'un. There has got to be to scale those walls, because the banana trees were like 20 feet tall. We took the house-- rather I took it, Edward took it just because he trusted me. And I said, it's like the dawn of creations of [? Astier's ?] garden. You'll only know that when you hit the back. But as I say, to scale that wall would have been a feat, I think. Even for nine years old, you were then? I think this is how starved I was for culture, Jay. It has been so long since both of us were in this part of town that we had trouble locating Dawn's infamous house. Which one was her house? This one. Was it this one? Wait a minute. No, wait a minute. It's this one up here. It's up here. Two that look alike, yeah. That's the famous porch. There it is. The famous porch. What's famous about the porch? Well, you know the wedding was held, and the music was done by, I believe at that point they called it Victrola. A well known orchestra, of course, who played-- who knows? A combination of rap, Japanese, pipe, avant garde music and Charleston spirituals. I have no earthly idea. But anyway, it was on that porch on the other side of the garden. And that's where the main wedding was. You know, when I called Jay, I didn't say, I'm doing a story about gay culture. I said, I'm doing a story about my coming of age in Ansonborough and Dawn. The truth is, I've known Jay all my life, and we have never discussed his sexual orientation, because people in Charleston see no reason to discuss such things. As with my mom, so with me. And even with Jay. What would it have been like for-- well, first of all, let me ask you this. Are you gay? Because I've never asked you that. Well, let's put it as Tennessee Williams said. I have covered the waterfront. And the other thing is-- Such a great Charleston answer. Indirect, funny, no bad words. Still, Jay can be wicked, as when he told me about calling his old roommate from those days to help jar his memory. When I was talking to Eddie I said to him, Jack is doing a story on Ansonborough, part of his sexual awakening. I didn't sleep with Jack, did I? My mother's going to love that part of the interview. As Jay and I drove around reminiscing, he told me his version of Gordon's fall from grace. Now, all my life I had heard that Gordon was ostracized right after the sex change operation became public. But Jack Leland had said the city shunned him even before that, when they learned he was homosexual. Now Jay remembers a slightly more extravagant occasion. She had her dogs make their debut in Charleston, including wearing real cultured pearls. Get out of here. I don't remember this story. What's this story? When was this? That was even in the paper, please. And this was when he was still Gordon Langley. So this is prior to the sex change and prior to the marrying-- So he was breaking rules even back when. This is what I mean about Dawn. Everyone has a story. And here it is 30 years after her sex change operation and I am still hearing fresh, new ones. And yet, they all fit into the unique genre that is Dawn Langley Hall. Later during my stay, I was at a cocktail party with many Charlestonians. The dog story would come up from time to time and always slightly different. In one account I heard it was a wedding. In another it was Great Danes that were given a debutante party. But as I moved among the different subcultures of Charleston, these stories provided me with another insight into Dawn. She was a scandal not only for straight Charlestonians, but for the gay aristocracy as well, two groups who were often hard to distinguish in those days. The whole thing was you had to be married. So this group I'm talking about who were gay were all married men. Most of them, in fact, I would say at this point all of them-- I can't think of one offhand who did not have children. I would know these children? We went to school with them. I would know all these children, wouldn't I? You'd know all these children. Actually, Charleston could have almost handled the change, even the black husband to some extent, all of that in time. It would eventually, I think, have been almost accepted to some extent, like you say. Are you talking about among the gay culture, or among the culture-- I'm talking about this gay culture who was basically straight. This married gay culture with children. And I do believe that if it had not been for the publicity, that at some point, probably, yeah. They would have been accepted. But there was publicity. And the gay culture of Charleston felt exposed. The way Jay described it, Dawn represented a kind of Gone with the Wind, a closing of an era for his crowd. Their private, serene Charleston life, married, but gay, with children, would soon end in a noisy media circus of Dawn Langley Hall. So the homosexual culture really didn't know Dawn either. Although Jay had one encounter with Dawn, sort of like my mom's. It was a misty evening when he and a friend had passed her on the street. She shot them an evil look from those piercing brown eyes. Very foggy night. I mean, the whole thing was perfect for the scene. And we had passed Dawn walking the dogs. And had gone two or three steps. And suddenly, all the lights in Ansonborough went off at one time. I mean, street lights, house lights, the whole thing. And we hauled butt then to my house. I think they were off about 30 or 40 minutes. We talked the other day. We didn't know because we got candles and things and barricaded the door. But again, Dawn was supposed to have some sort of powers. That was the other thing. Now wasn't part of the story that the voodoo that she might have had was learned from her husband, right? Well, that was the other story then. Naturally, by marrying black, you would have had more, I guess, background with it then, or someone who could really teach you what to do. A few days after riding with Jay, my brother-in-law and I spent an afternoon, as we often do, hanging out at bookstores. At one called [? Katie ?] [? and ?] [? Daughter, ?] I turned, look onto a shelf, and there was Dawn Langley Hall, just as I remembered her. It was a wedding picture with the cheerful, young John-Paul Simmons at her side. The title could not have been more apt, Dawn, A Charleston Legend. She had written it herself and it had just come out. I picked up the book and stared at it incomprehensibly. I hadn't seen her in 30 years. That person used to live here, said the clerk. I know people who knew her. I just bought my copy and went home. The writing in this book is sugary, full of romantic images, wistful goodbyes, big Fabio-like gestures. Dawn drops names and Florida aphorisms with abandon. The first line of the book reads, "My good friend, novelist Rita Mae Brown so aptly said, 'If you take a man to Charleston and in three days he does not propose, throw him in the Crape myrtle.'" But my biggest discovery while reading the book was the author's bio. I learned that Dawn and I remain neighbors. She lives in Hudson, New York, not far down the road from where I now live. So I called her up. I didn't tell her immediately I was a Charlestonian, just that I would like to interview her for the radio. She said she'd be delighted. A few days later, I received a polite note, banged out on an old standard typewriter. Let me read it here. "Dear Mr. Hitt, I look forward to seeing you on Sunday. I am disabled now since a freak accident. The doctor said I would never walk again, but I am doing so quite well. Am in the middle of moving into a townhouse, which I'm buying. I have lived in this rundown old Dutch house for five years because it was the only place I could find where my dog would be welcome. After 10 years, we have my husband home from the mental hospital. It is not easy as he hears voices and sometimes talks, shouts, and hollers all night. So many people do not understand what mental sickness can do to a family until it hits them." The letter is signed rather formally, "With all good wishes. Yours sincerely, Dawn Langley Simmons." Coming up, Jack Hitt's visit with Dawn Langley Simmons. That's in a minute from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. The deeper Jack Hitt delved into the mystery of Gordon Langley Hall, aka Dawn Langley Hall, aka Dawn Langley Simmons, the more questions opened up. Take, for example, this fairly straightforward clipping from the New York Daily News, November 21, 1968, page four. It announces that Gordon Langley Hall, biographer of Jackie Onassis and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, has changed his sex. And then a little ways into this article, it goes to quote from the hospital that performed most of the early sex change operations that were ever performed in this country or anywhere. Quote, "In Baltimore, a Johns Hopkins spokesman said, in response to a query, 'Miss Hall was a patient. Miss Hall underwent surgery.' He would not comment further." When Jack Hitt finally met Dawn, even the nature of this surgery came into question. Our story continues. On a rainy, cold morning I pulled up to her house. The only one with a bay window on the street, she had told me. The image I had was of a mansion, like in Charleston. But it turns out her house is near the train station, a vacant street with neglected warehouses. Even in the morning, a bar down the way was open. At her door, the brown paint was peeled and cracked. In the foyer it felt dank. The walls were missing chunks of plaster. A dead vacuum cleaner appeared chucked on a heap of trash. The wooden balustrade led up the stairs where Dawn appeared from a doorway. She was small, dressed in a red smock and purple leggings. Her grey hair was dyed red. It had three inches of white roots. She looked like an old lady, complete with dowager's hump. And then there were those piercing brown eyes that had not changed in 30 years. Friend or foe, they queried. Good morning. Delighted, she said. Inside her house, there were four dogs and five cats racing up and down the wide, last century floorboards. Most of the walls were scratched up. A slight aroma of ancient urine perfumed the air. A few antiques in need of some work were positioned along the walls, above which hung a gallery of photographs and paintings. As I set up my equipment, a large black man appeared in a doorway in just his underpants. He quickly closed the saloon style swinging doors, and then leapt into a heap of blankets on a bed. From time to time, I would hear him softly snoring. Although I did not see him again, John-Paul's presence never left the room. Dawn apologized for a hump, which was actually a stoop. She slumped in a chair to get comfortable, adjusted her dress, and began at the beginning. I was born in a country village in England with a country midwife. And when I was born, the clitoris was so small they couldn't tell if I was a little baby boy or a little girl. And the law in England was at that time-- it was a very cruel law, which incidentally was changed through my case. The law in England at that time was that, when in doubt, the child is just automatically registered as a boy, with dire results. Now today, if that had happened, the baby is immediately taken to the hospital, and has just a little surgery, and everything is put right. In my case, it wasn't. And it was very difficult. I looked like a little girl. Then when menstruation started, it was irregular and that, but it was very frightening. So here we are at the most fundamental fact of Dawn's life, and her version is totally different from what I had heard. That there was no sex change operation. That she was always a woman, forced to live as a man. Then she told me that she grew up with her father, who was, in her words, the factotum and chauffeur at writer Vita Sackville-West's famous estate known as Sissinghurst. Living there, Dawn sometimes saw Virginia Woolf and other literary visitors. Then, as the young Gordon, she moved to America to write for a Missouri newspaper. But for Dawn, every aspect of her life has a kind of gorgeousity. Every anecdote has a silent movie grand gesture to it, as if it should be punctuated with Greta Garbo sweeping into the room and striking a pose near a piano. My first job was as a society editor in Nevada, Missouri. And it was played up in all the national press that I was the first male society editor in the state of Missouri. And all I can say is, oh, well, if only they knew. When I first decided to explore the Dawn cycle, I wanted to discover the true story of her as a person, assuming it would be so much simpler than all the embroidered rumors I'd grown up with. Back home, those tales were all about myth, voodoo, the evil eye, pigs. Instead, Dawn's version would turn out to be more fantastic than anything we Charlestonians had cooked up. One story, for example, featured the mafia, a vengeful ex-lover, two chihuahuas, hit men, a $1 million dollar lawsuit, and the Elvis-bashing biographer, Albert Goldman, who once mentioned Dawn in an Esquire article. And he said that Dawn Langley Simmons had two Chihuahuas for bridesmaids at her wedding. Well, I didn't have two Chihuahuas as bridesmaids at my wedding. My little maid was married in the house, and she looked after the two Chihuahuas. And she brought them down to her wedding on a cushion. And this was the story. So I called Dena Crane, who was my media agent. And I said, Dena, you call that Albert Goldman, and you tell him I'm suing him for $1 million if he doesn't print a retraction. I did not have two chihuahuas as bridesmaids at my wedding. And so he called up, in turn, Dena. He said, you tell Dawn that if she doesn't sue me, I'll tell her who tried to have her killed in Charleston. And we'll come to that in just a moment. And he did. He was investigating the role that the mafia had played in the drug trafficking. They used the inland waterways and so forth, and the lonely plantations and so forth. And he was told this story in a bar. And apparently, this group of old Charleston society people, led by this former lover, had put a contract on my life. And of course, that night I was alone in the house and Natasha was then been born, my daughter. And I heard a crash upstairs. And I thought the baby had fallen out of her cot. I ran upstairs, and there was a man standing over her wearing a ski mask-- a white man-- holding a knife over the baby. He broke my nose. He crippled this arm, which has never been-- I've been able to use it properly since. And broke my big toe, beating me up. And it was a rape thing. And then he threw me off the porch. The porch was three stories up. I was fortunate to land on a lump of sand. And covered with blood, I crawled in the house. And that actually happened. And I was very glad to know. But now going back to John--- I have to say how strange it was to be sitting there talking to Dawn Langley Hall. All my life, she was a distant figure. Even when she was the man or lady walking across the street, she was mainly myth. Seeing her in her house was like sitting next to Hera, wife of Zeus. And the odd thing about a radio interview is you have to hold the microphone right in a person's face. I was probably 12 inches from her, a weird zone of intimacy. I could see her pores. I could see the few old lady hairs above her lip, the lines in her pancake makeup. I set off on this journey to separate Dawn, the person, from all the stories. And while I was sitting there, talking to her, in her house, I realized, I have always wanted to just look at her, the way a 10-year-old boy wants to look at anything new and different, like a car wreck, or people naked through a window, or a dead animal, or a good house fire, or a transsexual. When I came home that night, my wife and I sat down to exchange accounts of our day. Both of us had amazing stories to tell. Lisa is a med student. And she told me that in the hospital that very day she had assisted with an operation on a newborn girl. The affliction is called virilization, and the symptoms are an adrenal abnormality that causes the clitoris to expand to the size of the tip of your thumb and look like a penis. At the same time, the vaginal lips are fused and swell into what looks like a scrotum. These days it is easily corrected with a simple operation. So what if it were all true? That Dawn was born a girl, and wrongly sexed, as she called it. So that her life, her awakening, her metamorphosis, even her child, all of that could be biologically possible. Imagine if the hysteria and outrage that generated the entire Dawn epic cycle just boiled down to all of us reacting like a pack of enraged orangutans at something unfamiliar. Imagine it. But I'll be honest, I've told myself these stories so many times, I can not imagine it. But Dawn can. I had a recurring dream in which I saw an old fashioned glass hearse with plumes turning to go into the cemetery. And in the casket was Gordon. And that was a recurring dream. And of course, I grew up at Sissinghurst. And Virginia Woolf had written Orlando, the wonderful story about her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. How over the years Orlando had turned from a beautiful young man into a beautiful woman. And so I felt in my heart that I was the living Orlando. So here's Dawn Langley Hall, the living Orlando. And yet, all the outlandish stories of her life are contained within an unexpected concern for propriety. She married once in 1969. And long after the publicity faded, she stood with her man through madness and poverty. She never divorced or remarried, a claim that Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh can not make. She dotes on her daughter Natasha and reports to her pew every Sunday at Christ Episcopal Church in Hudson with her two grandchildren in tow. When you look at the pictures of Gordon, he was dapper, always in a coat and tie, very sharp looking. Very hip in a way. You know, young writer guy. And yet, Dawn turns into this rather, almost frumpy wife-like woman. I mean, what's that about? Well, I wanted to be a wife more than anything. You're absolutely correct. Dawn was proper, the same as her family in England, the same as Charleston society. Those are the people that I identify with. I have always put duty first, because that was how I was brought up. You know, when I was reading your book, you mentioned that your father was a mechanic and your mother-- I guess this was an illegitimate birth, right? She was 15. She was 15 when you were born. And yet, given the lineage on both sides, there were all these aristocrats. Some of them English, some of them Spanish, and so forth and so on. It's quite a list of contessas and various countesses and so forth. You know, when I was reading that I kept thinking, it felt like a Dickens novel. Absolutely. I kept expecting at some point, someone's going to come along and discover who Dawn is. Yeah, absolutely. And everything will be OK. Is that what's happened? This came out with-- another fellow author in England wrote and said, I always knew you came from good stock. And it was one of those things. It has been a long road. Everything has just gone full circle. I've done the mansion bit. I've done the debutante bit. I've been everything. Now, give me a little peace. Let me be me. Violating any boundary is always difficult. But typically when one does cross forbidden lines-- interracial or interreligious marriage, or announcing that one is gay, or changing one's sex-- at least there is a community waiting for you on the other side. But Dawn has crossed so many borders at once that she has slipped into a country where she is the only citizen. She is poor, her husband is schizophrenic, her life is fairly harsh, her books overcompensatingly sentimental. She speaks a unique language, a kind of Gothic romance. Even as I sat in her living room-- slightly aromatic from her dogs, her once beautiful antiques aged into ruin-- it was difficult not to feel a real respect for her for roughing it out. No one pressured her into the life she chose. She dwells in her own private Charleston. Now a bona fide dowager, ready to serve tea, hospitable, even brave, but alone. When I asked her at the end of our interview if she remembered a little red-headed boy who stared into her gates, she allowed that she did. She said she had quite fond memories of the family down the street. She chose not to mention the obvious, that my father refused to publish her story in the local paper. Instead, like a true Charlestonian, she behaved as if she had stumbled upon an old acquaintance and was simply delighted to be back in touch. Then, as every Charlestonian I know, including myself, would do, she changed the subject to something more comfortable. A few days later, I received another note that began-- "Dear Jack, as you are my red-haired boy at the gate, I think I should call you Jack and not Mr. Hitt." She said that she had bought her new house, a modest two-story place on Hudson's Main Street. It has some age to it, and she hopes to fix it up. As is the custom in England, she wants to give the house a name. She's pretty much set on using the title of a book by her old mentor, Vita Sackville-West. She wants to call her new house All Passion Spent question mark. She invites me to come visit. And then the letter ends casually, "Yours sincerely, Dawn." Act two, Dawn of a New Era. Well, up until this point in our program, you've been listening to a story that first aired on our show two and a half years ago. Since then, a lot has happened. Dawn, incredibly, has moved back to Charleston at the urging of her daughter. She now lives in an otherwise all black neighborhood in a rundown old house. She meets with old women, basically has managed to get the life that she wanted as a dowager in Charleston. Dawn's schizophrenic husband, John-Paul, now lives in a mental institution. And Jack Hitt has stayed in touch, gotten many letters that begin, "My dear red-haired boy." Just this month, he published a story in the magazine GQ about what he's learned since his original report for our program. He agreed to do a little update with us. After I did the initial interview with her two and half years ago for This American Life, she and I maintained a correspondence. She wrote me pretty much every other day. And each of these is a little typewritten letter? Often a letter, but more often than not, it's an envelope containing clips from the local newspaper that are, in some way, indicative of subjects that she thinks she and I share. Like what kind of thing? They often have almost metaphysical significance. For example, one story was about finding some sunken treasure just outside the harbor. And I couldn't quite figure out what the meaning of it was until I suddenly just sort of stared at the headline where it said, "Old Charleston Continues to Yield its Secrets." And it just suddenly dawned on me that maybe that was the only reason she sent me the piece-- Wow. --was that headline. It's like each one is like a little hieroglyph. Right. They're rather cryptic. I sometimes don't quite understand why I'm getting them. But anyway, Dawn and I very much stayed in contact. We've seen each other a bunch of times since then. I've met her daughter. I've met her two grandchildren. When you followed your story for us, when you did you story for us two and a half years ago, when the story ended, you weren't exactly sure what to believe about her story. And since then, with all this contact with her and meeting her family and spending more time with her, you actually now know what you believe to be the truth. Well, I do. I do believe that she was born a woman with a defect. You know, when I first interviewed her for the program, when I came home, you remember, my wife had just participated in this odd little surgery at the local hospital for this problem called virilization. And subsequent reporting with a pediatrician named Anjali Jain, taught me that this condition is called hyperplasia. And that, in fact, it's common enough that every child at birth in this country is screened for it now. Her description of what she went through, every detail, the sort of biannual menses and lack of breast development and all the various afflictions she talks about through her adolescence and into her adulthood were described exactly that way by Dr. Jain when I interviewed her. Plus the fact I interviewed her daughter at length. I found when Dawn moved back to Charleston, the daughter was there. She's working two jobs. And I just asked her outright. There are people who think that your mother is not a woman. And she explained that she knew in a way that a daughter would know that she was a woman. Well, she said she took care of her, right? She takes care of her, yeah. I mean, Dawn has had a rough time physically for decades. And the daughter has taken care of her in the way that a nurse would take care of her. One of the things that you mentioned in the story is this story that Dawn tells about an attempt on her life and Albert Goldman. And in your original story two and a half years ago, you sort of presented it as like look at all the tales around this woman. Do you have an opinion now about whether, in fact, those things happened? To listen to Dawn tell a story, I mean I think she mythologizes herself as much as we did. But to a different end. I mean, I was amazed that every story she had to tell had very similar themes to them, of a lost aristocrat being denied her due. And in some way, she is, in real life-- I mean in her childhood, she was the illegitimate offspring of Vita Sackville-West's chauffeur. He is shunned by all of these people. She always sees herself as being kept out of her real life, of the life that she was supposed to have lived. And it's true. And those themes never escape her telling of almost any story. And so when she tells a story of someone breaking into her house and trying to harm her, and beating her, or whatever, I think there is a core of truth to these stories. But I think it's very complicated. I think she has a narrative way of telling her stories that make them seem, I think, preposterous to many people. And that gets to one of the things about this story, which is so tragic. There are the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and then there are the stories that other people say about who we are. And if those two things don't match up in large part, you're in for trouble. And that's what happened to her. The story that she believed about herself was so radically different from the story that the world believed about her. Right. And realize that the world, from the very beginning, was forcing her to live a myth that she was a man. When, in fact, on some level she was a woman. In the GQ piece, there is an anecdote I ran across. She kept mentioning Carson McCullers, so I went and looked up Carson McCullers' biography. And it turns out that Gordon is mentioned in the book. And it's a rather eerie scene. There's only one mention of Gordon in the entire biography of Carson McCullers. And McCullers comes to Charleston at some point in the early '60s, when Gordon was still very much a guy. And Gordon, at that point, is a well known novelist and has Carson McCullers in for dinner. This is right down the street. This is when I'm 10 years old. And so Carson is an older person at that point, and at the end of the party-- hasn't said much the entire evening, but at the end of the party asks Gordon to come sit in a chair in the corner of the room. And they talk very briefly. And McCullers' description of this moment is that Gordon sort of talks on and on for a few minutes about this and that. And finally, McCullers stops him and touches him on the knee or something and says, "You're really a little girl, aren't you?" And Gordon just sort of nods enigmatically. Jack Hitt is the author of innumerable magazine articles and numerable books. He writes about Dawn in the October 1998 issue of GQ. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself, with Alix Spiegel, Peter Clowney, Dolores Wilber and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Emi Takahara and [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Music help today from Steve Cushing and [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Rattles. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] Or you know you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. That's thislife, one word, no space. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site. This American Life if distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who attributes our success as a radio program entirely to-- Voodoo, the evil eye, pigs. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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When Adam was a junior in high school, living in New York, he got invited to this party that he was petrified to go to. The kids not only seemed more grown-up, they talked about how grown-up they were. And when he got there, there was no dancing or goofing around. Everyone just sat around a coffee table, about a dozen kids, casually drinking beers, just talking. I don't remember exactly what we talked about, but I just remember it was all very quiet, and people would sort of nod while you were talking. And during this very grown-up party, a party unlike any Adam had ever been to, a couple got up and left the room for a while. At some point I realized that they were in the bedroom for quite some time. With the door closed. With the door closed. And I mean, we were 16. I'm kind of-- you know, nobody was giggling, nobody was observing this fact, nobody was making mention of this. I mean it was just what adults do. It was just, this is what you do at a party. After a while, the boy and girl walked from the bedroom to the bathroom, and they showered together. Then, the boy, wearing a terrycloth bathrobe, rejoined the party. And as Adam went to more parties with this crowd, this would happen a lot. A couple would go off, have sex, and then return to the party, all the while everyone acting like this was no big deal at all. At that time, did you think, OK, well, this is the way that adults act? Yeah, it was all so mysterious. I would have kind of bought anything about those things, you know? I didn't really-- it seemed to me like this is how sophisticated, cool adults were. I mean, the crucial thing was nothing was a big deal. Nothing was worth commenting on. Of course, why would you want to be prematurely blase about sex? Well, part of being a kid is wanting to be a grown-up already. And throughout childhood, from a very early age, you try on various adult behaviors for size. You rehearse being an adult long before you get the part full time. And sometimes, in these rehearsals, you just get it wrong. Today in our program, stories of kids trying to act like adults, sometimes by their own choice, sometimes because they have no choice, and what they get right, and wrong. From WBEZ Chicago, and Public Radio International, It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our program today, I Was a Teenage Ambulance Driver, in which we ask the question, can it be good for you as a kid to see some things that you just don't want to see? Act Two, Househusband at 12. The story of two brothers escaping Vietnam, and how one ended up doing the cooking and cleaning for the other. Act Three, The Miseducation of Josh Frank, in which an average American 17-year-old explains why it's OK to ignore everything you're supposed to like about high school and start your career in the big city. Act Four, Angry Young Man, Times Two. What it's like to be a teenager sent to a maximum security prison, and what it's like to be an adult working with kids like that knowing it could have been you? Stay with us. Act one, I was a teenaged ambulance driver. Mike Paternini has this story, that takes place way back in the late 20th century. I was a teenage ambulance driver. In my Connecticut hometown, people thought it might be wise to put their suburban youngsters to good use. And so post '53, a youth ambulance service was established. We, the acne-plagued, gum-chewing, beer-sneaking generation-to-be thought this was remarkably wise. One day, you were bumping your back wheel over a curve, nervously trying to parallel park over at the DMV, and the next, you are commanding several tons of bucking red siren emergency love, screaming like a banshee down the interstate. And everybody, everybody, was curtsying and swerving, and pulling over to let you pass. You checking these strobes, dude? Adios, suckers. The post was housed in an old railroad station that shook any time a Metro north train blew by on the way to Manhattan, or back to New Haven. And there we were, this secret cabal of 50 or so high school kids, girls and boys, most of us achievers of one kind or another, most of us on a path to college. Away from the post, we might drink or smoke pot, listen to Neil Young, or The Clash. On a call, there was none of that. There were usually four of us riding in the ambulance, an EMT, a gopher, the driver, and often an adult supervisor, though occasionally, the supervisor was just a more experienced high school senior. We dressed in white button down shirts and white pants with fluorescent orange jackets. At school, we carried big clunky pagers, and sometimes we were called from class to respond to a car accident, or a stroke, or whatever else might be going wrong with a human body in our town. The person responsible for our teenage ambulance service, the post, was a celebrated man in town named Bud Doble, who had a habit of calling each and every one of us Booby, and usually not as a term of endearment. "What the hell do you think you're doing, Booby?" he would roar. "Did anyone tell you we're dealing with human lives here?" He kept us on the straight and narrow, our very own Patton, and we, his boobies, attended endless training sessions where we learned to do our jobs with military efficiency. Our lives revolved around this old train station, cluttered with Styrofoam coffee cups and our backpacks strewn in every corner. On duty until midnight, we'd hang out, waiting for a call, get pizza, flirt. We weren't expected to be at home, and the beauty of it was that all this pizza-eating, and flirting, and teenage goofing around was sanctioned by the selfless effort we were making on behalf of our town. There were times when you felt a little like you were getting away with something huge. Other times, you weren't so sure. Once, I got a beeper call to a classroom at my own school. My physics teacher, who was full of quacky bluster during the 50 minutes we spent with him each day, who took exceptional glee in scrawling a C-minus at the top of a pop quiz after you'd bombed, stood alone in his lab, trembling, his nose bleeding uncontrollably, bright red blood streaking his white turtleneck like Chinese characters. He seemed mortified, both by what was happening to him and by who had come to help. Later, when he was back to his healthy self, lording his vast knowledge of physics over us, I would sit in the class on a particularly grueling day of him making us feel small, and flash back to that moment when he stood covered in blood. And I don't know, I'm not proud to say, it kind of helped me through. If teenage rebellion is based on the fact that adults are dangerous, that they control you and can get you in trouble, that teachers, and cops, and even your parents , are not like you in any way, but are a different species altogether, what happens when you're put in a position where they're suddenly weak, and you suddenly have the power? Can you ever go back to being a teenager again? Once, late on a week night, I was on another call outside a bar on the main street of our town. When we arrived, a man was down by the shoulder of the road, struggling to get up. He'd been hit by a car. He was dirty and drunk, slurring his words. He was clearly hurt, probably had some internal bleeding, though adrenalin and booze had convinced him he was fine. I remember holding a flashlight and shining it on him, and him saying, "Get that [BLEEP] light off of me. I'll be damned if I'm going to have the kiddie docs take me away." To my surprise, he was my old swim coach, someone whose generosity and ferocity on a pool deck had shaped my early years as a swimmer. And though I hadn't seen him in a few years, he was someone I'd revered. "Coach," I said, "It's Mike Paterniti. I was one of your swimmers." "I'm not going," he said, "don't touch me." "Listen, coach, I think it would be best if you came." "I think you can go [BLEEP] yourself," he said. "I was one of your swimmers," I said again, "and you're hurt." He tried to focus, but couldn't. My name didn't register. And why should it have? He'd been thrown headfirst into an embankment, and had a tuft of sod unwittingly stuck to his head like a sad beret. "Get away from me!" he said. "Before I make you hurt." Make me hurt? It seemed a bizarre thing to say, but I backed off. He signed a waiver that he was refusing treatment, and we left him there, broken and beginning to sob when I turned my back on him. I remember being confused by that, by his belligerence and vulnerability, by the way he was so completely not the man I once thought he was, the man I'd pinned some hope on, and some sense of my own self. And I knew that he wasn't sobbing because he'd been hit by a car, or was drunk. Something else had led him to this moment, but I didn't even try to ponder what. One of my brothers, Steve, was in post, too, and after I left for college, he became president, a kind of big deal at the time. Though he briefly ended up as the whitest angel, my brother was actually more of a rebel than I was in those days. Recently, I asked him what he remembered of that time. "The outfits," he said, laughing. We started trading stories about the calls we'd been on. You know, the one I remember, that I've had recurring memories and dreams of, is this accident up by that really bad 90 degree curve, up by Weburn, you know, on Hollow Tree? With this mother who was driving in a VW Rabbit, and she had two twin boys, four years old. And they were kicking each other in the back or something, so she reached back to stop them, and drove right into a stone wall. And one of the boys was OK, and the other one was hurt really badly. He had a huge swelling in his forehead, really big, and when we came to the scene, I was the EMT. And just this guy who had driven by stopped to see if he could help, and had grabbed the four year old, the hurt one, out of the car, which obviously you're not supposed to do, because we didn't know if he had a neck injury. And he came running over to me with this little boy. And so I had to grab the kid in my hands, in my arms, and take him into the ambulance. And his mother was a nurse, and she kept saying, just tell me, just tell me what's wrong. Just tell me, I know something, I know this is serious, I know this is serious. So my brother had to figure out what to do. There were no obvious broken bones or lacerations, which made the situation altogether more ominous. He suspected that there might be severe internal injuries, and so they needed to get the kid to the hospital, fast. I remember his little fingers. He was stiff, but his hands were moving. And he would he would grab my pinkie and squeeze it tight. And that was just pretty intense, to think this is up to me, here, maybe. As it turned out, he ended up dying, of, I think, massive, massive head injuries. Brain injuries. And I also remember, when I got to the hospital, we wheeled the stretcher off and ran him in, one of the people in the E.R. came out, and said to me, "Well, why didn't you tell us it was this kind of injury, and a head injury, we would have had the brain trauma center set up," and stuff. And I was like, at that point I was thinking, oh my god. If I didn't tell them something I should have told them, and I wasted five minutes that could have saved this kid's life, I was just devastated. I know I told them everything that I saw, I know I said that he had a swelling over his head. Whether or not I sufficiently flagged it for them, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I felt awful. It was pretty hard to deal with for a little while. I mean, I can deal with it now. And it's not something I think about every day. But I definitely felt guilty that maybe he wouldn't have died, or something. What's curious is that we never really talked about calls like that. Not in any great detail, and never to anyone outside of the post, especially our parents. And so my brother's worst calls were bottled and stored in the cellar of his psyche, only to haunt him these years later in bad dreams. In fact, until now, I had never even asked Steve about another incident that occurred when the two of us were at home, on a day near the end of the school year when I was a senior and he was a junior. That afternoon, I was engaged in heavy combat with my youngest brother, Rich, who was eight years old at the time. Rich had uncanny hand-eye coordination, and was a merciless video game player, the supreme universal master of Asteroids. I had made a promise to myself that before graduating high school, I would find a way to beat him. And by some cosmic fluke, never to be repeated, I was. I was creaming him, and neither of us could believe it. Which is when our next door neighbor, a woman just older than my mother, burst in. Her 75 year old father had keeled over on the lawn in cardiac arrest. I remember my first thought was, but I'm about to kick Rich's butt. And then I started outside, telling her to get Steve, who was upstairs listening to music in his room. I mean, I could probably remember the song I was listening to if I thought. I think it was probably Bob Marley, Babylon by Bus. I remember running outside to our neighbor's father, and beginning CPR. I remember something happening that I didn't expect at all, his ribs separating from his sternum, and breaking easily under the weight of my palm. A muffled cracking sound. I just remember the feel of the guy's beard on my lips. Then you have pretty normal reactions. How could I possibly think a video game is more important, or how could I possibly be angry at being pulled away from listening to a record to have to try to save someone's life? But you definitely have those-- I definitely remember having those reactions. I remember hearing that, in that sort of perfect early summer afternoon, listening to the perfect music, and just coming down the stairs and seeing her face, and knowing that something was going to happen. Or something had happened, bad. It's sort of the same feeling, almost like a little tiny bit of resentment. Well, that just blew the afternoon in a big way. And then feeling, of course, real guilty about having that feeling later. This was the thing about the post. It represented two totally discordant and opposite teenage impulses. On the one hand, we still wanted to act like kids, but then at the same time, we wanted to be adults. We'd accepted the ultimate adult responsibility, riding in an ambulance and being held accountable for human lives. I would have been 17 years old at the time of my last serious call. It was spring of my senior year, and all I wanted was to hang out with my girlfriend-- just get lost, and forget every last adult thing looming on the horizon. You know, the specter of going away to college, and then after that, the requirement of finding some kind of worthy job, and the ensuing money grief, and whatever it was that adults worried about all the time. But I was on duty, getting ready to go home, actually, when the call came in. A car accident, out on Pear Tree Point, which juts out into Long Island Sound. There are huge beautiful trees out there, and a girl not much older than me had run headlong into one of them, drunk. It was a dark night. When we arrived, we couldn't find her at first. We were all out looking in the ditch by the road. And then suddenly, I was at the car. What had been the car, as the whole front end was flattened. I remember somehow opening the jammed front door, and seeing a trapped woman, head down on the steering wheel, her hair long and blonde, her body splattered with blood. And she was moaning, a low, sickly, almost reflexive moan. I remember taking her head in my hands to pull traction, and lifting her back, and then almost throwing up at what I saw. I don't know how to put this gently, but she didn't have a face. That is, her nose had been driven into her head, and there was a huge gash on her forehead from which something brainy was leaking. And her jaw hung half-loose. And her eyes had rolled completely back, were just these white ghostly things reflecting nothing. In EMT training, you're taught that once you've begun to pull traction, you can't like go. And so I can't tell you how long I sat face to face with this woman. Even after we put on a neck brace, I held her head, for hours. And she moaned, and moaned, and I, too, begin to moan quietly to myself. The fire department was called, and other ambulances with the capability to administer drugs. And the jaws of life were used to pry her loose, finally. Bud Doble came too, as he often did to the bad ones. After several hours, after a huge crowd had gathered, we got her out and wheeled her to another ambulance. And since I'd been with her at the beginning, I stayed with her until the end. I remember standing up on the back fender at the back door as they stripped her naked and shot her full of drugs. And I remember a stream of her blood running down the floor of that ambulance, over my white Reeboks. Bud Doble was standing next to me, shaking his head. Tough one, he said. By morning, she was dead. When I got home that night, my dad was up waiting. And though I wanted to tell him what had happened, I didn't. Or couldn't. I don't know why. I just stood for a while, making small talk, and then I went up to bed. But here's the thing I remember most about that night. Somehow, the girl's parents had heard about the accident, and made it to the crash site. And then they were moving toward the back of the ambulance to see their daughter, the one they'd raised and loved. Bud Doble glanced over his shoulder, knew exactly who they were, and leaped down. I remember he wrapped his arms around both of them, talked to them in a low voice, comforting them. He covered them both up, and led them straight away, the three of them in a bear hug. Here was this stranger, and they clung to him like Jesus. I thought about that woman and her parents last week, when I myself was at the hospital for the birth of my first child. Already, I was imagining a life for him. His first words, his first steps, his first day of school, his first bike, his first girlfriend, his first act of rebellion. I imagined what secret worlds he might occupy one day, and whether he would ever tell his father about them. From our room at the hospital, we happened to look down on the ambulances as they came and went from the emergency room. And standing with my one day old son in my arms, I watched. I watched the paramedics wheel in all sorts of people, and return with empty stretchers, joking with each other. I stood in the window with my son in my arms like a man on a beach, watching others bob in a distant ocean, diving on a coral reef. It was late afternoon, and the sun dropped down behind some low clouds, lighting the parking lot silver. I watched as an ambulance driver ran to his rig, flipped on his strobes, and floored it, off to some new disaster, to some broken body out there somewhere. It was an old reflex, I admit, but I turned my son from the window and raised his mouth to my ear, just to make sure I could feel his breath. Mike Paterniti lives in Portland, Maine, with family. Act Two, Househusband at 12. So what if you made the most important decision of your life when you were 12 years old, and for all the wrong reasons? When Anh Tuan Hoang was 12, back in 1980, living in Vietnam, his cousin was scheming up a way to escape the country by boat. It would be 36 people, hidden in a tiny craft. Anh Tuan's older brother was invited on the trip because he knew how to fix engines, which everyone figured might come in handy. And Anh Tuan was invited too. And he wanted to go, but for reasons that had very little to do with reality, and everything to do with the way that a kid sees the world. For me, having a chance, an opportunity to travel-- because to travel in Vietnam at the time was extremely difficult. So just to have an opportunity to leave the city, maybe go to North Vietnam, because we were planning to escape from North Vietnam, I thought it would be a cool thing. And then, I thought, escaping, you'll be caught. It's not that easy. But really, you thought you would get caught and be sent back. Yeah. You didn't actually think you were going to be leaving Vietnam? Right. Not exactly. Like in my mind, I didn't think I would be able to. So for me, it's just like, I love my mom, I can't be separated from her, but this is not really true. This is a game. I'm going to go and enjoy the visit, and then be caught, and sent back to my family. And then my mom has a totally different idea. She's thinking, he's leaving, either he make it, I'll never see him again. I might, you know, in the late, late future. If he get caught, they might kill him. Or, you know, the chance of being dead at the sea is great, too. So she was truly petrified. And she didn't want to let me go, because I was really young, and I was a baby. And then he has to sort of convince, and then my brother and my whole family sort of talked to my mom, and said, mom, look, you know, there's a war going on with Cambodia right now. They're drafting young men. As soon as you reach your 17th birthday, they take you. And then, plus, if I had stayed behind, I would never been able to get ahead. And I wouldn't been able to go to college, for example, or to get a decent job. So after a lot of convincing, my mom just decided. She said, OK, you can go, it would be good for your future. But one thing I remember her telling me, she said, you can have a better future and everything, but you just never find the love that I have for you. I'm your mother. And after that, it was sort of odd, because she didn't really speak to me very much until the day I leave. It was too difficult for her. She's like, pretend that nothing is going to happen. Now, as an adult, you must know how risky it was. Is it one out of two people who would get onto a boat wouldn't survive? Yeah, I mean, the odds of being survive is really, really small. It's either like I said, the boat is tipped over, you get caught by the government, or you being attacked by pirates. Pirates? I mean, yeah, especially in South Vietnam. Were you scared? I don't know if I can say I was scared. I mean, I was excited. I don't think I really got scared until I was on the boat. Then reality sort of sunk in. So what happened when you got on the boat? I got really sick. That was the first thing. And I just got really sick. I mean, I have never been on a boat going to the ocean. I've been on river boats in Saigon, no big deal. And I remember praying to just about all the saints, whomever I know just from growing up, so that I could die. Literally, I was like, just let me die. This is just awful, I want to die. And the first few days we did have some food that we take with us. We thought that it would take us six days to get from Hai Phong to Hong Kong. But this ended up taking us a lot longer than that because the boat broke down a lot, and also we encountered a storm. We were stranded in an island for ten days. We had a little bit of food left for the island, but just barely. Like maybe a few handful of rice that we make very thin soup to drink. But we managed to find all kind of weird sea animals, and we ate those. I tried to eat grass, at one point, because I was so hungry. And found out that you can eat a lot of vegetation, you just can't eat grass. I don't know why. It's like it tastes horrible, you can't even swallow it. And so you had planned that it would only take 6 days. How long did it end up taking? Almost two months. So two months go by, and where did you end up? Well, we end up in Hong Kong. And of course, you know, they know we were refugee. We'd looked like we were refugee. The boat was awful. So they took us into shore, into a warehouse. And basically bathed us, making sure that we were free of lice, and making sure that we had proper check-up, medical check-up. Then they take us to another camp, and the first month or so, we get some money to just get by, for the first month or so. To buy food. To buy food. But then after the first month, you have to work. And they will try to help you find jobs, outside in Hong Kong. Of course, the job that you would be getting paid very, very little. I'm talking like, maybe $0.50 cents an hour, or something. Now, for you, you were 12 years old. Is this is the first time you had a job? Well, I didn't have to work. You didn't have to work. I didn't have to work. But my brother did, because he have to take care of me. And since like I said we weren't really close, we didn't interact that well, I just felt left out, in a way. But then I felt like I had a responsibility, and that is to take care of my brother, in terms of making sure he get food, he get food to take to lunch, making sure his clothes are clean. And you're talking about having two pair of jeans, or two shirts. So you have to do them daily. You have to wash your clothes, you have to cook, go to the market. You have no refrigerator. I mean, you're talking about living in a concentration camp, again, with bunk beds. And that would be your room, two people. And you would hang pots and pans, and your clothes, everything, within that bunk bed. And at first, I was very scared. I mean, I didn't know a word of Chinese. Here, I have to go out of the camp, and say, I want a pound of beef, I want a kilo of rice. And it was hard. So I did a lot of that through pointing and hand signals. And had you ever cooked a meal before? No. I mean, growing up, I was sort of chased away from coming into the kitchen. My mom and sister were like, go, you know, go play somewhere. So I never really learned. So when I got there, it was like, basically, I have to do it. Otherwise, we'll be hungry. We can't afford to purchase already made meal. So I would ask people in the camp. I would watch them, watch older people cook, and learn how to do it. Did you like the independence of shopping and cooking, and having this adult kind of life? Not really, because at that point, all I wanted to do was to have fun. For me, you have to understand, Hong Kong was new. It was kind of, wow, a huge city. And you are seeing 60 story buildings, and you are seeing all the neon lights, and the airplane, huge airplane flying. You know, the camp was very close to the airport. You are curious. You wanted to go out and just check around. It didn't cost anything. You can walk, play with your friend. Do you think it was good for you to have to be such a grown up at such a young age? You know, my friends ask me that question a lot, and I am not sure how I would answer it, exactly. I think, I guess being forced to grow up so fast sometimes is sort of-- this is how I feel. It's probably different with different people. But I feel it left you feeling kind of insecure most of the time, because you never feel adequately supported by your parents guiding you through different things, or saying don't do this, do that. And so I always feel like I'm a child, in some way. I'm like 32, and sometimes I just feel like I'm a little kid. Knowing now what happened to you once you left in the boat, would you make the same choice again? You know, probably not. Well of course, you can never say what happens to you, but I don't know. I just feel that if I have to do it, I probably wouldn't do it. Why? I don't know, I just think-- well, it's kind of a hard question, because I had to do it, so I did it. Just because I never get to see my mother. She passed away. She passed away after you left. After I left. This was after the year I graduate from college. I receive news that she passed away. So I regret that. I don't think you can have everything in life. Just back to what my mother said. You know, you can achieve all of this. You can have all the wealth, life can offer you all of these good things, but then sometimes you have to sacrifice a chunk of other things, like that love that your family can give you. Ahn Tuan Hoang lives in Chicago. A Catholic charity brought him to the United States after a year and a half in Hong Kong. He's never been back to Vietnam. Coming up: anger and its uses, high school and its uses, and more. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, stories of kids acting like adults-- some by choice, some because they're forced to. We've arrived at act three of our program. Act three, The Miseducation of Josh Frank. This is another story of a young person making a huge, life-changing decision about his own fate, while still very young. In this case, 13 years old. Hillary Frank tells the story, about her own little brother. This is what it sounds like when I call home to talk to my parents. Whoever picks up has to go to another room, so they can hear me. It's been like this for six years. This is my 17 year old brother preparing for his future. I try and practice about five hours a day, four to five hours a day. Mom and Dad ever have to tell you to practice trumpet? No. Now, these days, they have to tell me to stop practicing. It might get to be like 11:00 or 12:00 and they want to go to bed, and they think the neighbors will be mad, so they have to tell me to stop. Josh is training to be a professional trumpeter. He calls the incessant practicing his insurance to guarantee he'll have the skills he needs in the future. During the week, he goes to a regular public high school. But on Saturdays, he devotes 15 hours of his day to Juilliard's pre-college program. Basically, it's like cramming everything you get in one week at a conservatory into one day. Josh is pretty obsessive about his horn. He brings it to school every day, just in case a class is canceled. When our family went on vacations, Josh was sure to have his trumpet. Then he got to a point where he told our parents he'd rather not go on vacation anymore. A week off could be better spent practicing. Five years ago, Josh gave up being a kid to play the trumpet. I can remember telling my friends what I was going to be doing. It was at the beach, and we were rollerblading, which was like the thing I did in 8th grade. We were gliding around the parking lot, and I was like, guys, guess what, I got into this pre-college program. And some of them didn't even know what Juilliard was. Then it came, well, I guess you won't really be around on Saturdays. And I was like, I guess not. And it was difficult. The music was more important to me. And even if it does involve a sacrifice, I realized you couldn't have it both ways. In the first few years of high school, Josh used to call his friends to see what he was missing. They would tell him, oh, we just hung out until 3:00 in the morning, driving around or sitting at the diner, not very exciting. So Josh figured he wasn't missing much. When they invited him, he couldn't go. After a while, they stopped inviting him. It wasn't until junior year that we just never saw anything of each other. This is Eric, one of Josh's old friends. They used to play in orchestra together at school. And then this year, I don't know. I meant to call him at the beginning of, end of summer, and I just never got around to it. And then I think we might have talked once or twice. Oh yeah, we played Frisbee at the beach a couple times. But then school started, Juilliard started, and Josh gets a little consumed. It's a relationship riddled with formalities, and there's really little substance left. I got together with Eric and two other kids Josh has known since elementary school-- Katie and David. I wanted to know if they thought he was missing out. But like Eric, Katie and David said it was hard for them to talk about Josh. They told me they don't know him very well anymore. They all agreed. It's hard to put a label on what he's missed. All it is is a few hours of chilling time each week, when nothing really happens. But it all adds up. Yeah, I'd say he's missing out on things, obviously, because he's not there. But if you asked, if he asked us what we did in a typical weekend, it wouldn't be a lot of great, life changing things. But I think on a whole, over a long period of time, he misses out on getting closer with friends that he could. As our curfew was extended, we would stay out till 12:00 let's say. On Friday nights, he'd have to say at 10:00 or something, he'd say, OK, I'm going to Juilliard tomorrow, so I'll see you guys later. So that's two hours for us to kill without Josh, and eventually that adds up to a lot of hours to kill without Josh. Eventually that leads to, I think, it leads to Josh feeling alienated from his friends. When Josh was in 8th grade and told me what he wanted to do, I worried about him, about what he was giving up. I thought he should have a normal high school experience, even though like a lot of people, I hated high school. I hated it so much I left a year early. But somehow, the myth of high school is so powerful that even those of us who despised it think that you're missing something important if you don't go. Josh goes to the same high school I did, and the time I think it's most painful for him is at lunch. It does suck. Basically, at every lunch period, lunch is like the big social time during school. And I don't like classes. I don't like my math class. I don't like going to that stuff. But the thing I most dread is lunch, because I have to figure out what I'm going to do for that half an hour. In the past, when I have sat at lunch with people, it's really awkward for me, because they're talking about what they are doing or what they're going to do. And I never feel included, which kind of separates me. And it's really painful. So the way I deal with it is to get into music more. Like maybe I'll practice during lunch. Instead of eating, I'll eat when I get home. Today, all of Josh's close relationships are with other musicians. They connect easily, without having to explain their motivations for working so hard. And they have their own social scene, although it's not typical of kids their age. My friend often throws parties out of his apartment called sight reading parties. It's mostly string players and piano players who get together and just read music. And then when you're not reading, you just hang out and have a good time and listen to the music. You're describing this as your favorite social experience, and it's doing exactly what you would be doing if you were working in your ideal job. Totally. Back when he was little, Josh took violin and piano, and our mom used to set the timer in the kitchen to make sure he practiced for half an hour. He quit those instruments. It was just torture, getting him to sit for that long. But with the trumpet, it's almost as if he can't help himself. I can't explain it. It's just, it was right. It was just meant to happen. But I'm going to press you on this a little bit more. Why, what was so different about it? There had to be some difference. Was it because you were using your mouth, or? I think it was the sound. Just the sound that the trumpet made, I always thought was really beautiful. It sounds really warm, and you can really sing on it. You can be the soprano, or you can be in the orchestra, and be the biggest pig, and when you're playing Wagner, just play really loud and really brilliantly. Just to be a part of something like that is really special. It's amazing to adults when a 13 year old announces he or she has made a major life decision, and then sticks with it. One of the most adult things you can do is make a choice. Give up something fun in favor of something else. Though Josh says he won't really feel like an adult until he's doing his own laundry, getting his own groceries, ironing his own dress shirt before performances, living on his own. Hilary Frank is an art student living in New York City. Act 4, Angry Young Man, Times Two. This is the story of two people, one in his late teens, one in his late 50's. And we'll start with the older man. Willie Ross grew up in Arkansas in the 1940's, picked cotton from the time he was eight. He was a big strong kid. And we're going to field. I was going out there with my mother at five, six, seven years old. And I had fast hands, I noticed, and because watching her, you had to gather cotton real fast, because how great a cotton picker she was. And when I got 12, I was the only kid was picking 250 pound at 12 years old. When Willie Ross was 13, his stepfather died, and just months later, his mother died too, of spinal meningitis. And after the funeral, Willie Ross headed back to the family's house in Helena, Arkansas. When I caught the bus and went back to Helena, when I got to my address, which was 1136 Pecan Street, I looked there and the house was empty. There was no furniture, there was nothing. One of his sisters, who was pregnant and in the 12th grade, had taken all the furniture and went to live with her boyfriend. They had moved away, and no one took me in. I mean, I didn't know anything, and they had their own life. And I guess they was telling me about steel mills. Some of my family figured that I could get a job. I was big for my age, but I did not want that. Here's how he made it on his own, as a freshman in high school. His sister's boyfriend helped him rent a room in town, another sister, he says, sent him $24 a month. Of that, 12 covered his rent. He learned to budget, he washed his own clothes, made his own meals. People from church looked out for him. Boy Scouts was a big part of his life all through school. He played sports. He turned to God. And he supported himself with a series of jobs that relied on raw physical strength. He worked on an ice truck, on a beer truck, on a soda truck, carrying heavy crates of bottles. And he boxed. At 5'11", I didn't have the arm reach, but I was powerful, and I was quick. So what I did, I found that people would notice me, and give me hugs, if I'd be good in sports. Beating people up. I mean, I thought it was crazy. I said, here I am, nobody knows me as a person. But they love me as a violent animal. And I thought it was crazy, but you know, unfortunately, that's where I got my love, because everybody's attention came to me in sports. And I had a lot of hurt in my heart, because when your mother die, you are angry. And you wonder why other people got mothers, and you couldn't. I couldn't understand that. And so boxing, I just enjoyed beating them up. So you were pretty angry as a teenager. When did that turn? I don't think it turned. I'm still fighting it. You know, every day I think about it. He played football in high school, and was just as violent a football player as he was a boxer, he says. He went to college on a football scholarship, played pro ball for the Buffalo Bills, winning two championships on a team led by Jack Kemp. After that, he became a cop, and finally ended up an assistant superintendent at the Audi Home, a juvenile detention center in Chicago. Which is, as far as anybody seems to know, the largest juvenile lockup in the world. Sometimes as many as 600 kids behind bars, many of them full of anger. And full of anger for justifiable reasons, understandable reasons. Like Mr. Ross, back when he was their age. I really was angry, and I really hurt, because I couldn't understand why none of my people took me in. And I was a good kid. And I see these kids, it's happening to them. These kids here. These kids who locked up here in juvenile detention center. It happened to them. And I stress them, it happened to me. But I've told them this. Set a goal. Get an education. One of the many kids Mr. Ross told his stories to was Terence Golden. Terence describes his own life this way. Until he was nine, he says, he did well in school, things were fine. And then it all fell apart, when his father died of cancer. From there, that's like where the problems begin, you know, it's been hard since then. He died, my brother got killed, my cousin died, my grandmother died, so it's been a lot of trials and tribulations. And then what happened in your life after that? How did things change for you? I started to change mentally, you know? Go about things the wrong way, don't express myself, hold in anger, and there's a build up. It's like, when it's ready to go, it's like a volcano blow. Were you really close to your dad? I was the closest person in my family I've ever been close to. I was closer to him than my mother. When he died, my mother tried to bring me closer. But I really didn't want to grow closer. I wanted my father. And she was trying to tell me, she told me all the right things. But in my own little world, I thought it was wrong. Terence started doing badly in school, didn't listen to anybody, got it all sorts of trouble, and finally was arrested at the age of 14 for murder. A gang shooting with three other guys. And once he was behind bars, he started to think about things, and calm down. And he seemed to change. He befriended some adults, wrote and acted in some plays with the theater group, plays in which he and other teenagers contemplated the consequences of their crimes. He stayed at the Audi Home for two years as his case worked its way through the courts. Finally, a verdict came down. He was found guilty of murder. But he made enough of an impression on the adults in the lockup that several who rarely testify on behalf of any kids chose to testify for Terence at a sentencing hearing, hoping to convince the judge that he was worth taking a chance on. One of these adults was Meade Palidofsky, of the theater group Music Theater Workshop, who'd spent months working closely with Terence. Over ten years, out of hundreds of kids she's worked with behind bars, she's only testified for four or five. She says Terence was a natural leader, worked hard, had a sense of humor, got along with everybody. Terence grieved in a way that I don't often see kids. And my criteria, basically, is whether I think the kid has something to offer, whether they have remorse, whether if they went back out into the world-- I mean, the basic question I ask myself is, would I invite this child to stay at my house? Would I bring them into my house, would I offer them a job, would I help them out? And if the answer is yes, then I'll go to court. Because there are some kids that I really like who I wouldn't. Because I think that although I like very much, if they went out on the street, they'd be right back into it. But for Terence, there was a lot of us that really believed in him. Terence also asked Willie Ross to testify on his behalf. Mr. Ross turned him down. Liberals tend to think about cases like this one way, conservatives think about them another. Willie Ross's thinking takes in both sides. He'll give you the liberal line. He'll tell you that the only difference between him and Terence is that sports programs, church programs, and other positive community activities were there for Mr. Ross. And that's what saved him. That's what Terence never had. And he'll give you the conservative line. That any 14 year old or 12 year old who shoots somebody knows exactly what he's doing, and should serve an adult punishment. Which, in Mr. Ross's point of view, should be the death penalty. And this kid, and everybody, Mr. Ross, and he asked me to go to court. I would not go to court with him. I do not go to court for a murder. Period. For some things, you know, but not violent crime. I found him, and he found me too late. It's sad, but it happened. One of the things I tell the kids, I believe in the death penalty. Even for a 12, 13, 14 year old kid who shoots somebody? Yes. I believe that. Because I was 12, 13, and I knew better. I had a rifle at nine years old. And yet, still, I had more judgement than pull the trigger, and with all the anger I had. For years now, states have been cracking down on juvenile crime, sentencing teenagers and even preteens as adults in some places. We expect young people who face adversity now to master their emotions and overcome it. Terence was tried as an adult, and sentenced as an adult to 40 years. One year ago this week, at the age of 17, he entered a maximum security prison in Joliet, Illinois. It's not like the Audi Home, where there are counselors and classes and activities, and acknowledgement that these are kids that might be rehabilitatable. Oh, it's a lot different. The officers, they different. How are they different? They more aggressive. A lot of them ain't out to help you. You might catch a few that's out to help you. But there ain't too many out there for you. The inmate's different. See there, it's more laid back. See, here, you got to watch, you know? Watch continuously what's around you. Did you feel safe at the Audi Home? Yeah. Do you feel safe here? It's all in the mind. It's a mind game. I can make myself feel safe. I don't talk to nobody, really. I stay to myself, so I feel safe. He's been going to church in prison. He says it's hard to stay on the straight and narrow. If he doesn't get into trouble, he'll serve 20 years of his 40 year sentence. Our program was produced today by Blue Chevigny and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, Julie Snyder, and Starlee Kine. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margie Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. 312-832-3380. Or you know, you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet, at our website at www.thislife.org where we include all sorts of stuff we can't fit on the radio show. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Funding for our program is provided by Amazon.com. The books and music on This American Life are available on Amazon.com. [FUNDING CREDITS] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who just popped in, just popped his head in the door with this question, "What the hell do you think you're doing, booby?" I'm Ira Glass, back next week, with more stories of This American Life. "Did anyone tell you we're dealing with human lives here?" PRI. Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. My name is Marlene. I'm a senior at Lakeview High School, and I've had a crush on this one guy for four years. At first, it was like, OK, he's cute. Yeah, let me get to know him. And then, after a while, it's, OK, I really know you, and you really know me. So do you like me? Like, giving out hints but not really saying anything. And then it goes into-- when you walk down the hall, trying to touch hands to see if he'll actually grab your hand and stuff like that. There's times where it's like that, and you know he doesn't like you. But then, then, there's times like this one time, I sneezed. And he looked at me, he goes, "You have a really cute sneeze." It's like, Oh my god. What are you doing to me? Because it's just totally mixed signals. With a crush, everything is more intense. Everything your crushee says and does is freighted with such meaning. I was all day on that sneeze comment. I must've told every single one of my friends. And I was like, man, it's this stupid little "you have a cute sneeze" thing. And I was like, man, OK, get over it. Get over it. No big deal. But it was the highlight of my day, man. Having a crush, anybody knows, means being utterly, miserably, dejected and completely filled with hope at the same time. But after four years of an on-again, off-again crush on this guy, just last week, Marlene started seeing somebody else. And she says that compared with dating, a crush is better better in certain ways. The whole you don't know who he is, and you don't know if he likes you, and that trying to bump into him every day and stuff. But when you start dating somebody, it's just a normal thing. It's not something spontaneous. If you have a crush, you do anything just to be in his way, and it's just all this spontaneous, exciting thing. You have a boyfriend, it's just like, OK, yeah, OK. It's 3 o'clock. I see you now. Well, today on our program, for Valentine's Day, stories about love in its earliest stage. Crushes. What's terrible about them, what's great about them, and how they can overshadow real love for some people. Act One of our program, Kiss. Tobias Wolff has the story of a crush that lasted a lifetime. Act Two, How a Bill Becomes-- A President, in which a press secretary for a major presidential campaign explains the dynamics of crushes that are not about love but about politics. Act Three, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One April Morning, in which one lonely crushee finally figures out what it was that he wanted to say-- what we all want to say as the person of our dreams passes us on the street. Stay with us. Act One, Kiss. So what if you held onto a high school crush? Under what conditions would it never go away? Tobias Wolff has this short story. When Joe Reed was a boy of 15, his craziness over a girl became such a burden to his family, and such a curiosity to the small town where they lived, that his mother threatened to pack him off to his married sister in San Diego. But before this could happen, Joe's father died, and his mother collected a large sum from Northwestern Mutual and sold the family pharmacy and moved both Joe and herself to California. 30 years passed. In that time, he heard nothing from the girl, Mary Claude Moore, but now and then, word of her reached him through people back in Dunston. She dropped out of high school in her senior year, had a baby, got married, got divorced, remarried a few years later. That second marriage was the last thing Joe learned about Mary Claude until he got the news of her death. He dropped by his mother's house one Sunday afternoon. They had coffee together. And that was when she told him about Mary Claude and gave him the letter. He didn't want to be thinking about what his reaction looked like, or ought to look like, so he excused himself and took the letter outside to the backyard. According to the newspaper clipping his mother's friend had enclosed, Mary Claude appeared to have fallen asleep at the wheel and drifted into the oncoming lane of traffic. She'd been killed outright, and so had the driver of the car she hit, a dentist from Bellingham on his way home from a weekend of fishing. That was the newspaper account. The unofficial version, which his mother's friend disparaged but passed along anyway, was that Mary Claude had been having a fling with a real estate agent named Chip Ryan. Chip Ryan drove the same unusual car as the dentist, a red Mercedes station wagon. And Mary Claude had an equally distinctive old Mustang convertible, powder blue. Both of them lived outside town and frequently passed each other coming and going. The story was, whenever they met on an empty stretch of road, they played a game where they switched lanes at the last moment, a sort of lovers game. Mary Claude had mistaken the dentist's car for Chip's, and that was that. Joe could hardly make sense of the story. His mother's friend doubted it was true, but conceded that it certainly was a puzzle, how Mary Claude could've fallen asleep just 100 feet past a series of tight curves. Still, she wrote, there were probably other ways of explaining it without insulting her memory and giving needless pain to her family. She was survived by her husband, three children, and two grandchildren. For some reason, the paper hadn't run a picture of her with the piece. Joe was glad of the omission. Joe had lived another submerged life, parallel to the one known to those around him. In this other life, he hadn't left for California but had stayed on in Dunston with Mary Claude. He fell into this dream during the first months after the move in the immensity of summer, on a sun-struck street full of old geezers, where sprinklers ran at night on lawns visited only by the Mexicans who mowed them. When his mother left her darkened bedroom long enough to chase him outside, Joe took the Saturday Evening Post to a pool in a nearby park and watched the girls oil each other and arch their glistening legs over their backs and shriek when loitering thugs threw water on them. He lay on his stomach and stared at the Post and lived his ghost life with Mary Claude. After Joe started school, his mother took a job as an accountant for an office furniture store. A few months later, she and another woman formed a partnership and bought the owner out. Joe's mother began to dress smartly. She wore her hair straight instead of piled up on her head and let a gray streak show through. One night at dinner, she called "Joe" in such a way he realized she'd been speaking to him without his knowing it. And when he looked at her, she said, "You can't bring him back, son. You have to let him go." Joe was embarrassed at the depth of her misunderstanding, but he played along. He let her think she'd read his mind. The high school was new and bright and vast. In the echoing hallways, the voices of the students mingled in a roar that Joe came to hear as an aspect of the silence in which he passed his days. He sometimes went home without having spoken a word to anyone. It seemed to him that he might go through the whole year that way, and the next year too, until he graduated. But before long, he became friends with his biology lab partner, who took him to parties and introduced him to girls. When Joe got his driver's license that spring, he began to date Carla. He aced his courses and played Officer Krupke in West Side Story. In the fall of his senior year, he and Carla left a dance early and went to a motel. It was the first time for both of them and a failure. They tried again a few days later in Carla's bedroom and had better luck. And by Christmas, Joe was starting to see Courtney on the sly. He didn't really prefer her, but it seemed inevitable that sooner or later, either he or Carla would be unfaithful, and he wanted to be the one. It turned out to be much more complicated than he'd thought. Joe was soon exposed and denounced by both girls as a heartless cheat, which did not, it turned out, entirely discourage other girls from going out with him. And through all this, he continued his phantom life with Mary Claude. He was with her on a blanket in a moonlit clearing, or in a car parked above the river with Ray Charles on the radio, her fingertips grazing the back of his neck, her mouth open to his, her caramel taste on his lips and tongue and deep in his throat. Only the kiss was a memory. Only the kiss was real. He'd hardly been anywhere with Mary Claude, except when they could sneak off at school and a few times in town. But from the kiss, he made everything else, or everything else made itself. For that was how it happened. Without any effort of imagination or sense of unreality, he watched his life with Mary Claude go on as he had once believed it would. The scenes grew more particular as time passed, each new one framed by those that had gone before, and always with a kiss at the heart of it. At Berkeley, Joe went with Maureen. And when Maureen left for a year at the Sorbonne, there was Linda, then Candace. He and Candace shared a house with two other couples until they graduated. And afterward, they rented an apartment of their own through Joe's first year of medical school. Then Candace went to New York to visit her family and never came back. She sent Joe a letter in which she asked his forgiveness for the problems she'd caused through her alcoholism, which she was now in the process of confronting. She said she couldn't return to the life she'd led in Berkeley, as he must understand. No, Joe did not understand. They'd had their troubles, the two of them. He'd been going all out, and so had Candace, waitressing nights as she worked toward a degree in dance therapy. Of course, there were problems, but nothing that serious. He certainly didn't begrudge her a little relaxation. But when Joe's mother heard about Candace leaving, the first thing she said was that she hoped she'd get some help for her drinking. Joe hadn't mentioned the letter. By the time he started his residency in Seattle, he'd entered a state of near quarantine that made his shadow life more moony and detailed than ever. Dunston was just three hours north of Seattle. Joe sometimes thought of driving up on a free afternoon but never did. By then, he'd heard that Mary Claude was married again. There was no purpose in making the trip except to see her, and he was afraid that she wouldn't want to see him, and also afraid that she would. It was too late for that. She had a daughter and a husband and a house to run. She had work to do. So did he. Useful, exacting work. It depended on a clarity Joe knew he couldn't rely on, that he had to improvise day by day. He'd lost it before, and could not risk losing it again. When Mary Claude was killed, Joe had been married for 17 years. His wife, Liz, was a pediatrician in the same clinic where he practiced as an internist. They had a son in his junior year of high school, a daughter a year younger. The boy was a gifted cellist, unworldly, dreamy. Joe's daughter was more calculating but fiercer in her attachments once she'd made them. Joe began taking her rock climbing when she was still in grade school, and she turned out to be the most fearless and inventive partner he'd ever had. Then came a time when his daughter ceased to confide. Both daughter and son developed private sources of amusement, and Joe began to detect a certain condescension in their handling of him. His children were slipping away into the deep forest. He tried not to hurry them with the panic he felt at the gathering signs of their departure. Liz, too, kept changing on him. When they first met, she was girlish and unsure of herself in spite of being three years older than Joe. But since then, she'd grown calm and regal, which both unsettled and excited him. In their lovemaking, he approached her almost wistfully, and sometimes concluded with a bark of triumph, as if he'd brought a notorious virgin to ground. Away from her for more than a day or two, Joe hardly knew who he was. And still, through all these years, he had thoughts of Mary Claude. He thought of Mary Claude sitting across from him at a table in the kitchen, barely awake, drinking coffee. He thought of them standing on a porch and waving as friends drove off. And when they were alone, Mary Claude turned to him and slipped an arm around his waist. And they went slowly inside and up the stairs, stopping to kiss on the landing. Sometimes, Joe thought of what was to follow, but this was the moment he lingered on. The kiss. Joe remembered very well what it was like to kiss Mary Claude. He had done it as much as anyone could for as long as they were going together, which came to just over three months. Mary Claude's father owned a dairy farm several miles out of town. Her mother had moved away when Mary Claude was 11, taking her daughter with her. She married again, but things did not go well between her daughter and this new husband, and she sent Mary Claude back to her father when she was 15. Joe had gone through the first six years of grade school barely noticing her, drab little hick that she was. But she came back a different girl, witchy and vivid. She mouthed off to the teachers and walked around in a pout with her back arched like a bow. She had no friends except for an equally friendless cousin. During volleyball games in her gym class, she baited the other girls by deliberately hitting the ball lot of bounds or into the net. She cut classes and smoked and made out with other girls' boyfriends, or so it was said. And Joe, curious to test the rumor, found it to be true. Mary Claude went behind the school with him, during a dance to which he'd brought another girl, and kept him out there for over an hour. He knew she was doing it to shame his date, at first anyway, until she warmed to him. But once he started, he couldn't stop kissing her. Joe had, by then, kissed several girls and thought he had a pretty fair idea of the possibilities of a kiss. Kissing was good. But he tended to think of it as a beachhead from which to launch more serious operations, and a safe haven when, inevitably, he was forced to retreat. But he didn't remember to try anything else that night, leaning against the gymnasium wall with this girl, who tasted so good and pressed so fully against him, humming in his ear when they stopped to breathe and swaying to the music that rattled the high windows above them. There were other couples along the wall, and Joe knew his date would hear about this. But when he started to lean away, Mary Claude laid her fingers along his cheeks and guided his mouth back to hers. And after that, he forgot leaving. He would have stayed there all night with no sense of time passing, but finally, a girl came out and told Mary Claude that her ride was waiting to take her home. She turned to go, then stopped and kissed Joe again. He walked around the school twice before going back inside. The gym was almost empty. His date had left with friends. When he saw Mary Claude in the hallway on Monday morning, he did not pretend that nothing had happened, nor did she. She'd let him take her books and walk her to class. At the lunch period, they went to the cafeteria and sat across from each other. He understood what would happen, the hush around them, how they'd looked at, even by his friends. Joe knew the rules. He'd been a [BLEEP] and hurt a nice girl. And for Mary Claude, of all people. You could make out with Mary Claude, but you had to laugh about it later and cut her dead. They ate without talking. Her color was high. Otherwise, she gave nothing away. She helped herself to his carrots, and that was that. They were a pair. There was a fern-choked gully behind the school. There were the stands by the football field, empty classrooms. She tasted of lipstick and cigarettes and candy. Which she opened her mouth to his, the first sensation was a shock of relief as the tightness melted in a rush from his neck and shoulders. And then, he was swaying with her, drinking that smoky sweetness, drinking forgetfulness of the schoolwork he had not done, the stammer he was developing, his mother dazed and pale, the room at the end of the hallway where his father lay gasping for the next breath like a trout dropped on the river bank. He forgot to plan what to try next, where to touch, how hard to press. He stopped thinking ahead. There was no ahead, no before, and no after. He was itchy with thirst and deeply satisfied all at once. And Mary Claude was thirsty for him. He'd never have this happened before, a girl impatient for the taste of him, greedy for it. She did not like to break off. When he leaned away for a breath, she would close her fingers in his hair and pull him back to her. She sometimes said his name in a low, almost mocking way, and the sound of it whipped him around is if she'd yanked on a leash. Mary Claude some grew careless with their privacy. She didn't care who saw them or when. She'd command a kiss-- a profound kiss-- as she boarded her bus, or in the hallway, even on the street in town when her father let her go in for some shopping after school. Joe knew that it went beyond carelessness, that she was making a display of their appetite, perhaps especially of his appetite for her. He could see that she was proud of her claim on him, and this made him proud and brazen too. He didn't mind if people thought they were ridiculous, even a sort of joke, the two of them stitched together at the mouth, as his mother put it. Joe's mother had heard about them. She heard everything in the pharmacy. At first, she came at him aslant about it. Then she lost patience. Was this the time to be carrying on with some girl? Couldn't he sit with his father a while instead of mooning in his room and tying up the telephone? Would that be too much to ask? Joe knew he should care that he was giving his mother trouble, but nothing she said touched him. It wasn't out of concern for her that he ruined everything. He and Mary Claude were in the stands during a basketball game. She was bored. She wanted to leave, go outside. Joe kept putting her off. The game was close. She started to play with the hair at the nape of his neck. He liked the feeling, and almost surrendered to it, but something came over him, and he shrugged her hand off. He felt Mary Claude go still beside him. He knew she was looking at him, but he kept his eyes on the players, and even produced a shout when one of them goofed a pass. Mary Claude slid her fingers back into his hair, tightened them, and began to turn his head toward hers. Without taking his eyes from the game, he gave a rough shake and pulled away. Mary Claude stood up, but waited there a moment. And though Joe knew he could still turn to her, even then, he did not. She made her way to the aisle. He watched her descend the steps and cross in front of the stands and leave the gym. The game had become meaningless to him, but he sat through the rest of it. His mouth was dry. His heart thudded as if it were hollow. Tobias Wolff's story continues, plus other stories, in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different stories on that theme. Today's program, for Valentine's Day, Crushes. What's good about them, what's terrible about them, what happens when they take over your life. Tobias Wolff continues with his short story, "Kiss." Joe phoned Mary Claude when he got home, but no one answered. He called again just before he went to bed, and someone picked up but didn't say anything. "Mary Claude," he said. "Mary Claude, please." She wouldn't answer. He knew she was waiting for him to give an account, to justify himself, and he couldn't think what to say. In the end, all he could say was her name, "Mary Claude," and then she hung up. She hung up whenever he called. He pushed notes into her locker and got no answer. He met her bus every morning, and she walked right past him. He waited outside her classrooms and followed her down the hall and out to the bus stop after school. He knew he was making a fool of himself, but he had no choice. There was no other way to be close to her. His mother heard about it and demanded that he leave the girl alone. It made no difference. Joe continued to trail Mary Claude. And still, Mary Claude did not relent. They had one class together. Washington State history. She sat two seats ahead of him in the next row to the left. He could watch Mary Claude without seeing him watch her, though of course, she knew. He was alert to any movement that allowed him a view of Mary Claude's mouth. She often turned to look at the clock over the door, and Joe never failed to seize that glint of her face in profile, the high forehead, the full mouth. When he saw her mouth, he leaned forward, narrowing the distance by at least that much. It was wrong that he couldn't put his mouth to hers. It was an impossible mistake that kept him baffled and on edge. She must be feeling what he was feeling. Joe was sure of that. If he was cut off from her, she was cut off from him. She was in exile too. But it went on and on. And Joe came to understand that Mary Claude didn't know how to end it, that she was waiting for him to find a way. But what could he do when she wouldn't speak to him, when she wouldn't even look at him? Then she began keeping company with Al Dodge. Al was a senior, a quiet, well-liked boy who struggled in school and had a limp from polio. He lived just up the road from Mary Claude. He drove to school, and Mary Claude started riding with him instead of taking the bus. They often ate lunch together. Joe was confused at first. Then he saw that this was his signal. He waited for Al outside the wood shop and begin to tell him about Mary Claude and himself, but Al wouldn't listen. He tried to brush past, but Joe wasn't through talking and blocked his way. Al pushed at him, and his bad leg gave out, and he went down, his metal brace clattering on the concrete. Joe bent to help him up, but two boys ran over and shouldered him aside. One of them gave Joe a look as he struggled to lift Al to his feet. Joe wanted to explain everything, and the impossibility of ever doing this left him no choice but to smile at the boy and tell him to go [BLEEP] himself. He could see when he got home that his mother already knew about it. She sent him to work in the store and spoke to him only when she had to. While he was doing the dishes that night, she came to the kitchen and told him that his sister and her husband were willing to have Joe come live with them until things got sorted out. Until his father died, Joe took her to mean. Her face was flushed, her eyes brilliant. She stood erect in the doorway and forced him to look at her. She was magnificent, and he resented it. Did he want to go to San Diego? Did he want to do that? No? Was he sure? All right, she said. She needed him here. But one more thing like this, he'd be on the first bus out of town. Did he understand? Good. Now she wanted Joe to go to his father and make the same promise to him. Joe did no such thing. He listened to the weird submarine clankings emanating from his father's oxygen tank, and studied the pattern in the rug, and answered a few wheezy questions about his schoolwork, and then he got the hell out of there, but not before his father put his dry, yellow hand on Joe's wrist and pulled him down into an embrace that left him sick with horror. He stopped following Mary Claude to her classes. She rode to school with Al Dodge, and they sometimes ate together, but Joe could see there was nothing between them. She was alone, as before. So was Joe, more than ever, the guy who picked on cripples. He didn't follow Mary Claude, but he watched her, from nearby when he could, but mostly from a distance, cocking her hip to hold her locker door open, at a cafeteria table, tearing at the peel of an orange with her strong, white fingers. It was late May. In a couple of weeks, school would be over, and he'd have no way of breaking the spell he had brought on them. He decided he would kiss her. She was like him. After the first taste, she always wanted another, and then another, until she lost herself. That was what they needed, to lose themselves again. Mary Claude's gym teacher took the girls outside on warm days for softball and track. Joe's French class met that period, but he sometimes cut out early to stand in the shade of the trees at the near end of the field and watch Mary Claude. When the teacher led the class back inside, Mary Claude always made a point of lagging far behind, as if the force that impelled the others had no hold on her. He stood under a horse-chestnut tree beside the path that led to the locker rooms. The tree was in bloom. Eyes had gone weepy and raw from the pollen. When she drew near to him, he spoke her name and she looked up without surprise. He'd had something all planned out to say, but now that he was close to her, he forgot what it was. The whiteness of her legs emptied him of words. She waited, arms still crossed. Then she said, "You been crying?" Joe wasn't sure what happened next. Even right after it happened, he had no confidence in any account, even in his own memory, and had accepted the blame that fell on him without protest and without belief. But he knew that it started with Mary Claude's crack about his eyes. He heard her mockery as forgiveness. Forgiveness and summons. It sent a rush of heat to his face. He could still feel it, thinking back. Then he lost the thread. He remembered holding one of her hands in both of his, and her leaning away and looking at him. But struggling? Perhaps. Then he remembered being with her under the tree, his arms around her. But how they got there, he couldn't say. Maybe he led her there. Maybe he really did force her. The one thing he was sure of was that her mouth was opening to his when the gym teacher grabbed his collar. Even as she wrenched him back, shirt front bunched at his throat, he was straining forward to seal the kiss. Then Mary Claude turned aside and started gagging and weeping, and he knew he'd have to start all over again. He didn't argue with anything anyone said. His mother surprised him by trying to make the principal feel sorry for her, something he'd never seen her do. But it didn't pay off. The principal refused to let Joe finish out the year. As he was clearing out his locker, a couple of seniors walked past and made smooching sounds. And other students took it up as Joe carried his stuff down the hallway. Joe's mother talked about sending him to San Diego that weekend. He'd made up his mind to refuse, but it never came to a test. Late Wednesday afternoon, his father went into a coma. Until he died that evening, Joe kept the watch with his mother, prowling the bedroom while his mother held her husband's hand. He was steady at his mother's side, gallant and grave. On the night after the funeral, he slipped downstairs and felt for the car keys on the hook where they were kept. Not there. Not there the next night either. So, his mother had second-guessed him. Joe was surprised that she had calculated so coolly in her grief. It made him think differently of her, better and worse. Joe took the letter into his mother's yard and studied it a while. Hunched in a lawn chair, elbows on his knees, he waited to be struck. But down the street, someone was blasting a Strauss waltz through an open window. And he couldn't stop himself from following it, even conducting it with minute twitches of his head, though he'd lost his taste for old Vienna after Candace went on a Strauss binge the year before she left. The chair had looked dry when he sat down, but that morning's dew still lingered between the straps of webbing. It seeped into his pants, warm, clinging. The grass needed a trim. Joe knew that if he looked up, he'd see his mother watching him from the kitchen window, pulling a long face for what she imagined he was feeling. What he did feel was embarrassment at this hambone attempt to create sorrow by imitating it. Pathetic. Pathetic. He rocked to his feet, looked sourly around as he waited for a purpose to form, then started toward the shed where the mower was kept. It would come later if it came at all. Sometimes it didn't. He lost patience and hardly ever thought of them again, and then, with a regret that he recognized as mostly polite. Same with a colleague who was killed not long ago on Lake Tahoe when he hit a beer cooler while water skiing. But then, water skiing was such an untragic way to go, and the derelict cooler, a ludicrous touch. No, if it came, it would come from behind and push him into a hole so deep he'd forget what it was like to be out of it. That was what happened with his beautiful niece, Margaret, his sister's only child. She was 28. Joe had warned her. She had diabetes and was drinking heavily. But somehow, he'd failed to expect it himself. He got clobbered a few weeks after her death, laid low. Something like it happened to him after his son was born. One night, holding the baby, he remembered with perfect clarity his own father holding him, looking down at him. His father was smiling. There was that roguish gap between his teeth, the crazy, up-curved eyebrow. It was a look of unguarded benevolence. Joe knew it well. He'd grown up in the light of his father's pleasure in him. And now he figured that by some trick of the mind, he had imposed on a scene too distant for recall. And then, a few days later, he was doing some paperwork after the clinic closed and looked up into the dim corridor. And there he was in his parents house again, in the hallway just outside their bedroom. And as he stood there, unable to move, the wheezing, yellow-faced monster who had taken his father's place turned slowly and smiled that kindly smile and lifted his long yellow fingers and tried to speak. Joe cried out, or thought he did. The room had that shocked, expectant air. But if so, no one had heard him. The lawnmower had a bent blade and shook convulsively as Joe worked his way around the yard. it was folly to use it in this condition, but the pushing felt good and he muscled it on. He spun through a corner and saw his mother in the kitchen window, her face overlaid with leaves reflected from the orange tree. She looked worried. Joe raised a hand and she made a little wave back, the same regretful wave she used to give from the departing car when they left him at scout camp in the summer. The same wave, the same uncertain smile, except she was strong and handsome then. And now, she was old and had to wear a diaper. He turned his attention to the rock border where he'd pranged the blade last time. And when he looked up again, she was gone. His hands tingled, his brow dripped, his shirt was soaked through. As he worked, he ceased to think, or to feel himself think. And then it came to him. The real estate agent, Chip Ryan. Little Chip. He hadn't placed him at first because the boy had been so young-- just seven or eight-- when Joe left Dunston. Chip's older brother had been a friend of Joe's. Chip used to hang around while they played records and talked, but he didn't butt in or act bratty. Joe had been struck by that. What a nice little kid he was, little Chip, sitting there with his pet rabbit, stroking its ears while he looked up at the big boys. Little Chip and Mary Claude. The letter didn't say whether Chip was married or single. Either way, he was on the prowl, or they wouldn't be telling that story. And of all the girls in that long, green valley, he had to pick Mary Claude, if it was true. Of course it was true. He bullied the mower through the last couple of turns and cut the engine. A pall of exhaust hung above the yard. He heard the music again. Violins. Strauss still. He nodded helplessly along as he toweled himself down with his shirt. He'd heard the piece 100 times. 500 hundred times, Candace dancing naked through their apartment to the grand rise and fall of it, gleaming with sweat, eyes half-closed. But when he reached for the name, he felt it slip away. It baffled him that he could not hold on to something he'd known so well. And he stood fixed in his puzzlement as the music swelled to a finish and died. And a dog barked somewhere, and another waltz began. Tobias Wolff is the author of several books, including The Night in Question and This Boy's Life. His story "Kiss" first appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Act Two, How a Bill Becomes A President. Our program today is about crushes, and this story is about a very specialized kind of crush, the political crush. This is a crush that wants only for a candidate to get elected to office. It is a rarely-discussed force in our national life. Julia Rothwax, for example, says she doesn't care if she ever speaks with presidential candidate Bill Bradley, but she wants him to win the White House. Her political feelings for him started starring when she saw him talk about the normally uncrushworthy subject of campaign finance reform. Now she's one of his press secretaries in New York. She's worked for one other presidential campaign, for another Bill-- Bill Clinton in 1992. But after Clinton took office, she says the reality of his presidency did not match her hopes for it. She says "crush" isn't exactly the right word for the kind of political feeling that I'm trying to describe. But I do think there's parallels to-- that every now and then, somebody comes along that makes you feel extremely hopeful and excited. And then you go through a process of only thinking about that thing and that person. Yeah. What I think it's closer to is the feeling of falling in love than it is to a feeling of a crash. It doesn't feel like a crush to me. It's sort of a process. You have your first meeting or your first acquaintance with the candidate. And at that first meeting, which for me was that campaign finance reform speech that Bradley gave, you're assessing in the same way you would on a first date. I heard the speech and I was moved by it. And I wanted to hear more, and I wanted to learn more, and I got really interested. So this is like the curiosity phase. The curiosity phase. Yeah. And also the sort of gathering information. You're like, "Who is this person and are they as good as they seem?" Yeah, so you go through that. And then you commit. Then you sign up. I'm a full-time staffer now. So I actually left my job, and I gave stuff up, and I threw myself into this thing. And then you see where it goes. This kind of political falling in love, is there a difference for you in the Bradley campaign from the way that it felt with Clinton? Well, yeah, there's a few differences. With Clinton, if it was a political falling in love, it was my first time out. And the first time you fall in love, you fall hard, and then you usually, I guess, end up feeling disillusioned or disheartened. Or your expectations are too high, and then reality sets in. And with Bradley, I'm a little bit older, I'm a little bit wiser. And he doesn't-- well, the truth is, he doesn't work it, I guess is the right term. You felt that there was a feeling on the Clinton campaign that everybody should be sort of starry eyed about him. And Bradley's charming in this different way. There's a jazzier, high-school kind of first falling in love that maybe Clinton was for me. And Bradley feels much more serious and much more mature. Well, you know that idea that when you get into a new relationship, that it's a reaction to the relationship before-- Yeah. --so, like, the opposite person of the one who you just were with? Right. Pendulum. Pendulum swinging, you're talking about. Yeah, is that true for you in this case? Let's think about that. I guess with Bradley, I have liked it that one of his themes is that he's telling you what he really thinks. I think partly, with Clinton, what was hard for everybody is that you kind of got the sense that there were a lot of political considerations behind what he did and what he said. And with Bradley, it feels more pure. And I have to say, I feel like both of us are approaching this conversation rather tentatively because you have a real job in politics. And so, to talk about the emotional component behind it, it feels a little like, is this is right to talk about? Though I have to say, if you think about people working in politics, if they don't have a feeling behind the work they're doing, if they aren't idealistic at some level-- if you think about people who aren't, your heart sinks. You know what I mean? You want to believe that the people who are working with candidates and working in politics are doing it because they believe in something. I think a lot of my friends who I did the '92 campaign with actually-- everybody wants it to happen again, because it's a positive-- it's a good feeling. You get sucked back in, and it takes over your life. And you start caring maybe a little too much. And you do have to be careful about it, because you have to be working for somebody who's going to be responsible with your time and your affections and your commitment, I guess. And I guess I feel like Bradley, he does do that as a candidate. And if you talk about it as a political falling in love, a relationship, and you're looking as you get older, you look for different things. You're looking for balance, and you don't want quite as much of a Clinton-esque roller coaster, I guess. One of the things, when you have a real crush, or you're really falling in love with a person in a real setting, is that you want to talk about them all the time. And thinking about this kind of political falling in love, you're in a situation where you get to talk about him all the time. Right, I'm a press secretary, so my-- It's perfect. When I'm actually falling in love with a real person in my real life, I don't go around and gush. But with a candidate, it's something to share, so that's what's nice about the gushing about it, is because you do want to tell people. Because you've discovered something that's great. But they can have it too. That's what's different about political falling in love. Anybody could sign up and sign on and help us win this election. Julia Rothwax is a press secretary for the Bill Bradley campaign in New York. Act Three, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning. We close our show today with this story, with as pure a depiction of unadulterated crush feeling as possibly can be imagined, from Haruki Murakami. It's read for us by actor Matt Malloy. One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young either-- must be near 30, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from 50 yards away she's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert. Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl-- one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers. Or you're drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I'll catch myself staring at a girl at the table next to mine because I like the shape of her nose. But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived notion. As much as I like noses, I can't recall the shape of hers, or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It's weird. She's walking east to west and I west to east. It's a really nice April morning. Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty. Just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and, what I'd really like to do, explain to her the complexities of fate that led to our passing each other on a side street in Harujuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets. It's like an antique clock built when peace filled the world. After talking, we'd have lunch somewhere. Maybe see a Woody Allen movie. Stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed. Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart. Now the distance between us has narrowed to 15 yards. How can I approach her? What should I say? "Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?" Ridiculous. I'd sound like an insurance salesman. "Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there's an all-night cleaner in the neighborhood?" No, this is just as ridiculous. I'm not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who's going to buy a line like that? Maybe the simple truth would do. "Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me." No, she wouldn't believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you're not the 100% perfect boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I'd probably go to pieces. I'd never recover from the shock. I'm 32, and that's what growing older is all about. We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can't bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater. and in her right hand she holds a crisp, white envelope lacking only a stamp. So, she's written somebody a letter. Maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could carry every secret she's ever had. I take a few more strides and turn. She's lost in the crowd. Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would've been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical. It would have started, once upon a time, and ended, a sad story, don't you think? Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was 18 and the girl 16. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world, there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle, and that miracle actually happened. One day, they came upon each other on the corner of a street. "This is amazing," he said. "I've been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you are the 100% perfect girl for me." "And you," she said to him, "are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I pictured you in every detail. It's like a dream." They sat on a park bench, held hands and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle. As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny, sliver of doubt took root in their hearts. Was it really all right for one's dreams to come true so easily? And so, when there came a momentary lull in the conversation, the boy said to the girl, "Let's test ourselves just once. If we really are each other's 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, we will know the we are the 100% perfect ones. We'll marry then and there. What do you think?" "Yes," she said. "That is exactly what we should do." And so they parted, she to the east and he to the west. The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other's 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully. One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season's terrible influenza. And after drifting for weeks between life and death, they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D.H. Lawrence's piggy bank. They were two bright, determined young people, however. And through their unremitting efforts, they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were capable of sending special delivery letters at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love. Time passed with shocking swiftness. Soon, the boy was 32, the girl 30. One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special delivery letter, was walking from east to west, both along the same narrow street in the Harujuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in the chest, and they knew. She is the 100% perfect girl for me. He is the 100% perfect boy for me. But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of 14 years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd forever. A sad story, don't you think? Yes. That's it. That's what I should've said to her. Haruki Murakami's short story is in his collection of stories, The Elephant Vanishes. Our reader, Matt Malloy, can be seen in the films Cookie's Fortune, In the Company of Men, Election, and so many more. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, and Blue Chevigny. Production help from Todd Bachmann and [? Erik Hoversten. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. What does it mean that he greets me every day with, Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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As a species, something drives us to want to make inanimate things seem alive. There are statues where the whole idea seems to be to create a simulation of soft skin and sheer billowing cloth out of rock-- literally, out of a rock-- as if to prove this, too, can be human. There is just something about that moment when Pinocchio stops being a few strung together pieces of wood and starts to seem like he's really a little boy. This week I caught a guy named Ronn Lucas, a ventriloquist who is best known for being able to make anything talk-- a banana, a box of breakfast cereal, a sock-- to ask him what he makes of all this. His dummies are named Buffalo Billy and Scorch. When I'm on stage talking to my puppets, I believe they're real. I believe to the point, as an actor believes in his character. Charles Ludlam, of the Ridiculous Theater, had a dummy called Walter. And he wrote at one point about Walter, he sometimes says unexpected things. Does that happen with you, with Billy or Scorch? It has happened to me. There are a couple moments, too. I started to get through a breakthrough as a comedian. I was working a series of comedy clubs. And someone asked me if I would do a military club. And I said, yeah, sure, not knowing what I was getting into. I worked for the enlisted men. And they were just really into what I was doing. But then I went over to the officer's club. And these guys were wild. I guess it's part of the responsibility of command, is that when you get to hang out just with other officers, you can let yourself go. But performing, I couldn't do my script. I couldn't do the show I had planned. So I just started doing question and answer stuff. Don Rickles, ethnic jokes, nothing that would really hurt anybody. But I was picking on everybody equally. I had to preface that before I got to where I-- So one guy was an officer. And he was from Puerto Rico. I said hey, where are you from? And the guy said, Puerto Rico. And the dummy goes, how many Puerto Ricans does it take to screw in a light bulb? And I'm thinking to myself, why did I have him say that? I don't have an answer. Then, in a wink, the dummy came up with an answer. One funny enough to make an audience laugh in an officer's nightclub. But I have to say, not so funny that I want to alienate our lovely multicultural audience. And why is it so pleasurable for something inanimate to suddenly become alive through a voice coming out of it? It is fascinating to hold a fork in your hand and wonder what it would say. I found myself doing that not too long ago around a table with some other ventriloquists. And what did it say? And it said, your thumb is on my butt. Right. Of course. Exactly. I treated it more like a person. I didn't think of it as a utility, or what it was going to do. I saw it as a human form. And my thumb was in the wrong place. Which is exactly the point. Every object Ronn Lucas makes speak, he pretends is a person. This is exactly what we're doing as a species all the time. Turning things into people. And it begins when we're children, playing with dolls. That's true for men and women. Today on our program, what that's all about. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, stories of dolls, dolls of all sorts, and what is it all about? Act One, Thank Heaven for Little Girls-- Made of Plastic. The story of a company that has figured out all the different ways that girls like dolls, and is trying to sell to nearly every single way they can think of. Act Two, You Know What Mr. Bear Would Say. The author of a once-famous series of children's books about a doll, and how her life came to resemble a doll's. Act Three, The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter. Kindergarten teacher Vivian Paley tells the story of how, in this age when schools are eliminating the doll corner at younger and younger ages, it was playing with dolls that saved a kid in her class. Stay with us. Act One, Thank Heaven for Little Girls-- Made of Plastic. About a year ago, here in Chicago, just around the corner from all the fanciest stores that you can find for a three state radius-- Niketown, and the Sony Gallery, and Neiman Marcus, and all those kind-- a company began an experiment in marketing dolls to little girls. They opened a store, the only one that they have opened anywhere. This American Life producer Susan Burton headed down to American Girl Place. It's American Girl Place, not American Girl store. The word place was what thrilled me before I had ever set foot inside. It seemed to connote a project of such grand scale. Build a monument on the Magnificent Mile, and they will come. You see them on Saturday afternoons downtown, swarms of little girls. What you notice first is their shopping bags, which are bright, Crayola marker red with American Girl Place stamped in white across the side. Austere, grown-up looking bags. Even if the bags are large, banging against their legs, the girls tend to carry them by themselves. In good coats and tights and Mary Janes, they look like little girls pretending to be little girls. The question of what to wear to American Girl Place has clearly been given careful consideration. Some girls are dressed like their dolls. I have the purple 2000 millennium outfit. There are purple tights that are sparkly and a purple skirt that goes down to about my knees. I have a purple tank top with a purple cardigan. Whitney Robertson is 11 years old and came here from Saint Louis with her mother, Laura. She has short blond hair, braces. She moves with a heightened formality. It's as if she is wearing something magical and doesn't dare disturb the spell. The most interesting thing is when she got her braces this year at Christmas time, she had to have purple-- what do you call them, spacers? The purple rubber bands. Because I got my braces a few days after Christmas, so I knew I got the 2000 outfit. So that's the only reason I got purple. Otherwise would have gotten my favorite color, blue. So she was totally American Girl. Whitney and her mother have come to American Girl Place, not to Chicago, in the same way that you go to Disney World, rather than to Orlando. This is Whitney's first time here. Her parents gave her the trip for Christmas. There was a series of presents. The first one was a necklace that said, northern expressions. And I really didn't get it at the time, but it was a clue there we go north from Saint Louis. And then the next one was something from AG. I think it was a necklace. AG. American Girl. And then the next one was airline tickets to the AG Place. Whitney had this questioning look on her face, like, what? And then it dawned on her. And she just went, oh my gosh, and started to cry. True. In the store's first year, about 40% of it's million visitors have come from out of town. This is retail as theme park. Destination shopping. There is a concierge desk, coat checks on both the first and third floors. There is a cafe, and a clothing department, a museum, and a live musical, loads of furniture and accessories, shelves of souvenirs, and, of course, the dolls themselves, which cost $82 each. A former school teacher with a storybook name, Pleasant Rowland, thought up the American Girl dolls about 15 years ago. There are six historic dolls. Each represents a different era, and is accompanied by a series of chapter books about her life and times. Samantha, the most popular doll, is a Victorian girl. Molly misses her father, who is fighting in World War II. Addie escaped slavery and moved north to Philadelphia. The girls are spunky and independent, and the books are full of historical detail. Quiting bees, suffragettes, victory gardens. About 5 million dolls have been sold since 1986, mostly by catalog. The company won't say to whom, but as a fourth grade teacher, Whitney's mother has noticed which girls tend to own the dolls. I teach in a poorer area outside of Saint Louis. Most of the people would be lower middle class. I would say about 5% of my 9 to 10-year-olds right now. Now, my daughter's school, who is in the more middle class, maybe upper middle class, area, probably a good 80%-- 80%. Out of the whole school. Out of the whole school. Yes. Because you'll see them wearing the t-shirts. You'll see them carrying the dolls. And they talk about it a lot. And it's a big thing. The crowd in the store seems well off. Mostly, but not entirely, white. One girl, who must be all of seven, with elegant upswept hair and a long burgundy coat, carries her wire shopping basket around all day with the authority of a duty free heiress. Whitney didn't even like dolls, her mother tells me, until she got the first Samantha book three years ago. The history drew Whitney into the doll. And lots of other girls I talked to do seem to genuinely like, and learn from, the books. But mostly, the girls play with these dolls the way they play with any dolls. They insert them into various domestic dramas. New school. Orphan. The universally popular "my girl's coming over to your girl's house." And they do their hair. I hear that the problem with Molly is that her pigtails always fall out, that most girls prefer to undo Kirsten's braids. You get a little piece of the hair, and you brush it from the underside with a certain kind of brush for five minutes. And then it turns out more shiny than it was, and it won't be as frizzy. The ingenious thing about American Girl Place is not only that they seem to understand what a girl wants to do when she plays with her doll, but that they know how to participate in the game with her. It's as if the marketers have stepped into the center of a girl's dream and are selling to her from a perch in her own unconscious. The doll hair care products in this store rival a beauty salon's offerings. Employees roam the floor, dispensing styling tips. Frizzy. The lady was showing them down there how to brush their hair, and how they could put it up into little curlers. Again, Whitney's mother, Laura. And put water on it, and it would be shinier and it would be curly. I mean, they were taking the time to do this down there. Unbelievable. American Girl Place knows what girls want. And these days, this includes a look-alike doll. The American Girls of Today are available in 20 different skin, hair, and eye color combinations. Almost every single girl I talked to with a Today doll says she picked the one she did because it looked like her. And the Today accessories are varied enough to allow any girl to pursue her particular obsession. I'm pretty set, because I knew I wanted the wheelchair and the cast. I've been wanting one for about a year. True. We're not sure why. The medical thing. I don't know. --husky right there. That's Carrie. She's eight. She and her sister got the wheelchair yesterday. They've come back for the Apres-Ski set, which includes a tic-tac-toe board, a tiny thermos, and, most important, a bright yellow cast. They also want the dog sled, for accidents. They were in the midst of a complicated disaster narrative. A sort of Wild America meets Little House docudrama, which they began during their car trip to Chicago. Carrie needs the cast for a related story. Because we're playing a game. And they're going on a camping trip. Horseback riding. And on the way back, she falls and gets stomped on the leg. Then there are the collectors, the mint in boxers. By making the dolls collectible, American Girl Place can keep girls buying dolls long past the age they normally would. Their families can be a little spooky. I meet one grandmother who pulls from her handbag photographs of her granddaughter's closet. Yes, photos of a closet, filled with American Girl accessories. The stepgrandmother, who is also in the store, tells me that the girl has everything for Kirsten. For a while there, she thought that this was too babyish for her, so got out of it. But then I think she has realized that this is something that you collect, and you can just enjoy your whole life, really. I was telling her about Demi Moore, that she has a collection of dolls, and she has a special house for all her dolls. So it's just a nice hobby. Downstairs on the first floor, Whitney and her mother look at the dioramas. There are glassed-in living rooms filled with period furniture, one for each historic character, and display cases of accessories and clothing. Samantha's bathing outfit. How would you like to be over at Lake Carlyle in the summer, when it's 104, and have to wear something like that? I mean, it's basically a dress. Girls move past the dioramas in chronological order, as if in a museum. But not in a desultory field trip shuffle. They love this stuff. A girl dressed as Samantha lingers before Samantha's showcase, posing for pictures, staring at the doll's nightstand and her tiny copy of The Wizard of Oz. These items are called realia, which is the perfect word to describe what's so compelling about American Girl. Everything you buy makes the world of the doll more real. It makes her more real, which is what a lot of girls wish about their dolls. And now, our last contestant, Miss Samantha Parkington. In the musical review-- the theater is just past the dioramas-- the dolls are literally brought to life, channeled through six rosy-cheeked, middle school-age girls who act out stories the audience already knows from the American Girl books. After the musical, I have tea with Whitney and her mother. The cafe is elegant, in a cartoonish way. Dark pink carpet, lamps studded with plastic Gerbera daisies, overstuffed striped chairs. There is a harpist playing a Backstreet Boys song. Scones and tea sandwiches are served on tiered platters. Girls sip from iced pink lemonade. They sit up straight. They're giggly and polite. There is a way in which the whole American Girl Place experience seems orchestrated around this moment, that hour when a girl plays out her own story book scene, steps into the illustration. Whitney evaluates the menu. Then she says this. In the theater and in the American Girl Place, the employees make the dolls feel like they're real, and make you feel like they're real. And it's really, really neat. What do they do that makes the dolls feel real? In the tea and the lunch, in the cafe room, they get a chair for the doll, and if she has a dress on, fix the dress and set her in it, and then put her on the table. Almost everyone in the room clips one of these miniature chairs to her table. The girl at the table next to us neatly hangs Molly's winter coat over the back. And even though the chairs are for sale outside for $25, there's something lovely about seeing everyone engaged in the same game of pretend together. Whitney is on the upper end of the American Girl demographic. She says that in sixth grade, a lot of kids think that dolls are babyish, that she doesn't take her around too many places. And as she gives Samantha a sip from a tiny teacup, slips the napkin holder-- that also serves as a scrunchy-- into her hair, it's clear that one of the things she likes so much about the store is that it's a public space for playing dolls, maybe the only such place anywhere. It's almost 5 o'clock when we finish tea. And Whitney has to make her last purchases. She heads to the American Girl of Today room, which is the only place in the store where you see packs of seven-year-old girls shopping without their mothers. The atmosphere is that of a slumber party gone awry. The walls are painted black. It feels like a night club for little girls. Whitney wants to get a fleece jacket for her doll, one that looks exactly like a fleece jacket from the Gap would if you threw it in the dryer for a month. You sure that's absolutely what you want? Yep. But it's not a theme outfit. I thought you wanted another theme outfit. I do. But I really want this one. I would rather buy you a theme outfit. OK. Let's go get a theme outfit. A theme outfit means an historical outfit. Whitney's mother is pushing for the educational experience. We take the escalators down two floors to the turn of the century Samantha clothing. Whitney points at a striped dress with a pinafore. That's the birthday outfit. The pink-striped dress with the little pinafore thingy over it. I like that one. $22. But I also like the plaid cape and gaiters. I thought you liked the blue dress in the back? I do. But I like the regular clothes up there better. We head back up to the American Girl of Today room. Girls pulling out boxes, trying on slippers, crowding the aisles in a final shopping frenzy. This is the only thing in the store that's not a game of make believe believe. Buying. What's the decision? I want the regular clothes, the AG of Today. Whitney shows us her final pick. It's an outfit the girls wore in the musical's finale, white overalls emblazoned with a silver star. She also has a doll-sized American Girl Place t-shirt and a snow dome that trills a song from the musical. These accessories aren't about history, or anything other than the experience of coming to the store. The brand itself. One thing Whitney likes about the outfit she has bought for her doll, she tells me, is that it comes with a miniature red shopping bag stamped with the words American Girl Place. The cashier puts Whitney's items into a bright red sack of her own. And she and her mother head out to Michigan Avenue. Susan Burton. It was in the spring of 1997 that the artist's image floated into my mind, the cover of a children's book I hadn't seen, or even thought of, in more than 30 years. There it lodged, and there it remained. It felt as if it were a message, and its insistence startled me. After all, I live among the grown-ups now. But the image just kept flashing in my mind. Pink and white gingham inset with a black and white photograph of Edith, the lonely doll, an open book between her spread, outstretched legs. My own copy of The Lonely Doll was long lost. And I soon learned from a bookstore clerk, who gave me the name of the author, Dare Wright, that the book was out of print. The New York Public Library's computer listed three copies, all damaged or missing. When I called a children's book searcher listed in the phone book, she said she knew the book well, and would add my name to her waiting list. Meaning to close the phone book, I found myself turning distractedly to the listings for the name Wright. And there, jumping out at me from blurred columns of typeface, was Wright, Dare. 11 East 80th Street, 249-6965. I don't think I could have been any more amazed if the address given had been, say, second to the right, and then straight on till morning, Peter Pan's address on the island of Neverland. In the weeks to come, I dialed the number several times. There was never an answer. I also sent a letter expressing how much the book had meant to me as a child, and asking if she knew where I could find a copy. Several months later, I finally received The Lonely Doll from the book searcher. Illustrated with black and white photographs, The Lonely Doll is the story of a doll named Edith, mired in loneliness, seemingly parentless, eating her cereal alone, going to bed alone, begging some pigeons on the windowsill to be her friends, and watching as they just fly away. One morning, two teddy bears, Mr. Bear and Little Bear, appear in her garden. They tell her they've come to be her friends. They move right in. Home alone, one rainy day, Edith and Little Bear discover, behind a set of louvered doors, a grown-up woman's closet and dressing room. The identity of the woman, and her absence, are never explained. She might be Edith's mother, but from all indications Edith has no mother. A frenzied dress-up session follows, in which Edith and Little Bear adorn themselves with rhinestones and pearls, a petticoat, and a hat with roses and ribbons, high-heeled shoes, a leopard handbag. In their recklessness, they knock over a vase with one long-stemmed rose. The water spills into a jewelry box, but they are oblivious. Wielding a fully swiveled out lipstick, Little Bear goads Edith to put it on. She says she wouldn't dare. You know what Mr. Bear would say. Then, just as Little Bear uses the lipstick to scrawl "Mr. Bear is just a silly old thing" across the oval mirror, who should appear but Mr. Bear. Spankings ensue, but the deeper issue striking terror in Edith is that her disobedience could jeopardize the whole arrangement, and that Edith would be, once again, abandoned and lonely. Yet when the little ones clean up the mess and promise never to do it again, Mr. Bear solemnly promises that he and Little Bear will stay with her forever and ever. About the time the book arrived, I received a phone call from a woman named Brooke Ashley. She said my letter had been forwarded to her in California. She said she was Dare's unofficial goddaughter and legal guardian, and that Dare, now 84, was in a hospital on life support. She said she was coming to New York to begin closing up Dare's apartment. Did I want to meet her at 11 East 80th Street? When I arrived at the apartment, Brooke met me at the door and led me to the living room. I was spellbound. The living room was filled with portraits, some life-sized, of a beautiful blond woman. That's Dare, Brooke said. They were all painted by her mother. Dare, I was shocked to realize, looked very much like Edith, the lonely doll. And Edith, I learned, was named for Dare's mother. As I left, Brooke gave me Dare's fat, leather-bound scrapbook, containing the record of her publishing career, including jacket covers, reviews, and other articles relating to the first 12 of her 19 books for children. The Lonely Doll was her first book. I had never known of the rest. The Lonely Doll received mountains of publicity when it was first published in 1957. It was serialized in Good Housekeeping. It climbed the children's best seller list in the New York Times. It was translated into 6 foreign languages, and remained in print, in various formats, for 35 years. I sorted through the piles of clippings and photographs I had been given by Brooke. Mostly, they were photographs of Dare. There were magnificent photos of Dare playing dress-up in elaborate costumes. But the most startling ones depicted Dare across a spectrum of ages in what could be described as undress, or partially so. These photos were just as posed as those of her in costume. Dare, as I just began to discover, had lived in her own version of a wonderland. I spent the next two years talking to anyone I could find who knew her, trying to make sense of the world I had stumbled into. In 1917, when Dare was three, her parents divorced. Her father was given custody of Dare's five-year-old brother, Blaine. Her parents seem to have made a pact that the brother and sister should never see each other again. Dare and her mother moved to Cleveland, Ohio. Her mother put a doll made by the Italian company Lenci on will call at Halle Brothers, a department store near their home, until she could make the full $11.50 payment. The two named the doll Edith. Edie, as Dare's mother was known, was a portrait painter of some renown. Those who sat for her included Winston Churchill, Calvin Coolidge, and Greta Garbo. And in 1924, one of her subjects offered her the use of the penthouse of his Cleveland office building as her studio. For the next 45 years, its 1,500 square feet with a northern exposure skylight would be her home. The same year she moved in, Edie enrolled Dare as a boarding student in a private girls' school. Dare graduated from high school in 1934 and moved to New York to attend drama and art school. She didn't know that her brother, Blaine, was also living in the city. Their uncle orchestrated a reunion in Central Park of the 22-year-old tall, handsome Blaine and the 19-year-old newly-golden Dare. According to one of Dare's cousins, Blaine and Dare fell in love. They even considered concealing their brother and sister relationship in order to marry, an idea they eventually dropped. Dare tried, with little success, to be an actress, and then went on to work as a fashion model, including a stint as the Maidenform bra girl. Soon she switched to the other side of the camera, and her fashion photography began appearing in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Town and Country. In the early '40s, Blaine introduced Dare to a British friend of his, named Philip Sandeman, whose family produced port and sherry. Though tall, blond, and dazzlingly beautiful, Dare was strangely childlike, avoidant, and shy, and seemed somehow confused by her powers over men. Philip was ideal for Dare. Throughout their five year courtship, he remained at a safe distance. First there was the war, and afterward he lived across the ocean. They were engaged, but a week before the wedding, Philip called things off. In the years that followed, Dare's close friend, Donald Sewell, said, men always did beat a path to her door. Dare wasn't interested. She never seemed quite of this world, he said. She was ethereal, somehow above normal courtship. Throughout all of this, Dare seems to have hung onto the dream that Philip would come back to her. Edie no doubt fanned this fantasy. Dare sent Philip's mother photographs of alluring portraits Edie painted of her in this period. In all of them, Dare had posed in low-cut white gowns. Edie also did many portraits of Philip, painting him from Dare's photographs. These were signed by both mother and daughter. Dare also staged elaborate photographs of herself, seated at her dressing table, a sort of shrine to Philip, with a pencil drawing of him that she had sketched, and a bottle of Sandeman sherry. Clutched in her hands is a letter he had sent to her. She is turned, glancing at the camera wistfully, hopefully. But in 1951, at the age of 30, Philip was killed flying in a demonstration airshow. After Philip's death, Dare rented her first New York apartment, having lived until then in a series of hotel rooms. She hung her portraits of Philip throughout the apartment, with one by the front door. She made voluminous drapes for the windows and installed smoked glass mirrors. Her all-white boudoir was fitted out with a taffeta canopied princess bed. And next to that, set off by louvered doors, was a dressing room with a vanity table, an oval mirror, and a large closet. Dare and her mother were virtually inseparable. Dare made frequent visits to her mother's penthouse in Cleveland. And Edie spent at least one week a month in New York with Dare, sleeping, as was their custom, in the same bed. They seemed to have no idea of the oddness of this arrangement. As Edie told Brooke, I reach over and pat her little bottom in the night. Now that Dare had her own apartment, Edie sent along her belongings, including her childhood dolls. After the first, and biggest, trauma of Dare's life, losing her father and brother, consolation had come in the form of Edith, her doll. Now, after the second, losing Philip, Edith was back again. Edith was a mess. Her wig was yellowed and tangled, and her clothes were in shreds. Dare quickly set about giving her a completely new look. Long, straight blond hair, usually worn tied up in a high ponytail, and gold hoop earrings. Edith the doll now looked very like Dare herself. I don't think of Edith as a doll, Dare told an interviewer. She's a personality in her own right. A suitor told me that one day it began with Dare chiding, you didn't say hello to Edith, as though he had rudely neglected to acknowledge a human presence. Another time, when he tried to kiss her, she held the doll out in front of her to block his advances. Dare also acquired some teddy bears in this period, after her brother went on a drunken shopping spree with Dorothy Tivis Pollack, a former model, who headed the Figureheads modeling agency where Dare was registered for a time. Blaine was drunk, Dorothy told me, and got weird, as he always did when he drank. We passed FAO Schwarz, and he saw a teddy bear in the window. He decided I had to have one. In we went. But when he saw the bears, he said it would be terrible to buy just one, because the bear would be lonely. With that, he directed the saleswoman to pack up the entire lot, about a dozen stuffed bears. Hundreds of dollars of bears. Since Dare's apartment was just around the corner, we went over there, carrying all these damn teddy bears. Within minutes of their arrival, Dorothy recalled, Blaine and Dare were seated on the floor, surrounded by bears, telling bear stories in various bear voices. Soon Dare added Edith, the doll, to the party. Edith, Dare later told an interviewer, looked so happy with the bears that she decided to photograph them all together. Soon, she was making them into a book. She thought up a storyline, made Edith outfits, and photographed her doll and bears in her apartment and around New York. In all her poses, Edith appears to be an animated, thinking, feeling little girl. The story of the lonely doll was, in some measure, Dare's own story. The book and her life share the same set of themes. Seeking love and approval, fearing abandonment, risking separation and autonomy. In other words, the issues inherent in growing up. But in the book, she found a way to make it right, removing a mother from the proceedings, and providing her alter ego, Edith, with love and rescue in the form of two mail teddy bears. With the publication of The Lonely Doll, and the 18 books that followed, came recognition that Dare had never experienced, and with which she seemed highly uncomfortable. She would have been 43 in 1957, the year the book was published. 48 when she gave her age as 35 to the Saturday Evening Post. Her mother, Edie, however, was completely at home with all the attention. The two became a sort of team, with Edie in the assistant's role. They adored traveling, and built it into the story lines of Dare's books, the most elaborate one being Lona: A Fairy Tale. For this, they traveled throughout Europe, scouting out scenery for the story of a princess who must overcome the spell of an evil wizard who has changed her into a tiny doll. Dare herself posed as the princess in her full-size incarnation. She would set up the shot, focus the camera, don her gown, and have her mother trip the shutter. Even on vacations, they lugged along cameras, tripods, even movie cameras. I have yet to make my way through the dozens of 16 millimeter films. They're soundless, as mute as the photographs, but so much more chilling. Edie is never without a lit cigarette, and always appears in a cloud of smoke. In one scene, she gesticulates in the air with a paint brush, as though waving a magic wand. And how strange to see Dare move for the first time, with none of the grace I would have imagined. Her movements are awkward, jerky, as if she where crippled in some way. In the '50s, Edie and Dare began photographing Dare naked. The obsessive nature of this game is evidenced by the fact that the same pose would be photographed again and again, using a variety of cameras and film. The most extraordinary is a series of Dare on the sand, wearing nothing but a pearl necklace, her limp body tangled up in driftwood, shells and seaweed. Whether face up or face down, in all of them she looks as though she were dead, and had just washed up on shore with the tide. No one I spoke to knew about these photos, but nearly everyone was aware of the extreme closeness of the mother-daughter relationship. Almost no one viewed Edie's influence as benign. Blaine's friend, Dorothy, recalled shouting matches when she and Blaine came to visit Dare and Edie. Blaine would see Dare all dressed up like a fairy princess and scream at his mother, my sister's not a doll. In July 1975, Edie, age 92, died in her sleep in her daughter's bed, with Dare, then 61, by her side. For the first time in her life, Dare had a chance to forge a self distinct from the one Edie had imposed. Instead, after her mother's death, Dare seem to fall apart. She ate less and less, her body became more like a pre-adolescent's, and she wore clothing, makeup and hairstyles suitable for a much younger woman. She withdrew. She began to host ghostly gatherings alone in her apartment of those she had loved, lining up photographs of her mother, her father and Philip on her living room couch. Seating herself in an armchair opposite, she would spend hours talking to the pictures. Sometimes she would talk to a photograph of Philip all day long, said the nurse who began caring for her in 1987. In 1994, she suffered respiratory failure while undergoing medical tests, and has been hospitalized at a long-term care facility ever since. I have been to see her there, immobile, tucked tightly into bed, her waxen head propped up on pillows, her arms resting on her stomach. A tube comes out of her throat, hooked up to a network of clanking machines. She is still beautiful, even in this hideous circumstance. She is Edith, as if under an evil wizard's spell. The golden hoop earrings, the high ponytail gathered to one side, ending in a long yellowing white braid. When The Lonely Doll was reissued last fall, I brought her a copy, which I read aloud to her on each visit, holding the book so she can see the photographs. What she actually hears or sees is impossible to know, but if I glance at her face while I read, a look of childlike wonderment has come over it. From the moment I hold up the book's cover, her mouth breaks open into her widest smile. A version of Jean Nathan's story first appeared in the literary journal Tin House. She's working on a book about Dare Wright to be published by Random House. Coming up, girl turns helicopter into baby and other true stories, in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, dolls. Most important, from the beginning, they are characters to be nurtured. Hugging it, feeling it against your cheek, rocking it, just having it. It's a bulwark against loneliness. Vivian Paley was a kindergarten teacher for decades, won the MacArthur Genius Grant for her many books about the stories that children invent, and the way they play, and what it's about. She says, children use dolls and they make up stories for similar reason, to act out moments and feelings that are knocking around in their heads. In her classroom, Vivian Paley would have her students invent stories and then act them out. And she says, there's one idea that comes up in small children's stories more than any other. So many of the stories that young children tell have to do with an animal or a little girl or boy being lonely, and walking in the woods, and finding someone to play with. It is the universal, most successful story. And if you have a kindergarten class, or a preschool class, or a first grade class, and-- although this would never happen-- but let's say, all 24 children told this story. There was a lonely deer. He had no one to play with. And then a cougar came up and said, I'll be your friend. Next story. There was a lonely boy. He had no one to play with. And on and on. Not one child in the class would say, what, again? Haven't we had enough of that already? No. They would say, more. More. Tell us again that when you're lonely, someone's going to come up and say, I'll play with you. Vivian Paley says that it's by making up stories together that small children become friends. In one of her books, she tells the story of one of the children in her classroom who used a doll and a story to isolate himself from other students, and how it was through other stories and dolls that other children finally pulled him out of his isolation. The doll in this case was a toy helicopter. Vivian now tells the story with actors recreating scenes from her classroom from transcriptions of what really occurred. Every day in the corner of the classroom, nestled between the black cabinet and the bay window bench, Jason arranges big wooden blocks into walls and crouches behind them. He calls this his airport. The walls surround him, high enough so he can barely be seen over the top. This blade is turning around. Now you're going faster. Now you're going faster. Now you're going to crash. Now you're going off the ground. And now you're going up, up, up. Now you're going loud. Brrrrm. Now you're going to land. OK. All safely. Jason plays alone. He tells stories to himself. He seems unaware of our habits and customs. He wails in fright if his helicopter is touched, and he breaks up our talk with ear-splitting noises. His helicopter story isolates him. If you ask him a question, he says his helicopter is broken. If you suggest an activity, he rushes away to fix his helicopter. He hasn't learned to listen to anyone else's story, and stories are the way children get to know each other. Pretend a bad alligator peeked downstairs. Yeah, and then we hiss him. Then we fighted him. But who's the alligator? Hey, Jason. You're the alligator. OK, Jason? Up, up, up. Down, down, down. Oh, we're going to crash. Children usually take part in each other's stories because they need friends and they want to be part of a drama. If Jason would agree to be the alligator, Joseph and Simon would later tell their families, Jason is my friend. It's that easy when it works. Jason, look at me. You want to be an alligator or not? This is a rescue helicopter. Someone broke it. I have to fix the blades. I got an idea, Jason. Your helicopter has to rescue us, OK? Help, help. A monster alligator in the dark. Save me, helicopter. To the rescue. Save the day. Jason is silent, bent over his helicopter. Joseph glares at him. His best logic isn't working, and he's puzzled. I heard Joseph call for help, Jason. Can your helicopter save the snakes? My blade is broken. Someone broke this blade. Can you show Joseph and Simon how you fix it? I can't show someone how you fix it. He calls the children someone. After two months, he refers to no one but me by name. He enters the classroom feeling different, frightened, attacked, that he must defend himself. But every child knows these feelings, in one way or another. Every day, after I've collected 10 or 12 stories, we act the stories out. I read each story out loud, and the children take different roles. The stage where we do this is a taped square in the center of the story room rug. It is sacrosanct when stories are performed. The children learn to keep off the stage unless they are in the story. Jason refuses to follow the rule, and it upsets every one. His motor tunes up as each story begins, and within a sentence or two he is flying around the stage. He does this as we act out Simon's story. Simon, is there a helicopter in this story? No. Then you mustn't come on stage, Jason. Jason has heard this reasoning before. I ask this question all the time when he forges on stage. Is there a helicopter in this story? The answer is always no. Simon, is there a helicopter in your story? Do the squirrels see a helicopter? No. Yeah. They do. They heard it flying over there, then it lands, on this spot, right here. [MAKING NOISES] I turn off the motor. Jason stops, just where Simon pointed. He has deliberately furthered another child's story. Today, Jason has listened. The next day, I tell Jason, you turned off your motor when Simon told you to land. Now you know all about stories. Do you want to tell one? He says yes, and launches right in. And a helicopter, a turbo prop. It's flying. How could his first story be anything else? In the story room, Jason zooms around the rug as I read his story. He continues to fly several moments after I'm done reading. I wonder if the helicopter sees another plane? Someone. Which someone? Squirrel someone. He means me. I'm the plane, right? Jason nods, and the two aircraft zoom around the room. Chins forward, arms in motion, the two boys fly together in formation. Young children see themselves always inside a story. A young child will spend easily 3/4 of his time in fantasy play. It's through stories and fantasies that children understand the world. It is their intuitive approach to all occasions. It is the way they think. Jason still plays alone. I want to. I always have to be a helicopter. But you always tell me not to. I didn't tell you not to be a helicopter, Jason. But Simon asked you to come into his squirrelly hole. And I thought you didn't hear him since you didn't answer. Because that squirrelly guy is outside the window. I'm not outside. Don't say that. Jason seems surprised that he's gotten such an intense response. That squirrel someone is outside. I hate you, Jason. You're never my friend. Jason still doesn't play with the other children. But one day, he points at Simon. Someone's hiding in my airport. No. I'm not in there. Simon is in my airport. You're lying, you doody head. Simon is in my airport. Don't say my name. Tell him not to, teacher. Jason, Simon doesn't want you to pretend he's in your airport. Do you really want him to come in? Really come in? No. Jason, can I help you find someone to play inside your airport? Teachers do that, you know. Once I helped Simon find a mother squirrel. Remember, Simon? I don't want a mother squirrel. Who do you want? Someone hiding in my airport. OK. Listen everyone. Jason needs someone to hide in his airport. Who will do that? Only if I can be the mother. It's a helicopter house. I'll be the mother, and you be the baby. No. I'm She-Ra and you're the helicopter? Yes. Samantha climbs behind the wall of blocks gingerly, and sits down next to Jason. My blades are broken. I'm fixing them. We have to make beds. I'll get the pillows. Save my place. Jason covers Samantha's place with one hand, and blows on the helicopter blades. [BLOWS] Turn around. Turn around. Ooh, not such a good spinning. Kick the house down. Kick the house down. Lie down, little helicopter. She has pillows and sheets, and she makes Jason into a baby as delicately as she can. Kick the house down. Shh, little helicopter. With this one episode, Samantha launches a wholehearted pursuit of Jason that, more than any other event in the school year, brings him out of the helicopter house, and into the social life of the classroom. She is determined to make Jason into her baby, however he may object. Other times, Jason shows he's unable to join the other children's fantasy play. When he wanders into a game the boys are playing, he doesn't understand what they're doing, and everyone yells at him to get out. Don't go there, Jason. You're breaking up the marshway. You're breaking up the marshway. Get out, Jason. Don't. It's the marshway. I'm going there now because-- because-- there isn't a-- No, Jason. You don't even know what school is. Jason starts to cry. This is also a very emotional moment for me. Alex is right. Jason has interrupted play in an illogical way, in a way that shows he doesn't know that a story is going on. And Alex knows enough to say, you don't know what school is. Which is to say, you don't know what story is. You don't know what fantasy is. You don't know what the most logical relationship between human beings is. Because stories work by the most basic logic, logic a child can understand. It is not too much to say that the only time a child understands everything is in a story. As the weeks pass, Samantha's pursuit of Jason grows more inventive. I'm putting you in my story, Jason. Come here and listen. I don't want to. Yes, you have to. Or I won't give you a piece of gum when my daddy buys some. Jason sits down next to Samantha and watches as she dictates her story. If a teacher had threatened him in that way, he would have withdrawn. When Samantha threatens him, his interest in Samantha's story is heightened. He correctly interprets her warning as a sign of friendship, and the story proves him correct. Once upon a time, there was a little girl. Then a helicopter came. Then the little girl said hello to the helicopter. Then a kitty says hello to the helicopter. Then the kitty, and the girl, and the helicopter are friends. After she's done, Jason gathers up a pile of papers for his helicopter drawings. Don't draw now, Jason. You want to be my husband? No, because I'm busy. Or the baby, or the cook? Do you want to make a birthday cake? Do you want to be dead, but then you come alive? Remember, you liked it that time? As Samantha imagines other scenes, she doesn't notice that Jason has stopped drawing, and instead, has cut out a large oval shape. This is your cape, Samantha. Be a queen. I'm the king. But when I glance at their block castle a while later, Jason seems to be the queen's baby. Does Samantha continue to push Jason into the baby role because he appears babyish to her? I doubt it. I've seen too many mature children prefer the baby crib in play. Samantha's motives, I think, are simple and understandable. She likes being the mother and she's fond of Jason. To express her true feelings, she must act the role of his mother. The mother-baby or father-baby relationship spells love most dramatically for many children. By year's end, Samantha will have moved to the big sister-little sister version of the same emotion. No, you dope. You [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Once changes begin, they happen fast. In one week in April, Jason is a she-baby airplane on Monday, a smaller person looking for Easter eggs on Tuesday, a morning and night boy on Wednesday, an angry fighting person on Thursday. And on Friday, he finds a remarkable new role for his helicopter that takes my breath away in admiration and wonder. Do you want to play, Jason? Yes. You sit there. I made a two seater. Wait. A three seater. One more seat it needs. Why? Because I'm going to pick up someone at school, because not anyone will come to pick them up and walk them home. Jason is letting someone else into the helicopter. And when his helicopter finally emerges from its house, he gives it a single task. To take a mother and her child home after school. Underlying this fantasy is a basic fear. No one has arrived to take the school child home. The child is lost at school. I'm going to pick up someone at school. Because not anyone will come to pick them up and walk them home. They're going to hold everyone's hand. One kid's going to hold the other kid's hand. And I'm the mom, OK? Yes. And everyone, when I get out of school, I'm going to pick them up in my airplane. I'll be the kid, Jason. OK? Yes, you're the kid. Hold your mom's hand. I'm flying you home. Well, Vivian Paley's book, The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter, from which this was adapted, is published by Harvard University Press. The children's dialogue was reenacted from classroom transcripts by Joe Robinson, Jason [? Bogart, ?] [? Aisha ?] [? Harmon, ?] [? Matt ?] [? Kady, ?] Anna [? Klumsky ?] Beth [? Iams, ?] and Jenny [? Banachefski, ?] who played Jason. Funding came from the University of Chicago's William Benton Broadcast Project, Claudia [? Daily, ?] and the late Louis Friedman, supervising producers. Our program was produced today by Susan Burton and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Blue Chevigny, and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and conciliary Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Eric [? Harverston. ?] Musical help from Mr. John Connors. To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you know, you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website at www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This week a photo on there of Dare Wright. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who can be found every morning in his office-- Seated on the floor, surrounded by bears, telling bear stories in various bear voices. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Heather and her girlfriend lived with a cat named Sid. The girlfriend was always inventing these cute, little, affectionate nicknames for Sid, but never did that for Heather. She was always praising Sid, and asking Heather to praise Sid, but never gave that kind of approval to Heather. If anything, she was sort of detached when it came to Heather. And so, even though Sid was just a cat, against her will, against her better judgment, Heather started to get jealous. I remember that I would wake up in the morning and I would hear her saying things like, "You are so beautiful. You are a princess. Look at you." And as I opened my eyes, I'd realize that she's talking not to me, but to the cat. You felt like the third wheel. Mm hmm. I know if there had been another woman, I would have compared myself to her physically. What does she look like? What kinds of things is my girlfriend attracted to that I could aspire to? What personality traits? Is she funny? But I didn't know what it was about Sid. I could see that she was attractive as a cat. I could see that she had this nonchalance that was beautiful. She didn't seem to care really, that she was loved. So those were things that I did think about, really, cultivating even, but-- You thought about cultivating a nonchalance-- That I was this concerned about it shows you that it would have been a fake, but yeah, I thought about cultivating that. Since a pet can engage our affection, it also engages all the other feelings that can go with affection, jealousy and dependence and anger and all the others. And as soon as any one feeling kicks in, all the complicated dynamics that happen between people, any household, any family, inevitably kick in, as with Heather and Sid the cat. I felt sort of the same way I felt-- you know how when you have a crush on someone, and then you're friends with their significant other, and all the awkwardness as you pretend that you don't have the feelings that you do for this other person? I sort of felt like Sid was the significant other of the person for whom I had feelings. So I felt awkward around Sid and I felt like I had to-- I don't know. I felt like they were together before I was around, and I was an interloper. All the awkwardness surrounding that. And so what's it like to be in a love triangle with another woman and a cat? Well, it was pretty diminishing. I mean, it was a beautiful cat. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, In Dog We Trust. Stories of dogs and cats and other animals that live in our homes. Exactly how much are they caught up in our everyday family dynamics? To what degree do they actually function as non-speaking members of our families? We answer these questions today, and others, with three stories in three acts. Act One, The Youth in Asia, in which writer David Sedaris describes how a Great Dane-- and not a very smart one-- was able to completely replace him and his sisters when they grew up and moved out of their parents' house. Act Two, If Cats Ran Hollywood, in which we learn what it is that cats want to watch on television from the man who produced the world's best-selling video for cats. If cats ran Disney Studios, would its mascot be a mouse? Act Three, Resurrection. What it means in a family when a pet armadillo dies, and what it means it doesn't. Stay with us. Act One, The Youth in Asia. When a pet dies, to what degree can it be replaced by another pet? To what degree can pets replace people in our lives? David Sedaris has this story. In the early 1960s, during what my mother referred to as "the tail end of the Lassie years," my parents were given two collies, which they named Rastus and Duchess. We were living then in New York State, out in the country, and the dogs were free to race through the forest. They napped in meadows and stood knee-deep in frigid streams, costars in their own private dog food commercial. Late one January evening, while lying on a blanket in the garage, Duchess gave birth to a litter of slick, potato-sized puppies. When it looked as though one of them had died, our mother placed the creature in a casserole dish and popped it into the oven, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. "Oh, keep your shirts on," she said. "It's only set on 150. I'm not baking anyone. This is just to keep it warm." The heat revived the sick puppy and left us believing that our mother was capable of resurrecting the dead. Faced with the responsibilities of fatherhood, Rastus took off. The puppies were given away, and we moved south, where the heat and humidity worked against the best interests of a collie. Duchess's once beautiful coat now hung in ragged patches. When finally, full of worms, she collapsed in the ravine beside our house, we reevaluated our mother's healing powers. The entire animal kingdom was beyond her scope. She could only resurrect the cute dead. The oven trick was performed on half a dozen dazed and chubby hamsters, but failed to work on my first guinea pig, who died after eating four cigarettes and an entire pack of matches. "Don't take it too hard," my mother said, removing her oven mitts. "The world is full of guinea pigs. You can get another one tomorrow." Eulogies tended to be brief, our motto being, there's always more where this one came from. A short time after Duchess died, our father came home with a German Shepherd puppy. For reasons that were never fully explained, the privilege of naming the dog went to a friend of my older sister's, a 14-year-old girl named Cindy. She was studying German at the time, and after carefully examining the puppy and weighing it with their hands, she announced that it would be called Maedchen, which apparently meant "girl" in what she referred to as "Deutsch." When she was six months old, Maedchen was hit and killed by a car. Her food was still in the bowl when our father brought home an identical German Shepherd, the same Cindy christened as Maedchen Two. This tag-team progression was disconcerting, especially for the new dog, who was expected to possess both the knowledge and the personality of her predecessor. "Maedchen One would never have wet on the floor like that," my father would scold. And the dog would sigh, knowing she was the canine equivalent of a rebound. Maedchen Two never accompanied us to the beach and rarely posed in any of the family photographs. Once her puppyhood was spent, we more or less lost interest. "We ought to get a dog," we'd sometimes say, completely forgetting that we already had one. During the era of the Maedchens, we had a succession of drowsy, secretive cats who seemed to share a unique bond with our mother. "It's because I open their cans," she said, though we all knew it ran deeper than that. What they had in common were their claws. That and a deep-seated need to destroy my father's golf bags. The first cat passed into a disagreeable old age and died hissing at the kitten who had prematurely arrived to replace her. When, at the age of nine, the second cat was diagnosed with feline leukemia, my mother was devastated. "I'm going to have Sadie put to sleep," she said. "It's for her own good, and I don't want to hear a word about it from any of you. This is hard enough as it is." The cat was put down, and then came the anonymous postcards and phone calls orchestrated by my sisters and I. The cards announced a miraculous new cure for feline leukemia, while the callers identified themselves as representatives of Cat Fancy magazine. "We'd like to use Sadie as our cover story and we're hoping to schedule a photo shoot. Is tomorrow possible?" After spending a petless year with only one child still living at home, my parents visited a breeder and returned with a Great Dane they named Melina. They loved this dog in proportion to its size, and soon their hearts had no room for anyone else. In terms of family, their six children had been nothing more than a failed experiment. Melina was the real thing. The dog was their first true common interest. And they loved it equally, each in their own way. Our mother's love tended towards the horizontal, a pet being little more than a napping companion, something she could look at and say, "That looks like a good idea. Scoot over, why don't you." A stranger peeking through the window might think that the two of them had entered a suicide pact. She and the dog sprawled like corpses, their limbs arranged into an eternal embrace. My father loved the Great Dane for its size, and frequently took her on long, aimless drives, during which she'd stick her heavy, anvil-sized head out the window and leak great quantities of foamy saliva. Other drivers pointed and stared, rolling down their windows to shout, "Hey, you got a saddle for that thing?" When out for a walk there was the inevitable, "Are you walking her, or is it the other way 'round?" Our father always laughed, is if this were the first time he'd heard it. The attention was addictive, and he enjoyed a pride of accomplishment he'd never felt with any of us. It was as if he were somehow responsible for her size and stature, as if he'd personally designed her spots and trained her to grow to the size of a pony. When out with the dog, he carried a leash in one hand and a shovel in the other. "Just in case," he said. "Just in case, what, she dies, and you need to bury her?" I didn't get it. "No," he'd say. "It's for, you know, it's for her business." My father was retired, but the dog had business. I was living in Chicago when they first got Melina, and every time I came home, the animal was bigger. Every time, there were more Marmaduke cartoons displayed upon the refrigerator, and every time, my voice grew louder as I asked myself, "Who are these people?" "Down, girl," my parents would chuckle as the puppy jumped up, panting for my attention. Her great padded paws reached my waist, then my chest and shoulders, until eventually, her arms wrapped around my neck and her head towering above my own, she came to resemble a dance partner scouting the room for a better offer. "That's just her way of saying hello," my mother would say, handing me the towel used to wipe up the dog's bubbling seepage. "Here, you missed a spot on the back of your head." The dog's growth was monitored on a daily basis, and every small accomplishment was documented for later generations. One can find few pictures of my sister Tiffany, while Melina has entire volumes devoted to her terrible twos. "Hit me," my mother said on one of my returns home from Chicago. "No, wait, let me go get my camera." She left the room and returned a few moments later. "OK," she said. "Now hit me. Better yet, why don't you just pretend to hit me." I raised my hand, and my mother cried out in pain. "Ow!" She yelled. "Somebody help me. This stranger is trying to hurt me, and I don't know why." I caught an advancing blur moving in from the left, and the next thing I knew I was down on the ground, the Great Dane tearing holes in the neck of my sweater. The camera flashed, and my mother squealed with delight. "God, I love that trick." I rolled over to protect my face. "This isn't a trick." My mother snapped another picture. "Oh, don't be so critical. It's close enough." With us grown and out of the house, my sisters and I foolishly expected our parents' lives to stand still. They were supposed to stagnate and live in the past, but instead, they constructed a new "we," consisting of Melina and the founding members of her fan club. Someone who obviously didn't know her too well had given my mother a cheerful stuffed bear with a calico heart stitched onto its chest. According to the manufacturer, the bear's name was Mumbles, and all it needed in order to thrive were two AA batteries and a regular diet of hugs. "Where's Mumbles?" my mother would ask, and the dog would jump up and snatch the bear from its hiding place on top of the refrigerator, yanking it this way and that in hopes of breaking its neck. "That's my girl," my mother would say. "We don't like Mumbles, do we?" I learned that we liked Morley Safer, but not Mike Wallace, that we didn't like Mumbles or thunder, but were crazy about Stan Getz records and the Iranian couple who'd moved in up the street. It was difficult to keep straight, but having known these people all my life, I didn't want to be left out of the "we." During the final years of Maedchen Two and the first half of the Melina epic, I lived with a female cat named Neil. My mother looked after the cat when I moved from Raleigh, and flew her to Chicago once I'd found a place and settled in. Neil was old when she moved to Chicago, and then she got older. She started leaving teeth in her bowl and developed the sort of breath that could remove paint. When she stopped cleaning herself, I took to bathing her in the sink, and she'd stand still, too weak to resist the humiliation of shampoo. Soaking wet, I could see just how thin and brittle she really was. Almost comic, like one of those cartoon cats checking her fur coat at the cloak room of the seafood restaurant. Her kidneys shrank to the size of raisins, and though I loved her very much, I assumed the vet was joking when he suggested dialysis. I took her for a second opinion. Vet number two tested her blood and phoned me at home, saying, "Perhaps you should think about euthanasia." I hadn't heard that word in a while and pictured scores of happy Japanese children spilling from the front door of their elementary school. "Are you thinking about it?" he asked. "Yes," I said. "As a matter of fact, I am." In the end, I returned to the animal hospital and had her put to sleep. When the vet injected the sodium phenobarbital, Neil fluttered her eyes, assumed the nap position, and died. A week after putting her to sleep, I received Neil's ashes in a forest green can. She'd never expressed any great interest in the outdoors, so I scattered her remains on the carpet and then vacuumed her back up. The cat's death struck me as the end of an era. It was, of course, the end of her era, but with the death of a pet, there's always that urge to crowd the parentheses and string black crepe over an entire 10- or 20-year period. The end of my safe college life, the last of my 30-inch waist, my faltering relationship with my first real boyfriend. I cried for it all and spent the next several months wondering why so few songs were written about cats. My mother sent a consoling letter along with a check to cover the cost of the cremation. In the left-hand corner, under the heading marked Memo, she'd written, "Pet Burning." I had it coming. When my mother died, Melina took over her side of the bed. Due to their size, Great Danes generally don't live very long. My father massaged her arthritic legs, carried her up the stairs, and lifted her into bed. He treated her the way that men in movies treat their ailing wives, the way he would have treated my mother had she allowed such naked displays of affection. Melina's parentheses contained the final 10 years of his married life. She'd attended my father's retirement, lived through my sister's wedding, and knew who everyone was talking about when they mentioned the "M" words, Mom, Mumbles, and Morley Safer. Regardless of her pain, my father could not bear to let her go. The youth in Asia begged him to end her life. "Onegai desu," they said, "sugu." But he held out until the last minute. A month after Melina died, my father returned to the breeder and came home with another Great Dane, a female like Melina, gray spots like Melina, only this one is named Sophie. He tries to love her, but readily admits that he may have made a mistake. She's a nice enough dog, but the timing is off. When walking the puppy through the neighborhood, my father feels not unlike the foolish widower stumbling behind his energetic young bride. Her stamina embarrasses him, as does her interest in younger men. The passing drivers slow to a stop and roll down their windows, "Hey," they yell, "Are you walking her, or is it the other way 'round?" Their words remind him of happier times, of milder forces straining against the well-worn leash. He still gets the attention, but now, in response, he just lifts his shovel and groans. David Sedaris's story "The Youth in Asia" appears in his book, Me Talk Pretty One Day. A version of this story also appeared in Esquire magazine. Act Two, If Cats Ran Hollywood. With millions of Americans treating their pets like members of the family, it was really only a matter of time before cats and dogs got what everyone else in the family has, their own TV show. At least their own videos. In 1987, Steve Malarkey was a computer technician, and he hated his job. He wanted to do something else. And since he loved cats-- he had a Cornish Rex of his own named Stick-- he thought he might invent some cat product to sell. He tried a few things. Scratching posts. A cat warmer called The Warmeus, which heated the animal with a 60-watt light bulb. No luck. Then fate intervened, as it sometimes does these days, over the television. I'm sitting down at the breakfast table on Sunday morning one day. And you remember that show by Charles Kuralt? Remember at the end of that show, as the credits were rolling, they would have this peaceful scene of a doe stepping through a mountain stream? Sure, absolutely. His show, Sunday Morning, they would always end it with birds flying and stuff like that. Nature scenes. Right. Well, when I was in Washington, DC, there was a show on directly after that in the morning. It was a local version of Charles Kuralt's show. And they had a local host, and I can't remember his name. And so at the end of their show one time, they decided to do a little nature scene also. Only since they didn't have much of a budget, they just trained a camera on the back of the studio. You mean they just pointed it out the window of the studio? They just pointed it out the window of the studio. And to get a little motion, they threw some birdseed back there. How classy. It was wonderful. But at any rate, they ran the credits, and apparently, the phone lines lit up. People were calling in saying that their cats were going crazy. They were all looking at the television set and meowing. And the Sunday that I watched, the host said, "If you've got any cats, get ready because we're about ready to show this segment again, because we got a request for it from about 40 cats in the Washington, DC area." And the segment came up, and Stick came running. I hadn't even seen Stick. I don't know where she was, but as soon as she heard the first bird chirp, she came like a shot out of nowhere and just right up to the television set and stuck her little face right in front of that TV. And her head was bobbing back and forth. And she started making these little sounds that cats make when they see a bird. It's kind of like a little chirping noise. So I got to thinking about that. And I thought, well, maybe I can make a whole video production for the cat. Maybe that's something I can sell. So Steve opened up the Yellow Pages and went looking for a video production company. One after another turned down him down-- literally refused to take his money-- until he found a guy who was willing to produce a video for cats. They filmed in Steve's backyard. All I thought we really needed to do was to get as many close-ups as we could of birds and squirrels and whatever else happened to fly by at the time. He suggested that we might be better off with antics, as he put it. He suggested that if we could get birds fighting or squirrels chasing themselves around trees or something like that. Now, you did actually end up getting some footage of birds confronting each other, like your videographer wanted. Do cats care? Have you watched cats watch the footage to see if they prefer whether the footage is more active, whether the birds are fighting with each other or in motion? The cats don't care. They don't care one iota if they're fighting or sleeping or whatever. They really don't care at all. And it doesn't matter if the bird's in motion or just standing there? Well, from what we can tell, they are attracted to the actual motion of their natural prey. If you look at a bird-- a chicken, a pigeon, something like that-- when they're walking along, they have a very distinct motion. The head goes first, then followed by the body, and it's very quick. And apparently, this sets off all sorts of bells in a cat's head. And they just will stay there and stare at it until it doesn't move anymore or until it's gone. Have you tried other things that we know that cats like, for example, the sound of crumpling paper? No, I haven't tried the crumpling paper yet. Have you had anybody just dangle string in a video? No, not yet. Not yet. Do you think it would work? Oh, well, it would for the string cats. Oh, I see, but not every cat is a string cat. If you want to sell a lot of these things, you've got to give them some birds and squirrels. A little bit of chipmunks help. Now, there's other tapes. There's some out there that have nothing but fish on them. Oh, do cats like the fish? Some cats like the fish, but not as many. Now, some cats like to look at lizards. We've got that covered. We've got one video that's absolutely nothing but lizards on it. But what you're saying is, birds and squirrels are pretty much your money shot in this business. Yeah, that's the bread and butter is the birds and squirrels. Just thinking about what it is that people like in films and videos, we don't just watch movies of food. We like to see other people in dramatic situations, difficult situations. Have you experimented with or thought about doing things like cats-- where they could see another cat in some sort of peril? Perhaps somebody is holding the cat over a bath full of water. And then it gets away at the last minute. You haven't tried that? No, I haven't tried that. It's probably out of my budget range at any rate. A cat and a bath? A bath? A bath full of water and another cat? Well, it's too easy, actually, to terrify a cat. Is that true? Yeah, and if they see another cat, they adopt a pose which is extremely defensive. Cats are extremely territorial. Whenever one presents itself, whether it's on video or actually out the window or wherever the cat may be, they don't like it all. And the hair stands up on the back of their back and their tail. Steve Malarkey. His real name. It cost him $25,000 to film and edit Video Catnip. When he finished, it took three months before he made his first sale. In his first year and a half, he only sold 400 copies total. Then, after just one syndicated newspaper story about the videos, sales immediately jumped to 30,000 a year and stayed there for a decade, though Steve says that in the last year, sales have dropped to about half that. He thinks this is because people don't want their cats pawing their new, delicate, beautiful flat-screen TVs. His website, cattv.com. When we showed Video Catnip to a North Side Chicago cat named Oscar, Oscar, I have to say, was utterly captivated by the sound, but refused to look at the TV screen, even when his owner tried to turn his body toward the TV. Some cats just prefer radio. When you think about it, what is it about having cats in their home that makes people so crazy to buy all sorts of stuff? I think mostly what it is is that cats have a tendency to give people a sense of failure. When people look at their cat, if their cat looks back at them, you can almost read in their face, the cat thinking something like, "Is this all there is? Isn't there anything else you can give me?" Wow. Cats just have this sense about them that they should be worshipped. You're saying that people buy stuff for their cat because they're trying to get on the good side of the cat? I think so. Yeah. Some of the things that they sell are OK, but some of them are just kind of ridiculous. This young woman works in America's fastest-growing occupation, cashier. One of our producers was buying doggy treats in one of those big chain stores that sells pet supplies. And this cashier started railing against some of the products sold in the store, the very store in which she was standing. St. John's Wort for dogs. Stuffed animals for your real animals. In the interest of equal time, hoping for the fair expression of all points of view, we returned to her with a tape recorder. We had these dog CDs. It's got "Sunday in the Park" and some other soothing things for your dog's stress anxiety. That's kind of retarded. But it's the truth. How would you know your dog has stress? Does his hair stand up on the back of his neck and turn gray or fall out? It's crazy. They sell sweaters for dogs, raincoats for dogs. They sell pup pouches. It's like a backpack for a dog. What's the point? They've got these little hats, sun visor things. Come on. I mean, it's ridiculous. All these years, dogs have gone around the world, for centuries, without half of this garbage. So why do they need it now? We have flavored bones. Strawberry, watermelon, orange, spinach, corn. Like the dog cares. I had a dog that chewed on panties. Come on, it's crazy. Why do these people go and spend all this type of money on these animals? And to me, it doesn't make any sense. A disgruntled worker in America's burgeoning pet industrial complex. Coming up, one of the best-known stories from the Bible reenacted with an armadillo. Sort of. And what animal takes a licking and keeps on ticking? Answers in a minute, from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, In Dog We Trust. Stories of pets and the degree to which they function like any other family members. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Resurrection. Earlier in today's show, David Sedaris talked about the animals that his mother could and could not bring back to life. This is another story about what it is that animals can take the place of in our lives and in our homes. From writer Brady Udall. It was three days after our old man died that my brother, Donald, accomplished the most spectacular deed of his life. I wish I could have been there to see it, Donald taking the Greyhound down to Nogales all by himself, buying the baby armadillo for 800 pesos from a pie-faced Indian woman at the Santa Acuna market, tucking the little thing under his arm like a football, and running the length of the pedestrian border station, past the heat-struck tourists in their sombreros and loud socks and the guards with their sidearms and walkie-talkies, pushing through the last steel-toothed turnstile, and sprinting like a madman into the heart of the Nogales slums. It was his proudest moment, though it did take him the rest of the day and half the night of wandering among the hookers and street-corner punks to find a bus that would bring him back to Ajo, where we lived. There he was after I came home from hours of frantic searching, sitting stiff-backed on the couch, beaming. The little armadillo was rooting at the crotch of his pants, and Donald's pink, sweating face had screwed itself up with such a grin of utter self-satisfaction. Donald ended up giving the armadillo to me. "A present," he said, "something to make me feel better." I thanked him, took the armadillo, which clawed at my t-shirt like a cat, and gave it a little squeeze. What else could I do? My father had worked as a janitor for 21 years. But he was also a reader of books, a scholar if it is possible to be both a scholar and a sixth-grade dropout. And one of his favorite subjects was zoology. He could bore you into a coma with what he knew about the great horned owl or the common mealworm or the laughing hyenas of Africa. But of all the beasts of the animal kingdom, he loved and admired the humble armadillo most. "Nope, not the smartest or the prettiest," he would say when one of them scatted across the highway in front of our old Le Mans, "but the hardiest, you see what I'm saying, the most resourceful." He often promised he would get us an armadillo for a pet, but he died before he could come through, an end-all heart attack standing in line at the grocery store. I was 17, Donald 19. Our mother-- a Guatemalan migrant worker who'd married my father under the impression he would one day be a rich man who could buy her a Cadillac and a house with a swimming pool-- had run off when we were babies. So it was just the two of us now. It took me about a week to get over the shock, and then I did what I had to. I dropped out of school, started working full-time pouring concrete for Hassenpheffer's and moved Donald and me to a cheaper apartment near the McComb & Sons wrecking yard, where Donald could watch the cars getting pulverized from our window. We got money from the state that paid for Donald's medication, but the rest was up to me. Donald was really something else. What could be done with a guy who ate his own earwax? Who carried a maroon mini-Bible in the band of his underpants and read random scriptures out loud at inappropriate times? Who could be sashaying about the room one minute, doing a dead-on impression of Sammy Davis Jr., and the next be downstairs in the closet grunting like a pig and trying to tear his hair out? From a distance, you wouldn't have been able to tell him from any other teenager. He had relatively good hygiene, did not usually talk to himself in public, and was something of a handsome devil, with his dark hair hanging down over pale green eyes. Sometimes, I would take him to a party or a dance with me, and the girls would flock around us. He could be as charming as Hugh Hefner in short bursts before he'd have to run off and hide in the bathroom. I remember once when I was 9 or 10 and we were playing in the backyard. He kept pestering me, saying "I am the Indian. You are the cowboy, OK?" I told him to shut his trap. I was busy building a cave for my army men. He wouldn't give up. "Me Indian, you cowboy, okeydokey?" Over and over. "Dammit, Donald, you freak!" I hollered. "Do whatever you want, but just shut up for a second." "I'm not a freak," he said, sticking his chin out. "All right then," I said, "You're a retard extraordinaire." The next time I looked up, Donald was on top of a doghouse with a bow-and-arrow set my father had bought for him at a garage sale. He had the arrow notched and pulled back to his ear, just like the Indians we saw on TV. I hadn't noticed before, but now I saw that he had taken off his shirt and tucked it in the elastic of his shorts, so it looked like he was wearing a loincloth, and had used a little blood from the scab on his elbow to make fiendish red streaks across his face. He was doing it perfect, really, just like a TV Indian, an honest-to-God savage. I didn't believe he would really shoot me, so I just sat there like a jackass, my hands full of dirt. I didn't see him let go of the bowstring, but I certainly did hear the "thop" the arrow made when it hit me in the chest, dead center. More from the surprise than anything, I fell flat on my back. It was only a target arrow, but it pierced my sternum just enough to stand upright from my chest, waving around sluggishly like a reed in a river. I lay in the grass and stared up at the neon yellow fletching of the arrow. My hands were still full of dirt. Donald jumped down from the doghouse and stood over me. He was smiling an odd, satisfied smile, as if he was expecting to be congratulated on his marksmanship. He looked down at me for a long time before he gently put his hand around the shaft of the arrow without pulling it out. He said, "Right smack-dab in the heart, white man." I told Donald I wanted him to name the armadillo. After several days of deliberation, he decided to name it after Otis, the happy drunk on The Andy Griffith Show, who our father had resembled in almost eerie detail. I had gotten used to taking care of Donald alone-- I had no choice-- but Otis was a different story. First of all, Otis smelled. He gave off a musky odor that intensified whenever he was nervous or hungry. And no matter if we scrubbed him raw with industrial soap and water, the smell would come back in an hour or so. And then there was the furniture. Armadillos are burrowing animals. This is something I learned from my father. And in the confines of our small apartment, Otis didn't have many opportunities to burrow. Instead, he would march through the house like a tiny gray tank and move the furniture around. He'd waddle into the living room, put his blunt forehead against one of the legs of the coffee table, and bear down, inching it around the room, his little squirrel claws scrabbling on the wood floor. At least once a week, he would crawl between the mattress and box springs of my bed and take a dump. My father was right about armadillos. They are hardy, they are resourceful, and if Otis is typical, they're as dumb as donkey crap. Sometimes, in the course of his incessant apartment wandering, Otis would find himself trapped in a corner and would spend the rest of the evening attempting to claw his way out. Otis was technically my pet, but Donald cared for him, worried over him, tormented him, teased him, then made up with tearful professions of regret and affection. While I was away at work, they would do things together. Donald would carry Otis around outside, conversing with him, rooting in the weeds in the vacant lot, searching for earthworms or crickets for Otis's dinner. Sometimes, Donald would hide behind the recliner and, when Otis passed by, would jump out and shout in a high soprano wail, "Look out, Otis!" Poor Otis would spring two feet into the air like a startled cat, his leathery body twisting, his claws clutching at nothing. And once he'd landed, he'd scurry into the hallway, looking back over his shoulder, embarrassment in those little piggy eyes. This kind of living arrangement was no boost to my social life, I can tell you. If I ever wanted to bring a girl home, I figured I'd have some difficulty explaining why the apartment smelled like a bear's den, why the furniture was strewn around, and why my brother was naked and hiding behind the couch, waiting to scare the daylights out of an armadillo. It took five years before I found someone I loved enough to bring home. Allison was good about everything, told me I was a saint and a Christian to be taking care of Donald. She was so wonderful and beautiful and good-smelling, I could barely stand it. Eventually, I proposed to her, after which I went home to talk to Donald. It was springtime in the desert, the smell of cactus blossoms everywhere, and I was so full of love and desire I could barely see straight. Allison and I had decided that we would get an apartment nearby, that with my new promotion at Hassenpheffer's and Allison's job at the county courthouse, we could afford our own place, and, with the help of the government, support Donald. Donald would be all right as long as we checked on him daily, made sure he was taking his medication, and occasionally washed down the place with ammonia, so the smell wouldn't bother the neighbors. I have to admit the thought of escaping from Donald and Otis and that cave of an apartment was almost as enticing as the thought of being together with Allison. At home, when I sat Donald down to explain things to him, I could barely get a word out. I stuttered and stammered, kept wiping my mouth. When I finally made things clear, Donald whipped out his mini-Bible and frantically paged through it, but couldn't seem to come up with anything, the first time I'd ever seen him at loss for a scripture. He yanked at his hair and ground his teeth together until they squeaked. Finally, without saying anything, he snatched up Otis who had been napping under one of the couch cushions, and went into the laundry room, slamming the door behind him. I felt like kicking that door down and wringing his neck. Couldn't he at least try to be happy for me, to think of somebody other than himself for one minute? I wanted only to be with Allison, and I hated Donald for making it so difficult, hated him for the years of responsibility and obligation and lost opportunities, hated him in the way only a brother can hate a brother. I took a few steps toward the stairwell to leave. I didn't care, I was going to stay at Allison's, my first night ever away from Donald, when I heard a splashing noise from inside the apartment. The laundry room door was locked, and I shouted Donald's name, but got no response. I tried to kick in the door, which was made of something like cardboard. My foot went right through it. Once I had my leg free, I looked through the splintered hole and could see Donald hunched over the overflowing utility sink, both arms submerged up to his biceps. The back of his neck was purple and pulsing full of angry blood, and it took me only a moment to understand he was trying to drown Otis. I unlocked the door and grabbed him from behind, but he resisted me, grunting and plunging Otis deeper into the water. I wrestled him out into the living room, where we fell sideways against the couch. Donald twisted away from me and stood up, the water dripping off his elbows, forming a puddle around his shoes. Otis was curled up in a ball, just like when he slept, and Donald began to shiver so badly that he lost his grip and let Otis's body slide out of his hands and hit the floor with a wet slap. Donald's face twisted into a mask of concentrated grief. "See?" he wept. "See what I did?" Looking at my brother, I felt all the parts of me that had been opening up since I had met Allison collapse on each other like so many empty rooms. It would have to be me and Donald, brothers, inseparable, no one else allowed. I don't remember if I looked away, or if it was as sudden as it seemed, but one moment, Otis was a sad, wet corpse, as dead as an armadillo could be, and the next he was huffing and twitching and scrabbling to his feet. Donald let out an arching shriek, which sent Otis zigzagging into the kitchen where a mad chase ensued, Donald slipping and flailing, knocking over chairs and pulling down the drapes, still choking and sobbing, now with relief. He finally herded Otis under the table and, once he had pulled him out, he held him up, his fingers locked in a death grip around his little body, and cried, "Otis is resurrected! Otis is resurrected!" A fair trade. Donald got his armadillo back, and I got to marry Allison. Never again did Donald show any sign of jealousy or resentment. He was the best man at our wedding, read a long section from Zephaniah at the reception, and even bought us a gift, a book called Hot Sex for Cold Fish. Things went well those first few years. We saved up enough to buy the concrete business from old Hassenpheffer, who retired to ride his Harley around the continent. And Donald and Otis seemed to thrive together. We stopped in to visit as often as we could. Allison cooked dinner for them on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we paid a housecleaning service to scrub the apartment down every week, put the furniture back in place, and steam the carpets. Donald had his first episode one night while I was in Phoenix at a heavy equipment auction. They found him digging up the lawn in front of the City First Bank, blabbering about how difficult it was to find high-grade earthworms on the south end of town. When the cops tried to approach him, he pelted them with dirt clods and threatened to eat a fistful of worms if they got any closer. He spent most of the night in the holding tank before Sheriff Brasky figured out who he was and gave me a call. A few months later, Donald climbed an old elm at the city park which branched out over a sidewalk. He managed to pee on a few passersby before the groundskeeper knocked him off a branch with a well-thrown rake. We took him to a doctor, who adjusted his medication and suggested that Donald be put in a home, where he could get the care and attention he needed, where he could socialize with somebody besides an armadillo. I brought up the subject with Donald, but he told me he would rather die than give up Otis and go live in a house with a bunch of half-wits and knuckleheads. The only other option we knew was taking in Donald and Otis ourselves. Allison was eight months pregnant with our second baby, the business was really starting to take off. It just wasn't a good time, we told ourselves. We might be able to work something out in a few months when things had settled down. By the end of the summer, Donald was dead. The call came in the middle of the night, like they always do. Sheriff Brasky told me that Donald had been hit by a car on 87 near the refinery. He had run through traffic completely naked, dodging cars and sprinting down the median until an old couple in a minivan clipped him with their bumper, knocking him over a temporary steel divider and onto a concrete platform where he was partially impaled by a jutting piece of rebar. He bled to death before the ambulance arrived. After I went to the hospital to identify his body, I drove out to the accident site. For half an hour I combed both sides of the highway without a flashlight until I found Otis, cowering under a piece of discarded plywood. His left foreleg was mangled, nearly torn from his body, and he was bleeding from the soft flesh of his belly. I drove him over to the only veterinarian in town, Larry Oleander, and pounded on the door until he answered. Larry was an old retired cowboy with a glass eyeball and a dent in his head where a mule had kicked him. "Jesus Geronimo Christ," he said. It was 4 o'clock in the morning. I held Otis out to him, and he said, "What you have there is an armadillo." "Fix him up," I said. "Son," he said, "I don't know what you think--" "Do it." Larry Oleander peered up at me. He sighed and held the screen door open. "Come the hell on in." Larry amputated Otis's leg, stitched up the wound on his underside, and bandaged him until he looked like one big wad of gauze. When I tried to pay him, he waved his hand in front of my face, took a slug off a bottle of vodka he kept under the operating table. "Jesus, Richard. Just promise me you'll never make a peep about this to anybody." I took Otis home, and he has been part of our family ever since. Over the last few years, I have added on a wing to the house just for him. He has a room with a skylight and two bay windows, his own pillow-bed to sleep under, and a bunch of old furniture to push around. As far as I am aware, he is the only three-legged armadillo on earth with his own personal wading pool. Allison is not thrilled about having an armadillo in her home, never has been, but she knows it's important to me. The kids-- we have four of them now-- can't stand Otis either. They want another pet, some kind of happy, slobbering dog or an albino snake to impress their friends. Otis is not only real, real dumb, they argue, but also smells like doo-doo. They're not sure which is worse. I tell them they are correct, they'll get no disagreement from me, but Otis is our pet, and we're going to love him no matter what. I try not to let myself forget how blessed I am, my beautiful family, my dream house up in the hills, a successful business that pretty much runs without me. I am happy and satisfied most of the time. But every once in a while, maybe once or twice a year, something will come over me, a dark mood that I can't shake, usually at night when everyone is asleep and the house is quiet. And I'll get Otis out from under his pillow-bed and take him upstairs. I run a bath, sitting on the lip of the tub, holding him close to my chest the way he likes it. Usually I just let him paddle around, but sometimes, when the tub is almost overflowing, I take him firmly in both hands and plunge him into the water. There's not a clock in the bathroom, so I count, one alligator, two alligator, three alligator. This is how I count off the seconds. Otis struggles like a tiny lion for the first two or three minutes, writhing and spasming wildly, sending up a boiling foam of bubbles, fighting and scratching with everything he's got, and I hate myself for what I'm doing to him. Usually between the fourth and fifth minute is when he starts to lose his will. And his thrashing weakens, as he gradually curls up in on himself, like a flower dying, and goes utterly still. This is always the hardest part for me. The urge to pull him out is almost unbearable, but I go 5 or 10 seconds longer than the last time. One alligator. Two alligator. Three alligator. Four alligator. Five alligator. Until I can't stand it anymore. I lift him out, and he lies there in my hands, like a deflated soccer ball, and I'm sick with dread knowing that this time, I've taken it too far. I've killed him. I stare down at him and wait, hardly blinking, wait for that first twitch or jerk, for his nostrils to flare with life. And usually, there's an almost imperceptible shudder from under his hard shell, a stirring, and his tail will begin to vibrate like a piano wire. And he slowly, hesitantly, opens up and stretches himself, clawing the air and coughing like a newborn. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub with Otis wet and dripping in my arms, I'm always overcome with the same vision. Donald clutching a newly-revived Otis, his face slick with tears, transformed from a man twisted inside out with grief to someone awestruck at the realization that our worst mistakes can be retrieved, that death can be traded in for life, that what has been destroyed can be made whole again. With a sudden surge, Otis struggles to get out of my lap. He is an armadillo, and there is exploring to do. I let him down and watch him slide around on the linoleum and try to push the toilet off its base. And I feel a small, bitter joy lodge in my heart. "Otis is resurrected," I whisper. I carry him to his room and make sure he is comfortable under his pillow-bed and only then will I be able to walk peacefully through the dark, quiet halls of my home, kiss each of my children goodnight, and lie down next to my wife to sleep. Brady Udall. His short story "Otis Is Resurrected" was first published in Story magazine. It is a work of fiction. No armadillos were harmed in the making of this radio story. Well, today's program was produced by Alex Blumberg and myself with Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, and Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Eric Haverston, Seth Lind, and Bruce Wallace. Music help from Mr. John Connors. Special shout out today to my own dog, Piney. If my plan has worked correctly, Piney right now is at home listening to my voice over a little radio in the kitchen. Piney? I'm up here in the radio. Piney, sit. I wonder if this is working. Our website, where you can get our free weekly podcast or listen to our old shows for free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who thinks our show would be a lot more popular if we would just take his advice. You've got to give them some birds and squirrels. They don't care one iota if they're fighting or sleeping or whatever. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. Yeah, that's the bread and butter is the birds and squirrels. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Parents, here's all the evidence that you need that TV is bad for kids. Especially public TV. When Sean was 14, he loved watching those British TV shows that are always running on PBS. Masterpiece Theatre, Doctor Who. And then there was this show that I would stay up really late and watch, and tape, and watch over and over again the tapes, called Dempsey & Makepeace. Which was about an American detective who went to London because he had been set up at home. And he was teamed up with a woman, who was this aristocrat named Lady Harriet Makepeace. And I was really on her side, I thought, she's got it going on. You looked down on the American. Oh yeah. What Sean liked about Lady Harriet Makepeace and all the other Brits on TV was their aloofness. How they seemed above it all, how they looked down on Americans, which Sean did also. Convinced there must be something wrong with the nation that produced jocks and bullies who harassed him at school. And sometimes, joking around with his friends, he would talk with a British accent. And then it was just something that spiraled out of control. I know that eventually, I was just using an English accent literally from waking to sleeping. Morning, noon, and night. Sean spoke with a British accent from the time he was 14 until he was 16. And at some point, his mother took him to see a psychiatrist. He was just really, he must-- I don't know the different schools of psychology, but he was really very confrontive. And he was like, well, you've got to stop doing this, he said, because you're not British. And my mom just sort of sat over next to me, and she sort of went, yeah, to agree with him. And to sort of help him in showing me this. Sean was furious. He had an impulse to lecture the guy on how, in fact, he was British. And the only problem with that was, A, he knew very well that he was not, and B, his mother was sitting right there. She was sure to contradict him. It all just seemed impossible. Because that's what I was thinking. Like, there has to be a way that I could be British still. There must be a way that this is true, somehow. Yeah, exactly. Well today on our radio program, stories of people to tell a lie, and they get to the point where they believe the lie more than anyone else does. In other words, stories of people pulling hoaxes on themselves. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Act one of our program today, The Sun Never Sets On The Moosewood Restaurant, in which two young men, both from small towns, try on new identities, false identities, and what they have to do to keep the lies going. Act two, Conning The Con Men. Nancy Updike reports on a federal sting operation and how it caught con men by setting up a con of its own. Act three, Outperforming the Performers. A girl gets her big break on Broadway by going into a coma. Stay with us. Act one, The Sun Never Sets on the Moosewood Restaurant. This is the story of two young people who, for a period in their lives, in their search to figure out who they were, pretended to be people who they were not. We'll hear from Sean Cole and Joel Lovell, starting with Sean. He grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, a town that was approximately 3,350 miles from London. It was second nature. It was first nature. To this day I have trouble saying, oh, I faked an accent for two years. I mean, I had an accent for two years. Sean, could I just ask you to take a deep breath and describe for me what you had for lunch today, or perhaps for breakfast this morning, in as close to the accent that you can remember. As close I can. OK. I'm going to take a sip of water here. Well, Ira, I had a salad. I had it at the Boston House of Pancakes-- er, Pizza, rather. What was the beverage? It was a Snapple, just lemon-flavored. I don't really like the peach. Joel Lovell's story began when he left the working class town where he grew up, in upstate New York. His parents owned a liquor store in a small town. He was the first member of his family to go to college, and it was an especially big deal because he got into an Ivy League school, Cornell. It was one of those first days of college, you know, when to spend a lot of time-- everybody kind of moves in hordes, and you spend a lot of time in each other's dorm rooms. And there were about, oh, I don't know, 10 or 11 of us in this one guy's room. And we were just like sitting around, eating pizza and talking. And people were talking about where they were from and what their parents did, stuff like that. And there was one guy whose dad was a doctor for the Knicks. There was another guy whose father was an elected representative from New York State. And then this other guy whose father was on the World Court. Literally was a member of the World Court. Oh, my. And so it suddenly seemed like this incredibly impressive group to me. And they seemed sort of worldly in ways that was just beyond my wildest imagination. And worldly beyond what I am now, frankly. And I remember sitting there at the time thinking, oh my God, I'm so out of my league here. And then, completely unplanned, I suddenly said, as a slice of pizza was passed to me, this pizza with sausage on top of it. I said, I can't take that because my parents are vegetarians. And then everybody in the room sort of turned and looked at me. Because it wasn't even as if I said well, I'm a vegetarian. But I said, my parents are vegetarians. And there's a sort of puzzled look on everybody in the room. And I said well, and I am too. I've never eaten meat. I'm not entirely-- well, I mean, I have some ideas now about why I said that. But at the time I had no idea what I was saying. It was like suddenly I'd become possessed. And I had to think of something to say about myself that seemed interesting. And vegetarianism was the thing that I chose. Now, did you tell people that you were actually from England? No, no. Never that I was from Britain. But in a way, that I was British, you know. There was a real distinction there for me. Like I'd taken it on. Like I was culturally British now. Well, I think what it was is, I think I did some sort of calculus that took like an nanosecond in my head. And I thought, I can't actually lie about what my parents do. But I think the connections that I was making were this. That somehow, because I was from this town in the sticks, if my folks were vegetarians, then the whole history that that suggested was that they were sort of these kind of leftist academic radicals who had sort of dropped out of society and gone back to the land. And I was living in this bumpkin town in upstate New York, and my folks were living some sort of life that was driven by their political philosophy, rather than I was just a guy who grew up in upstate New York. I did the old kid thing of wishing that my real British parents would come and tell me I was adopted and take me back to London. So I'm sitting there in the room and all these guys are looking at me. And they're like, dude, what do you eat? And suddenly I realized, in that moment, how little I knew about vegetarianism. I kind of tried to be real vague about it. You know, we eat salads and lentils. I remember saying lentils a lot. And there was a gap, certainly, in my education. Because I would be using words that Americans just don't use. I would, instead of saying drug store, I would say chemist. Or I would try my best to remember to say bonnet instead of hood, or boot instead of trunk. But I often couldn't. On the meal plan I ended up eating a lot of big piles of iceberg lettuce. And chickpeas. And during that time, would you find yourself sneaking to go to get meat somewhere? Yeah, definitely. At first I would go really far from campus in order to have a BLT. There's this diner downtown in Ithaca, and it felt incredibly illicit. I'd be sitting there and I'd have some reading material or something with me, and I'd be the lonely guy in my booth. And I would order the BLT and I would watch it coming from across the room, with its toothpick in the top of it. And a side of French fries with this meat gravy on top. And when it landed on the table it would just seem like this incredibly wonderful moment. When you're doing something just totally unlike what anybody would expect of you. I was a nobody. I was living in an extremely small, kind of rural town, in the middle of nowhere. I guess, in a way, this was my way of travelling. And of being somebody. And sort of achieving an identity. Which I guess I didn't feel like I had. I didn't feel like-- I'm just sort of realizing this now-- but I guess I didn't feel as though I had anything that made me up. I mean, what I realized fairly quickly is that if this is going to be believable, I actually have to believe in it. But I also began to, not only believe, but really sort of take on as my persona, all the stuff that I imagined was associated with vegetarianism. Like what? Well, certain political convictions, and ways of dress. I wore ripped jeans and I wore combat boots. But I also wore a kind of stage jacket that you would see in a community theater production of Hamlet. Yeah, I bought sandals. I very specifically remember going down to this thrift store in downtown Ithaca and buying a pair of fatigue shorts, which just seemed like I might as well have been Che Guevara at that point. As far I was concerned I was a dangerous leftist. Did you, at any point during this, find yourself in the following argument where you would say, I've never had a hamburger, and somebody would insist, oh, you must have had meat some point. And then you had to argue your side. Yeah, definitely. It wasn't pretty. And of course, I had grown up-- just to put this in context for a second, if you don't mind. I mean, not only had I had hundreds of hamburgers, and gone to the McDonald's drive through hundreds of times, but the counter point situation that I always think about when I remember this time was that, when I was a senior in high school, my family, for time saving reasons, decided that a great thing to do would be to go to Arby's Roast Beef. I don't know if you have those out in Chicago, I think they're countrywide. So my dad and I would go to Arby's, on say, a Thursday afternoon or something. Or after I got out of school. And we would go in there and we would buy 48 Arby's roast beef sandwiches. And they would put them in this cardboard box. And we would bring home this giant box full of those tin foil covered Arby's roast beef sandwiches, and we would stuff them in our freezer. We would freeze the Arby's roast beef sandwiches and then we would have them there. Buns and all? Buns and all, yeah. And so we would have them there as ready made snacks whenever we might want one. I mean, that's the kind of meat eating that my family was engaged in. The other things was that I had these run ins with doubting my British identity, Oh really? Yeah, as though it were slipping away. And I would really go nuts at that point. And there was one time it happened at home. I was at home, and I was like, oh my god, I have to do something. I have to affirm my devotion. I opened up the window and I psyched myself to do it. I was just like, oh man, if I don't do this, it won't come back. And I opened up the window, and then I screamed-- this is in the middle of the night, or, ten at night. And I screamed I love England, of course in a British accent, outside the window. And then you felt better? You felt like you had reasserted yourself? I felt like I had done something, at least. For England. Yeah. I had fortified my Britishness. I would find myself in these conversations where people were saying, you've never had a McDonald's hamburger. What kind of American, 18 year old American, has never had a hamburger from McDonald's? Quite a legitimate question, I would add. Absolutely, absolutely. And I would say, yeah, you know. I've just never had one, they scare me. And I would talk about the ways-- and I would make up these stories about how I'd come close a couple of times. How a friend of mine in high school had bought me a Big Mac and there I was, sitting on the front seat of his car, and I almost ate it, and then couldn't bring myself to do it. So there was all the drama that I lied about. My mom and Dad came down to visit for parents' weekend, and they were really proud that I was going there, and really excited to come down. And they came down to visit. And really proud because you were the first generation to go to college, you made it into this Ivy League school, it was a big, big deal. Right, exactly. Exactly. And so they drove down from Camillus, which is about between an hour and an hour and a half, they came down. And in that week leading up to parents' weekend, everybody's talking about their parents coming, and everybody's making reservations at restaurants, where to eat on Saturday night, and everybody's sort of planning on taking their parents to the football game on Saturday during the day. And it suddenly occurred to me, this real panic set it, that my parents would come down, and we would go to a football game and my dad would buy a hot dog. And somebody across the field would see Mr. Lovell eating a hot dog. And then, of course, the cat would be out of the bag. And so I thought, I've got to make a reservation at a restaurant. At someplace either, A, where nobody else's parents will be, or at a vegetarian restaurant. And so what I did was make a reservation at the Moosewood Restaurant, which is in Ithaca. There's the Moosewood cookbooks that are out. Vegetarian cookbooks. Exactly, yeah. And it's this nice little vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca, and a slightly famous place. But then we got there. And I remember sitting down at the table in the Moosewood, and the bowls are these kind of carved wooden bowls, and everything about it feels like a vegetarian restaurant. And not just a vegetarian restaurant, but kind of a cartoon of a vegetarian restaurant. Exactly. Exactly. And I was looking at my parents across the table, and they were dressed up and they were excited to be coming down, and I could tell my dad was sitting there and sort of perusing the menu and thinking, well, maybe this lentil salad will be good. Or whatever. And I could he was sitting there thinking geeze, I just drove an hour and a half, all I want is a steak, and a baked potato, and a beer. And there I was bringing them here. But they were so game about it. They were so willing to go along with it because, for some reason, they thought I really wanted to bring them there. And I just thought, geeze, you know, these people, my parents, have really given up a lot for me to come there. I mean, financially they were really stretching themselves, and we were taking out all sorts of loans, and all of those things that people do in order to go to college. They never complained once about doing it. They just wanted to come down and see me there and feel all proud that I was there, and I was sort of hiding them out in this vegetarian restaurant. And I felt so bad about it afterwards. And they never once complained. They went home, and I sort of imagine them stopping at a Hardy's just outside of Ithaca, getting a burger as soon as they say goodbye. But after that I just thought geeze, I've got to find some way to come clean about this. I mean, is it OK if your child decides to express themself in an alternate personality for a period of two years. I think there's-- it's funny, I never thought I would say this-- but I think there's nothing wrong with that. I never thought I would say it because I wish that I hadn't done it now. But maybe I learned something from doing it. I mean, I think that that is par for the course. Now I think that's part of growing up. I think it was probably necessary for me at that time in my life. Because it gave you more confidence. Yeah, and there was some ridge that that this allowed me to cross. Joel Lovell and Sean Cole. Joel Lovell is a writer in New York City. Sean Cole works in public radio in Boston. Act two, Conning the Con Men. The American legal system, for the most part, does not uphold the principle of eye for an eye. If you steal somebody's car, the police do not steal your car in return. If they catch you selling marijuana, they do not sell marijuana to you as your punishment. But if you're in the business of running scams, authorities catch you by running a scam on you. This is the story of a con man who made millions by fooling people over the phone, until he was the one who got fooled. Nancy Updike reports. The guy's name is David Diamond. That's his actual name. He was one of the most successful salesman in one of the longest running telemarketing scams in Los Angeles history. David Diamond was a salesman at a boiler room. This is Dale Sekovich. He's been a Federal Trade Commission investigator for 29 years. He's the one who busted Diamond. He was living in a very expensive home up in the hills of Woodland Hills. He drove a custom Porsche Carrera that he had shipped over here by airplane from Germany from the factory. They lived very high on the hog. David Diamond was just one of a whole bunch of guys making money hand over fist in an operation in southern California that was basically running the same scam over and over, under different names, for seven years. It was an investment scheme. Give us your money and we'll put it into this great 900 number business, or this online shopping network, or this hot new internet service provider. Needless to say, no one ever made a dime, except the people running the scam who cleared $40 million. Since Diamond was one of the operation's top salesmen, he made $2 million in commissions in just four years on the job. He got 30% of whatever he talked a person into investing. That means he personally conned people out of more than $6 million. The FTC caught Diamond and the others in the operation essentially by conning the con men. They had volunteers pose as dupes and record their phone calls. Because the FTC brought a case against the operation Diamond worked in, some of those recordings are now part of the public record. I got Dale Sekovich to listen to the tapes with me, and talk about David Diamond and the FBI volunteer who caught him. The woman on the tape, I can't tell you her real name, but she uses the alias of Marge. She assumed the identity of a person who is named Marge. Marge was a real person who we in law enforcement and who people in the telemarketing business refer to as a mooch. A mooch is someone who will essentially buy anything from anybody who calls her on the telephone. In fact she did, over a number of years. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars-- The real Marge. The real Marge spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on bogus prize promotions, investments, gold coins, you name it. So the FBI went to Marge and said, we really think that we need to take your telephone number away from you, because it's being used to ruin your life. So once Marge agreed to that, her telephone number was installed in the home of an FBI volunteer. And that volunteer, every time that phone line rang, the Marge line, that volunteer would pick up that telephone, and answer it, and pose as Marge. Marge? Yes? It's David Diamond, how are you? Oh, I'm OK. It's kind of warm here. Yeah. I set you up a video and a package. Yes, I have it. OK. The video is with regard to Mark Erickson. Mark Erickson is the person who is heading up the program. And he is very successful in taking upstart companies and making them successful. You've probably heard of Hard Copy. He's the original producer of Hard Copy. I've heard of it, yes. You're smiling as you listen to this. What are you smiling about? Well I'm smiling because it's been a while since I've heard Marge, and she sounds so old, and so fragile, and such an easy mark, when in fact she's this sharp FBI informant. She doesn't look as old as she sounds, trust me. So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect is this whole Mark Erickson thing. Yeah, is he a real person? Mark Erickson is a real person. He was named in our lawsuit. And was he an original producer of Hard Copy? No. He was a segment producer and on the air reporter for Hard Copy for a brief period of time. And is this sort of typical of the cons in the tapes that you've heard, that they'll try to associate what they're selling with a legitimate business or organization or television show, something that people have heard of. Exactly. They want to make this something people can relate to. Here's the thing. You have to invest everything you've got, or do nothing at all. And I'll say that again. You should invest everything you have. You should transfer all of your investments into this program or do nothing. It doesn't make sense to do just a little bit. You should think about doing a million dollars in this program. Oh. I don't know. That's a lot of money. You need to liquidate every nickel you've got. You either want to be in this situation, you either want to be in the situation wholeheartedly and upgrade your investments, or you don't. My suggestion to you is just do the whole thing. Well, I would never liquidate everything I have. My question is, why not? Because there's always gambles in anything like this. Anything like what? Well, any investment like this. Like this? What does that mean? Well, anything you invest in, there's always a gamble. Now I want to ask you, you told me once that you thought he sounded nervous on this tape. And in this part where she's saying, you know, an investment like this. And he's sort of questioning her, well, what do you mean like this. I wonder, do you have any sense that he's suspicious that she might know what he's up to. I mean, did they know that volunteers are out there trying to trap them posing as dupes? No. Since we talked about this tape last, I actually had a revelation that came to me as to why. I listened to over 40 individual tapes of David Diamond. Of conversations with Marge and conversations with others over the course of about a year. And one of the things, when you've listen to all of them, you find that David, in the earlier part of that year, was much more sweet and cautious, and trying to bond with these women. And patient. And sometimes would spend an hour on the phone with them. The tape would be an hour long. But this tape was made towards the very end of that year period. Probably within a week or two of our raid. Having gone in on the raid, and searched David Diamond's desk that day, I came to realize that David Diamond was starting to question whether he wanted to do this anymore. He was starting to really have some concerns about-- Moral concerns? Moral concerns about what they were doing. And I believe that in these last couple of weeks, and it's kind of shown in this tape, he was becoming a little bit desperate. He wanted to make a couple of more big hits, and he just couldn't figure out why this woman wasn't going to write him a check. So he started getting frustrated. And it comes out in his voice. What evidence did you see that he was starting to have moral qualms about what he was doing? David had become a born again. There were religious tracts all over his office, and posters on his wall. Just recently? I don't know exactly what the time frame was. We do know that he had given a lot of the money that he had made to his church. And we believe that a lot of that was sort of a self-imposed penance, that he can justify what he was doing because he was giving his tithings. This money that he was taking from these poor victims into his church. If $30,000 is what you made on every $5,000, and you put $50,000 into this program, that's $300,000 return. That's why I'm telling you, you need to do a million dollars in this program. I don't know. I would never put that much in, in any program. Do you have an obligation to yourself as an investor to make the most amount of money possible? Well, you know, at my age it's really not that-- what do I want to say-- I have enough to live on for the rest of my life. I understand. But is it still in your best interest to make the most amount of money possible if you can find to do it as safely as possible. It's my obligation not to lose what I have. Correct. But it's also your obligation to keep your money working for you, otherwise, what's the point. When I heard this part of the tape, even though I knew that this woman, this particular woman, was not getting conned. That she was, in fact, conning him and trapping him, I started to get so angry. Because I was thinking, he is really trying to take all of this old woman's money. All of it. She's saying, I have enough to live on. He's saying, you have an obligation to make more. Do you ever hear things like that and just get angry, even though you know that she's in on the con, on the joke? Every time I hear these pitches I'm outraged. Because I am the person that spoke to people who really did send David Diamond tens of thousands of dollars that consisted of their life savings and now don't have any money, even to buy groceries. I've interviewed them. I've seen them sob. Yeah, it makes me very angry. And what sort of recourse do they have? Slim and none. Slim and none. We have public companies that want to take you public. So if you've got a public company that's passed judgement on it, it's not even me talking anymore. If Mark Erickson wants to do business with you it's not even me talking anymore. You have the ability to make an absolute fortune, and it doesn't make sense not to have every nickel you've got in this particular program. That's why I said it's an emergency investment situation and you should do at least fifty to a hundred, a hundred and fifty units while you have the opportunity. Well, how much are you investing in this? I'm not investing anything in this. My investment comes in the time that I put with my clients. Right. And the fact that when they make money, they reinvest with me. Right. That's the whole point. You were smiling again. When she said how much are you investing. Is she just screwing around with him? Of course, she's playing with him. Yeah. I mean, she's trained to ask him those kinds of questions so that he responds with a misrepresentation. But that doesn't sound like it's part of the script. That just sounds like her being mean in sort of a delicious way. Well, no. I think what we were trying to do, or her handler was trying to do, was get her to get him to say, oh yeah, I'm in it, and I've got my mother and my grandmother in it. And I'm putting away money for my child's education with it. Because then we could show later that he hadn't. Did you ever talk to Marge about what it's like to do this. Do they ever sort of have fun, just thinking, I'm just turning the tables on this guy. He has no idea. I wish I could answer the question. I've never spoken to them. I'd love to get the answer to that myself. I'd like to ask that question myself. I think they get a lot of personal satisfaction though. How often do you get a chance to catch a bad guy as just a regular civilian. Yeah, exactly. I do it too, I tape people using an alias in cases that I work. And is it fun? I love it. I love to get these people to tell me stuff. It's like acting. There's a rush. The rush of a con, the pleasure of it, is knowing that you have more power than the person you're conning. You know more. You know that it's a con. And let's face it, given the choice between being the mark and being the con man, nobody's going to choose to be the mark. But the problem is, the more confidence you have in your own con, the more easily you become a mark yourself. Con men get taken by other con men all the time. There just seems to be something about the particular arrogance of always being on the knowing side of the con that makes for a really, really good mark. Nancy Updike, in Los Angeles. Coming up, the thrill of sitting close to the stage, and the evil that that can lead to. In a minute, for Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, pulling a hoax on yourself. Stories of people who think that they are fooling others until they're not anymore. We've arrived at act three of our program. Act three, Outperforming the Performers. It's a measure of just how hungry people are to create a community that a full fledged, tight knit group of friends could form out of a publicity stunt. Back in 1996, a new musical called Rent was moving from a small theater in New York's East Village to the big time, a Broadway house just a half block from Times Square. The show presented a romanticized view of what it means to be young and broke. And to keep the magical air of youth and poverty in the house, the producers decided that every single night they would sell two rows of seats, the first two rows, some of the best seats in the house, for a price nearly anyone could scrape together. $20 a pop, less than a third of what tickets normally sell for on Broadway. Hundreds of teens and twenty somethings took the bait. So many, that if you wanted to get one of the cheap seats, you had to arrive at six o'clock a night before, get in line with a sleeping bag, and stay out all night. See where they're standing? That's where we used to sleep. We would sleep all where those photos are. Joe Gillis and Rebecca Allen stand in front of the theater where Rent is still playing, near a row of life-sized pictures of the cast, mounted on a wall by the theater door. During the show we had to stay out there because they had to keep the marquee area clear. So as soon as the show was over and they closed the doors, we'd all run over, and we all like, claim our spot because we'd all want to sleep under our favorite cast member. And so which one was yours? I slept under Daphne once and I think I slept under Anthony another time. You're sleeping on the pavement while people walk by, ignoring you. And you're like, yeah, I'm just like those people in the play. You don't really think that. But a small part of you thinks that. A small part of you thinks that. And will identify more with the play, the more you can be like it. When they were in line, everybody would hang out all day. Grab some food at McDonald's or at the diner across the street. And the fans who didn't show up at the theater on any given day would communicate through an email list with hundreds of Rent heads on it. Most of them were suburban kids like Joe and Rebecca. Students. Joe says that he was closer to the Rent fans than to his friends back in high school. It was on the Rent line that he first came out as gay, long before his friends back home knew. For lots of teenagers, this was the first community that felt like their own. It's easy to see why they like the show which unironically celebrates what it unironically calls the bohemian life, in French. A life of poverty and love and art. The setting is contemporary New York. The characters are homosexuals, homeless people, interracial couples, drug addicts, flailing artists, and doomed HIV positive lovers. The mood of the show is at once fantastically idealistic and desperately tragic. Several characters are dying of AIDS. And among the throngs of young people who are drawn to the magnetic pool of Rent's message that you should live each day like it's your only day on Earth was a young student who we'll call Stephanie. All of our interviewees also agreed to call her Stephanie. We met about two and a half, three years ago, when we were both interested in the musical Rent. We belonged to the same mailing list online. And she drove up to New York with some friends from college and they stayed in my apartment while they went to see the show. This is Catherine Skidmore, a friend of Stephanie's and one of the ringleaders among the Rent fans. She was a founder of one of the big internet mailing lists about the show. She's young, used to run in computer hacker circles. One of her tattoos is her social security number in binary code. Now she works for a web start up. Stephanie was one of the many people she got to know, back during the heyday of Rent. I lived the closest to the theater out of anybody. And I think I was the only person in the line who had her own apartment, so I used to let friends stay with me when they drove up. How often would you let somebody stay with you? I think every weekend or every other weekend. It got turned into the hotel Catherine. She says Stephanie let everyone know that she had a medical condition called autonomic neuropathy. And she said it was terminal. She told this people on the line and she told it to members of the cast of Rent. When she was in New York she used to come to the stage door and ask the actors to give her tours backstage, or ask them out for lunch or dinner. When she would email us Stephanie would say, I'm not feeling great. Could you ask the cast to send me a card, could you ask them to email me. I first got a letter that she kind of sent the same letter to several of us in the cast in New York. Anthony Rapp played the lead role in Rent. She was a young aspiring actress, student who was suffering from an illness, and that the show brought her great comfort. And she didn't know how long she had to live. You know, my heart went out to her, as all of our hearts did. You know, my heart just went out to her. It really did. Gwen Stewart was another cast member. And whenever she came to the show I would make sure that I would try to spend a little time with her. We'd gone out to dinner a couple times, and we'd sit around and talk, and I called her on the phone. I gave her my home number. And it was to the point where I literally made a point of praying for this girl each and every night. Well ultimately what we were hearing was that she was about to have this major surgery and that she was very scared about it. And that she came to New York right before she was going to have it. That was when Gwen Stewart and I went to lunch with her. She said that she was contemplating suicide. And I'm a spiritual person, and I'd gone as far as to look up all these scriptures to support life and to support hope and faith. And I would give them to her and tell her to read her Bible. And a lot of the conversations were like that. And then, you know, if it got a little too heavy, we'd swing it around to Rent. And at that lunch she brought out some medical paraphernalia. Like a syringe, and like an IV tube thing. She went off to the bathroom to supposedly administer herself some medication. After her lunch with the stars in New York, Stephanie flew back to the city where she was from, where she dropped in on a touring company of Rent which happened to be performing there. She was getting to know them and befriending them and telling them her story and they held a prayer circle for her the night before her supposed surgery. You mean just backstage at the theater? Yeah, she was backstage and she was there with the cast and they held a prayer circle for her. Perhaps you've already figured out where all this is going. In the end, Stephanie did not turn out of any kind of terminal condition. What's remarkable about her story is how far she was able to push the lie, and how compulsively she did it, almost like it was out of her control to stop herself. As she got sicker, her friends in New York started to get emails from someone named Monica, who claimed to be a friend of Stephanie's. It was Monica who wrote them when Stephanie went into surgery. Monica gave lengthy accounts of Stephanie's condition, and urged them to organize get well cards and calls from the cast. Catherine later collected all of Monica's and Stephanie's emails into a massive document that she calls the log of deception. With her roommate Jen Eldridge, who also met Stephanie on the Rent line and considered her a close friend, Catherine stood at her computer and scrolled through the log. Yeah, oh, where's my favorite one. Yeah, Monica emails are good. Find the one about the coma. That's [INTERPOSING VOICES] The suicide one. The suicide one's good, too. There's coma and suicide. They decide to go for suicide. Here we go. This is an email from Monica on Friday, November 7, 1997, at 9:00 PM. Where she says, she sent this directly to me. I'm at Stephanie's, I just followed the EMTs out to the ambulance. Stephanie tried to end it all tonight. I found a syringe and an empty container of morphine. She didn't know that I was coming to check on her, blah, blah, blah, they say she'll be OK, and I caught her just in time. She really went all out, and I don't know how much of this she planned or how much-- And keep in mind, this is a weekend she knew that all of her friends were converging in New York at Catherine's apartment. Like we were all going to be there together when this email came. And I think we were all in different levels of transit when you got this email and started just being very upset. And trying to get contact, and everybody's in cars and on trains trying to get there. And then what happen once you all knew that she was-- We tried to call the hospitals, and we tried to call 911 to see if they had a record of it. I called Kenny. Oh, you tried to call her in a hospital and you couldn't find her. We could find her. No hospitals in her area had records of her being checked in. So we just said, oh my god, she's somewhere and we can't get to her, and we don't know what to do. And nobody knew what to do. It's amazing how un-thought out it is. What did she think you were going to do once you got that email? I don't know. And so your evening together, like where all of you were going to be together hanging out, ended up being completely-- It was pretty miserable. Yeah, it was really miserable. We went, I guess we saw the show. Everybody bawled their way through it and cried their way through it. And went and told the cast members, of course, because that's what we thought she'd want us to do. There was one person who always got Monica's story. Josh Safran, who at the time was boyfriends with the star of Rent, Anthony Rapp. Josh not only doubted that Stephanie was sick, he felt horribly guilty for doubting her. This was his problem in a nutshell, he says. Anthony was all about trusting and loving people. He was all about cynicism and mistrust. Fortunately for him, his friends Sean and Michelle also doubted Stephanie. So we were suspicious. We were talking more about it for a few days, but then she goes to the hospital, and she goes into a coma. That is, an email from Monica said Stephanie was in a coma. And when this happened Catherine, who wasn't doubting at all, made a decision. I talked to Catherine, and Catherine was like, even though she doesn't want us to go there, even though Stephanie doesn't want any visitors, we're going to go. She's in a coma. We should be there. And I said good. And I said, tell Monica. And as soon as they told Monica, Stephanie woke up. As soon as that happened, Sean and Michelle and I were positive that we got her. Why? Why, what did that mean to you that she woke up at that moment. She woke up so they didn't have to come. That was Monica, the way she phrased it in the email was, oh, she's better, you don't have to come. She'd like to see you in a few days. It was so obvious that she was pushing off. So we needed to find a way to make sure. How to make sure. Well, it turns out that we live in a country where, if there's an emergency requiring a plumber or an electrician or a mechanic, people turn to professionals. But when it comes to detective work, deep down, we all believe we're capable of it. It really became a crusade. I mean, there were three days where none of us slept. We only worked on this. And that was insane. It's embarrassing to think about it. They called dozens of hospitals in the city where Stephanie lived, asking if she was a patient. They researched the disease she supposedly had, they pored over old emails looking for clues. Finally they decided to call the elusive Monica who no one had ever spoken to. It turned out that there was in fact a real Monica who went to school with Stephanie, and after some spade work, they found her real last name. We called information, and there was that number. She existed, she was there, we immediately were like, oh [BLEEP]. This was the moment of crisis where we were running around the apartment, freaking out, thinking we are terrible people. Because if we call this number, and this girl's like yes, Stephanie's in the hospital, but she's much better, then we were terrible, cynical people for-- like, it was everything that is wrong with the world and wrong with us. How could we ever think this. How could we spend so much time on it, how could we be such a horrible person. So I called the number, and Monica answered. And I was so nervous. I remember it was in my dingy little kitchen with the plastic countertop, and I was so nervous that I was shaking the plastic countertop, and things were falling all over. And Monica was like, I've heard about you, but there's all this loud noise. So nervous. I said, how's Stephanie? And she said, she's doing better. And I was like, OK, thank you. And I hung up the phone because I didn't want-- I couldn't deal with it. But immediately Michelle, Sean, and I were like, she's doing better, she really is sick. But then we thought, but wait a minute, maybe not. So they were like, you have to call back. And I'm like, I'm not going to call back. We just found out we're horrible people, she really is ill, blah, blah, blah. So they were like, but she didn't sound concerned, she didn't sound worried, call back. So we waited 10 minutes then I called back and I was like hi, I'm sorry Monica, it's Josh again. Look, when's the last time you saw Stephanie? She said, I saw her in class this morning. And that was it. They contacted Stephanie, let her know that they had talked to the real Monica. They knew there was no coma. After some hedging, Stephanie finally admitted she wasn't dying. The next week, Catherine used her plane ticket and went to talk to Stephanie in person. I had a list compiled of questions from our friends on why she did this, how sick was she, and she basically admitted that she did this as a cry for attention of sorts and it went overboard. And then once she started telling us all of these lies about what was going on she didn't have any way to back out of it. Then she kept going and she didn't feel like she could stop at any point during this. Stephanie declined a request to be interviewed for this radio story. Jen remembers that before everybody knew the truth about Stephanie, it was a regular thing to get panicky calls from her between midnight and 2:00 AM. She would call me crying in the middle of the night that she was just ready to kill herself, couldn't deal with stuff. And I honestly think that when she called me and said these things, that it was genuine. It was just sort of something that went along with it and we would talk about it when she needed to and needed to be upset and cry. And there were many conversations about how she just didn't know how to deal with it anymore. And as I look back on it and I wonder if some of those I don't know how to deal with it conversations were really about she didn't know how to tell people that she had done this. I think there was a point for her when she realized that this was going to blow up in her face. A word now about the plot of the musical Rent. It is, of course, about terminal illness. One character dies, another nearly dies. Anthony Rapp. It's very much about what people do in the face of all that. And in the case of the show, the group of friends really bands together. And so I don't know. I guess maybe on some level Stephanie thought that we would appreciate the plight of somebody who was young and facing something dire like that. And then everybody would band around. Yeah. In a way it's like she's casting herself in the show. Yeah, sure. In a way, it's like, what does a fan want from a show. Especially the kind of fan who comes back again and again. It's like somehow they want to get closer to it. They want to get inside it. They want to be in it. I know when I see a show that I love, I want to be in it. Seriously. It brought out the best in people. It did. In fact, the script of the show provided a model for everyone on how to act with Stephanie. Both for the fans who saw the show dozens of times and the cast who sung out their hearts every night about the importance of sticking by your friends when they're dying. Stephanie got her wish. Not only did she get sympathy and attention, she got it from the very people who she watched on stage, in Rent, time and again. When Catherine went back through her old emails, she noticed how often Stephanie was asking to deliver a message to the cast, or asking about the cast. Afterwards, it was just pretty sick to read back and see it. That she really didn't care about her-- we thought we were her friends. She really cared more about the cast and their reaction. You know the point in the show where Angel dies and then all the other characters come forward and give little tributes. Yeah, a eulogy. Give little eulogies. Do you think that Stephanie fantasized about all of you-- you do. Oh, absolutely. She had emailed us and said, when I go, when they put me in the ground, I want so and so to sing the reprise of "I'll Cover You" from the show at my grave. It would be great. When I first realized that it was all a lie, I was very angry. Again, cast member Gwen Stewart. Very angry. And that's why I didn't speak to any of them. Because I had allowed a bunch of strangers to come into my life and I'd opened my heart to them. After this, did you change your attitude toward the fans in general? Not really. I mean, I didn't give out my number anymore. But I still signed autographs. I still took the time to talk to people, and took pictures, and all that other stuff. I didn't open myself anymore like I did. I felt betrayed. And I had to make sure that I didn't allow anybody else to do that. After all this happened, did you want to pray for her, still. Oh, I did. I did. Because I realized that sickness and death were the least of her problems. Back on 41st Street, Rebecca and Joe, who knew Stephanie, but not all that well, say that Stephanie was just doing a more extreme version of what a lot of people did on the line. It's not surprising to find out that something you think about someone in the line is a lie, or just like, a little off. Sasha, please, don't get me started. For example, this is my good friend Joe Gillis. But that is not his name. And how long did I know you before I knew that was not your name. When did you figure out that was not my name? What is your name? My name is Joe Falduti. On the line there was a Bridget, whose real name was Laura, a 15-year-old who everybody thought was 22, and many gay teenagers, who are out only on the neutral ground of 41st Street. I mean, I actively knew it was not real life. And I actually would say, my Rent friends and my real friends. But it's really weird how something that was so not real affected real life so much. In a way, a play does too. That's what theater wants to do. They want you to become emotionally involved and care about something, and then leave it and go back to your real life. Which is what Stephanie did on the Rent line. She got everyone emotionally involved, made them care about something. And then, she went back to her real life. You know, I do it too. I tape people using an alias. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. A few years back here in Chicago, we had some unusual weather and 18 people were struck by lightning in one month. 17 of them survived, and I set out to interview as many of them as would talk to me. The ones with the worst injuries remembered nothing of what happened to them. But the rest all described the moment they were hit in very similar terms. Mike Bergeron and Larry Wilson were on the golf course under an umbrella with two other guys when the lightning struck. All I saw was just a very bright white flash. I think I remember a white light. And when the lightning struck, I felt no pain. And I can remember, or what I think I remember, is just getting knocked backward. My brain saying, hey, you've got to stand up, and nothing else would really respond. And I was trying to call friends over. I remember that. But I couldn't speak. And it was like things kind of went in slow motion. Out of the corner of my eye, I can remember seeing Tony falling backward. I can remember seeing Larry falling, but it wasn't like somebody just tripping and falling on the ground. It was like it took them one or two minutes before they actually hit the ground. There's a terror to lightning. Victims say they were surrounded by friends and family. But when the bolt came, they were suddenly alone, trapped in their own bodies. The natural world turned supernatural. Georgiana Davies was at a company picnic when it just started to drizzle. She never saw the blast. She didn't suspect lightning. She says she thought it was the end of the world. Right before all this happened, it was like everybody just shut the sound completely out. You couldn't hear nothing. You couldn't move. It was like total silence around the world in that area where I was at. And then I started hearing humming, like bees or something, or a bunch of flies going zz-zz-zz. And it felt like something was going to happen, but I didn't know what. And then I looked over and I saw Sylvia screaming. And I saw her mouth open but I couldn't hear her at first. It was like everything was shut out for-- I don't know if it was seconds or minutes. Or it could have been a second. And I didn't know where I was at. That's what it was like in the moment lightning struck. But in the moments after, the days and weeks after, it all started to look different. When something happens to you that is so big, so biblical, you definitely start to think about why. And most of the survivors I talked to came to the same conclusion. It was not just a coincidence, where the lightning hit. My own opinion, I think God's trying to tell the world something. They say God is trying to tell us something. Well, God don't try. God is telling us something. God don't try to do nothing. He's telling us something. Beware. He's coming back, and beware and be ready. My belief is there's a purpose to whatever happens. There's reasons behind it. Well, today on our program, we try a little experiment. Usually we bring you stories of people in the middle of big experiences, whose lives are going through some sort of change, some growth, or some crisis. But sometimes, that moment of dramatic change is only half the story. The other half happens after time passes and they return to revisit that moment. Today's program is about what they find later and what remains of who and what they once were. Our show today in three acts. Act One, I Used to Bank Here But That Was Long, Long Ago, in which David Rakoff returns to the city he grew up to find buried, frozen treasure. Act Two, Exiles on Main Street. A young Russian emigre returns to the heroes of his youth, the brave Soviet dissidents who risked their lives at the height of the Cold War who were forced out of the Soviet Union. What have they been doing all these decades, the many dissidents who resettled in comfortable houses, not just in America, but in the American suburbs? Act Three, Shopping for a Better Tomorrow, the story of a social experiment involving a supermarket and 6,000 poor people. Stay with us. Act One, I Used to Bank Here But That Was Long, Long Ago. David Rakoff recently flew to Toronto, where he grew up, to revisit a time in his life that for years he joked about, he downplayed, and he tried not to think about. He tells the story of what he found. At age 22, I had Hodgkin's disease. It is a form of lymphatic cancer common among young men in their 20s. It is also highly curable, so highly curable, in fact, that I like to refer to it as "the dilettante cancer." An old Canadian joke bears telling here. A boss says to an underling, "I'm off to Sault Ste. Marie for the weekend." "Sault Ste. Marie," asks the employee, incredulous. "But boss, there are only whores and hockey players in Sault Ste. Marie." "My wife is from Sault Ste. Marie." "Oh," says the employee. "What position does she play?" When I joke about Hodgkin's being the cancer for boys who do things in half measures, it is invariably to someone whose husband or brother or son has just died from Hodgkin's. I don't mean to denigrate other survivors or less fortunate non-survivors. My inappropriate wisecrack only serves to prove a point about myself. On some level, despite the fact that I received both radiation and chemotherapy, I cannot escape the feeling that I was at best a cancer tourist, that my survival means I dabbled. Kind of been there, sort of done that. It has only recently occurred to me that perhaps I might stop glibly insisting that the cancer wasn't real and that the doctors popped me into an Easy-Bake Oven where a 40-watt light bulb halted the metastasis in its tracks. What remains some 13 years after the fact? Four small tattoos, subcutaneous black dots like compass points on my torso, near-total numbness in the very tips of my fingers, as well as a palm-sized area on my right inner thigh, also without feeling, some dry mouth, and most lastingly, three straws of my pre-chemotherapized sperm in cold storage somewhere in Toronto. Like millions of tiny Walt Disneys, they wait, frozen, until the day when I will return and have them conjoined with some willing ovum and thereby fulfill their zygotic destiny, growing into children who will eventually go on to break my heart and not talk to me. More than a desire for kids who can be fairly boring, truth be told, I just want to know where the sperm is. Easier said than done, as it turns out, because since that time, I have moved, my parents have moved, the sperm bank has moved, and the cancer hospital has moved. The traces have been thoroughly kicked over, which suits me fine. I'm not by nature terribly sentimental. I'm not a photo taker. I have no scrapbooks. I have attempted to never look back-- until now. Along with my scar, my tattoos, and my numbness, these straws of sperm are the only things I have left from that time in my life, a period of 18 months that I have generally tried to not think about. 13 years later, at the age of 35, it's starting to seem like bad juju to continue to ignore it. And so I am off to find the straws, just in time for their putative, microscopic Bar Mitzvahs. I was treated at PMH, the Princess Margaret Hospital, the main cancer facility in Toronto. If you were a child at any time from the 1930s through the 1950s living anywhere in the British empire, chances are you were inundated with images of the two young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. Elizabeth would eventually become Queen, of course, but Margaret was always considered to be somewhat prettier. And simply by virtue of her thwarted ascendancy to the throne, she was less duty bound, and consequently more fun, kinky almost. As she grew up and had her serial doomed romances, Margaret gave the commonwealth public a taste of the kind of low-rent scandal we could later come to expect from the House of Windsor. It's not like she was a slattern or an embarrassment. Calling it the Princess Margaret Hospital is not like naming it the Billy Carter. It's more affectionate than that, more glamorous. The Tricia Nixon might be more apt. Hanging on the wall on the way to the radiation room in the old hospital was a photograph of Princess Margaret's hand, taken on the occasion of the inauguration of the building. It was actually an x-ray photograph, so her highness's jewelry glows white against the bones in the vaporous gray of her invisible flesh. I look at it every time I go for treatment. The radiation room itself is a lead-lined interior chamber of the hospital. Two red laser beams cross over the exact center of the table where the patients lie. Using the cross of four small black tattoos on my torso, the technicians line me up and ready me for the thousands of rads of radiation. The machine is bulbous, huge, and a dull hospital-green, a death ray straight out of '50s sci-fi. I lie down and look up. Above my head, directly at eye level, someone has drawn a hastily-rendered happy face in magic marker. Underneath that is written the message, "give us a smile." Like Rita Hayworth's picture that graced the side of the atom bomb they dropped on Bikini Atoll, there's something so pathetic, so vastly outmatched about this little happy face. It is like putting a garnish on annihilation. Still, I never fail to smile. Even when I reach the point in the treatments when most of my hair has fallen out and my throat has been burned to such an extent that I cannot swallow, I smile. They haven't stopped at the happy face, either. Every time the lead door closes, latching with a booming clank, so, too, begins the music, the same song every time, the same place in the same song every time. The full horn section buildup of the chorus to the song-- "you're just too good to be true." The plutonium drops down into the central cone, a warm wind starts to blow on my chest, indicating that I'm now getting the equivalent of a lifetime's worth of the recommended dose of gamma radiation, and I smile. The harvesting of sperm before chemotherapy is a fairly standard practice. Chemo makes you sterile. They suggest it to most male patients of a certain age. It is certainly the most important sperm sample I've ever given, but it is not the first. In 1982 as a freshman, I sold it once. Every bulletin board in my dormitory on 114th Street and Amsterdam Avenue had the following flyer-- "College men, make money now." It was an advertisement for a midtown sperm bank. We would be paid close to $50 to do, under somewhat more controlled circumstances, the very thing that was occupying a great deal of our waking lives anyway. The lab was very interested in our seed, the sperm of the Ivy League. There's something so obscenely vital, so borderline eugenic about that image, imbued with a potency and a Riefenstahlian vision of the future. It was a stereotype much greater than the actual sum of its parts, I can assure you, given some of the knock-kneed Hebrews I went to school with, myself included. I remember nothing from that day. I cannot tell you if there were dirty magazines, although I suspect there were. I cannot remember being embarrassed, although I'm sure I was. And I cannot remember what I was paid, although $40 cash rings a bell. The conflation of climax in commerce cannot have failed to escape my notice. At age 17, it felt like sexual transgression. I suppose it still does, since until this moment, I have never told anyone about it. It is now a gray Toronto day in January of the new century. The new Princess Margaret facility is beautiful, occupying an old art deco insurance building. It is imposing and gray and elegant and graced in the center with a soaring, six-story atrium. It is nothing like the old hospital where I was treated. I feel a little jealous as I walk in. There's even a multi-faith chapel which I don't recall from the old place. Outside of it, on a white board, someone on staff has written, "just a thought," and then a quote-- "joy is not in things, it is in us." It is attributed to one Robert Wagner, whose dates are 1813 to 1883. Presumably this is a different Robert Wagner than the wattle-concealing, turtleneck-wearing star of The Towering Inferno and Heart To Heart. So different a Robert Wagner, in fact, that when I tried to look him up in my Bartlett's Quotations, he is not listed. Who is listed there, with exactly the same dates, however, is Richard Wagner, he of the proto-Nazi operas of heroic Ubermenschen. Funnily enough, Bartlett's doesn't list this lovely caveat against materialism among the composer's notable quotes. But it's a lot more suitable for an oncology chapel after all than "To be German means to carry on a matter for its own sake," don't you think? This new place is completely devoid of anything I might recall. Not a single doctor who treated me still works here. The fondly remembered x-ray photograph of Princess Margaret's hand is also nowhere to be seen. I ask the volunteer at the desk if they brought it here from the old facility. "It was on the way to radiation," I say. "I was also a radiation patient," she replies. "I don't remember it." I then ask her if she remembers the music during treatment. She doesn't dismiss my recollection, but she's not sure herself, it was so long ago. All memory is porous. Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand sickness, and a good thing, too. But of these two details-- that x-ray photograph, that music-- I am sure. I think. It's not all that hard to locate the missing sperm lab. A few phone calls and I find that it has been moved lock, stock, and barrel to another more centrally-located hospital. When I finally call them up directly to see if they still have my straws, they know all too well who I am. They have been waiting for me, or more precisely, for my money. There are apparently years of storage fees outstanding. I owe close to $1,000. What would have happened if I had never checked up on this, I wonder? Would I one day be walking past some pawn shop in Toronto, and there in the window next to the watches, the saxophone, the old Canadian Legion of Honor war medallions are three straws of my semen falling out in a dusty shaft of sunlight? The folks at the lab view me with suspicion, but not because I am a deadbeat dad. What the folks at the lab seem disquieted by is this radio story. They don't really understand why I want to tell it. I am reduced to using icky tricks, preambling each phone call by describing myself as having been "a cancer patient," which seems a little melodramatic to me and leaves them completely unmoved anyway. Or if I'm not being treacly, I'm playing the ridiculous schlemiel, stammering and apologizing. It leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, and all to no avail. What begins as frosty but cordial relations between the nursing manager and myself devolves steadily. I fly to Toronto and she refuses to speak with me outright. I am Scrooge, revisiting Christmas past, walking through a room, trying to right a wrong and being completely unheard and unable to physically manifest. I will not be able to see the facility, tour the vault or wherever it is they keep the straws, or ask her my many medical questions. My audience with the sperm of the Ivy League is denied. I recall the last time I saw these fugitive children of mine. It was in the summer of 1987. By that time, my illness was fairly advanced. I was some 35 pounds underweight, an old man at the age of 23. Virtually the last thing on my mind was onanism. I had been told if I could get the sample downtown to the lab within 45 minutes, I could do the harvest at home. To this end, the lab technician at the sperm bank had given me some sterile containers. In the abstract, this sounded far more comfortable, producing my sample in the privacy of my childhood bedroom. But privacy isn't really the name of the game when your mother has to drive you to the hospital. I've never been licensed by a sitting government to drive a car, and I'm far too weak to take public transport. By happy coincidence, my mother's office is two blocks away from the hospital. After breakfast, she says to me euphemistically, "I'm going to start the car. Why don't you go upstairs and get ready," emphasis and winking italics my own. If this freaks her out, she doesn't let on. She's a physician herself, so it might just seem par for the course to tell your youngest child to go upstairs and salute the archbishop and then join you in the car. My deed done-- not my finest effort after what has arguably been half a lifetime of practice-- I put on my coat and grab the jar. It is made of clear plastic. In college, my friend's parents came to New York for a psychoanalysts convention. Getting onto a hotel elevator crowded with their colleagues, my friend turned to his mother and stage whispered, "Jocasta, I want you." But it is just me and my mother in the car. There are no Freudians to entertain with the discomfort of the Oedipal situation. Even in my weakened state, I'm certainly not going to ride next to my mother with a transparent vial of spooge in my lap. I look around the kitchen for a suitable bag and find the perfect one. It is four by six of white paper. It has clearly been in the kitchen since I was very young, because when I turn it over, I see that it's printed with the image of an orange pumpkin and a black cat, and in dripping, blood-soaked calligraphy, the words "trick or treat." Among my destinations on this trip up to Toronto is the site of the old hospital. I'm told it's being used now as a homeless shelter. It was in one of Toronto's few rubby-dub neighborhoods. There were a lot of hookers and also a Christian ministry back when I was a patient. The area has clearly been cleaned up, because I don't see any hookers or visibly Christian folks either. And the purported homeless people going into the old Princess Margaret all look like backpacking Northern Europeans. I stand in the circular driveway, the place where the smoking patients used to congregate with their IV stands and enjoy their last cigarettes. I think of that song "This Used to be My Playground." I'm trying to actually feel something about the whole thing as I stand there, but I'm not really coming up with anything. The building is possibly one of the more important structures in my life. I feel like I should well up with some sort of nostalgic yearning, mourning my youth, anything. But it's just not happening, which is very strange. Or not. Once on my way home from radiation, a man came running out of the Knights of Columbus chapter near the hospital. Another man came running after him. And like a cartoon panel come to life, the man giving chase actually yelled, "Stop! Thief!" I remember thinking to myself, "well, that's very cliche." I was close to the robber. I could have stuck my foot out and tripped him perhaps, but I didn't. He made it across the street, dodging traffic, and was out of sight in a moment. The man from the Knights of Columbus stood frustrated on the sidewalk as the cars rushed by. He turned and gave me a dirty look for my inaction. I wanted to say something. I wanted to explain how weak and tired and sick I was at that point, but more than that how I had essentially let go of any sense of agency. I could lie on a table. They could shoot me full of gamma rays. I would eat what was put in front of me. The hair could fall from my head. My throat could be burned. But I was not involved. I was a stranger here. That he could even see me standing there seemed vaguely surprising. They say that times of crisis are the true test of one's character. I really wouldn't know, since my character took a powder that year, leaving in its stead a jewel-bright hardness. I was at my very cleverest that year, an airless, relentless kind of quippiness. Every time a complex human emotion threatened to break the surface of my consciousness, out would come a joke. Come on, give us a smile. I was Thanatos' rodeo clown. I still am. And Eros' as well, as it turns out. Years later, in a tender embrace in bed with my first real boyfriend, he said my name. "Oh, David." I stopped, sat up, and responded in my best Ed Wynn, "mm-yesss?" This kind of behavior essentially killed things between us. There was a period during the illness when I was at my very sickest, at 115 pounds hovering in and out of consciousness. This month and a half was the one period in my life when I was not faking it, where I was not deflecting every emotion with repartee. That it would take millions of cancer cells lining up for their big Esther Williams finale in my lymphatic system for me to finally shut up is sobering. Or would be, were I to think about, which of course I choose not to. What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories, procedural and de-populated. It's as if a neutron bomb went off and all you're left with are hospital corridors where you're scanning the walls for familiar photographs. Sometimes in the absence of emotion, your only recourse is to surround yourself with objects, assemble the relics about you, as I am doing in flying to Toronto to commune with my little Eskimo Pie children. For the moment, this physical evidence will have to serve as proof that the illness was real, because even now, I only half-believe what I'm telling you. David Rakoff in New York. Coming up, little pinko houses for you and me. Soviets move into Capitalist neighborhoods in America. And more in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, What Remains, stories in which people return to a scene of big, dramatic change years after the fact. We have arrived at act two of our program. Act Two, Exiles on Main Street. What remains of the Cold War now, years later? Keith Gessen's family were Soviet Jews, who emigrated from Moscow in 1981 when Keith was six. They eventually moved to the well-off suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, where Keith learned to revere certain heroes of the Cold War, heroes who included people just down the street. Our house in Newton looked like all the other houses, which in turn looked like ours. But in fact, our home was an enclave of Moscow culture. Our best loved writers were those who had stood up to Stalin and died for it. The only framed photo in the entire house was of me at 12 with a kindly old man who everyone assumed was my grandfather, but who was, in fact, Andrei Sakharov, the inventor of the Soviet hydrogen bomb who later became a dissident and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. And then there was the soundtrack to my childhood. I put in my hours of rap music and The Doors. But when my parents controlled the tape deck, we listened to Alexander Galich, a Soviet dissident who sang with great pathos of labor camps, executioners, and exiles. These words were playing in cars and homes all across the suburbs of the Northeast states, where the Soviet dissidents landed in the '70s. Even now, after the Soviet Union has collapsed and they could go home, many of the most prominent former dissidents live in places like Revere, Massachusetts, Aberdeen, New Jersey, and Ithaca, New York. It never made sense to me. A whole heroic generation of Russians had gone from a place of drama and conviction to these dull, groomed streets. And I decided at long last to figure out why. My name is Pavel Litvinov. I'm a physics teacher in Hackley School. And we are standing in my lab. It's a physics lab. That's where I teach and spend several hours every day, five days a week. The Hackley School is a prep school on a pretty, hillside campus in Tarrytown, New York. But Litvinov's story of being a humdrum physics teacher won't fly with me. I know who he is. Well, we see our football field, but they actually play lacrosse because it's lacrosse season. This is the Litvinov who, when Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia in August, 1968, led the most famous Soviet protest of the Cold War era, a protest of eight people in Red Square who were quickly beaten up, arrested, and packed off to Siberia, labor camps, and a psychiatric institution. A few nights before going out into Red Square, Litvinov attended a get together where Alexander Galich himself, the singer so popular in my family's Cutlass Sierra, performed a new song about resisting authority, whose most ringing phrase was a call to arms. "Will you dare go out into the square at the appointed hour?" Well, Litvinov dared. He spent four years in Siberia and was forced out of the Soviet Union in 1974. For many people, it's just very strange that I was ready to risk my freedom and maybe even life. It's definitely different. And they look at me, a middle-aged man and so on. And I don't look like the one who would do such things. And they would be very much amazed. It's not as if Litvinov stopped his political activity when he arrived in the states. Until the Soviet Union collapsed, he gave speeches, published a chronicle of Soviet human rights abuses, and served on the board of Amnesty International. But in America, politics were merely politics, not a way of being. Galich himself came to United States after immigration years ago after that. And we had a concert for him. A small concert, maybe about 40 people in some place across the river in Nyack. And he started to sing his songs. And in America, it didn't make much sense. It still was great poetry, great songs. But somehow, it didn't sound, and even Galich didn't sound the same. I remember listening to him in Moscow apartments when he was singing for dissidents, when the feeling of danger, feeling that tomorrow somebody can be arrested, some people were in prison, some people in labor camp, in mental hospital for their dissident activity. Everything was so sharp and so painful that Galich's songs were just a very subtle, very desperate thing. He tells me that he doesn't regret coming here, that the achievements he's proud of these days are his successes with his students. Litvinov see nothing incongruous about Soviet dissidents settling in the American suburbs. That's what is great about America, because everyone in America is something, has some experience. You go and you find out that on the next street, there could be mobsters, there could be Soviet dissidents, there could be some character or some guy who made $20 million because he invented some software. And that's what is incredible in the United States. And yet his old friends in Russia are still on the front lines. Sergei Kovalev was Yeltsin's human rights commissioner and a longtime deputy in the Duma. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] is an important human rights activist. And I cannot rid myself of the notion that there is another life that Litvinov might have lived, a heroic life in which he stayed in Russia. I ask him about it, about whether he ever thinks about that life. And finally, he tells me that of course he's thought about it. It would have meant going to a labor camp instead of coming here. And if he had come out alive, he tells me, well, then yes, he likely would have become a politician or activist after the regime collapsed. He's very polite as he says this. If he had survived. Because millions died in those camps. And it dawns on me, more powerfully than it ever has, that in asking him if he feels out of place here, I'm asking if he might not rather be dead. By the time the Soviet Union did collapse and there was nothing preventing him from moving back, he felt it was too late. I already became very American. My life is here. At your trial, you were talking about the attitude of the authorities to the people. And you said, "this is what I have fought against and what I shall continue to fight against for the rest of my life." Could you have imagined then this future that you've had? About continue it the rest of my life, I still believe in those things. I still, when I can, contribute whatever little I can contribute to that. I do it. But it's a different life. And you change with age. When I left Russia, I was 33 and now I am almost 60. So the changes are there. So I'm a different person. I still feel a lot of connection, but I know that I am American. In 1993, Yeltsin decided to bomb the first Russian parliament. I was so disgusted with that. And I wrote a letter which was published in several Russian newspapers. And most of my friends disagreed with me. And my very close friends started polemics against me, which I didn't mind. But basically, part of the message was-- which I minded-- that I don't live there, I don't understand life there. And from America, I have no right to say it. That was the implication, that I'm a foreigner. And I suddenly realized that they probably are right. And that was a good cure from any thoughts about returning. We're standing in front of 54 Maplewood Avenue in Newton, Massachusetts. If anyone should have a reasonable perspective on dissidents in the suburbs, it would be my old friend Matvei, who is dissident royalty. The kindly old Sakharov in the framed photo atop our stereo wasn't my grandfather, but he was Matvei's. And for most of Matvei's childhood, he was exiled in Gorky. Matvei's family lived near us-- cross Rt. 9 on Parker, take a right and another right-- and we had Russian and chess lessons together as part of a parental rear-guard action against our creeping Americanization. His parents listened to Galich too. More importantly, his father was Sakharov's spokesman in the West. So they always had reporters and camera crews swarming the house. I think that a lot of the neighbors were very suspicious of us. And because my dad was so busy, he didn't have time to rake the lawn or mow the grass sometimes. And people would complain and say that our house was-- that we weren't being respectful to our Newton neighbors because we weren't cleaning up. But it lowers the property value if you don't mow your lawn. Right. Exactly. We were committing a Capitalist sin. I tell Matvei that as a child, I found it hard to have an American life at school and a Russian life at home. But maybe he felt different because his parents were on a mission from God. I didn't see myself as different from the other immigrant kids just because my parents were involved in this. It just meant that they would go away for a month to Europe or something. And I would be like, well, where are my parents? And they'd be touring Europe and talking to Mitterrand and I don't know, all sorts of weird people out there. Did you ever get called a Commie? Yeah, I remember being called something like-- my teachers in junior high would say things like, where are you "Russian" to? Mr. Roberts. Or Matvei, you look so Red today. Like most kids, Matvei didn't think his family was so special until Sakharov died in 1989, when Matvei was 16, and they went to Moscow for the funeral. 50,000 people came out to mourn his grandfather. And I think that was a turning point when I realized what I had missed, what I had not been old enough to really understand. It was just an incredible physical experience, in the sense that the space of Moscow was completely flooded by people following the coffin. And I remember just walking for miles behind, and sort of in a daze because I was thinking about all these things. But it was not so much of a turning point that Matvei decided to devote his life to politics. I think Matvei learned something different from his parents' dissident lives than they probably ever intended. He has a dissident's relationship to the world but without the politics. He simply doesn't fit into society, and he doesn't seem distressed about it at all. He lives in a part of Brooklyn that's only barely connected to public transport. He does not have a job. He does various projects of his own invention. His latest is a biweekly 'zine on theatre theory. Meanwhile, his family wants him to settle down to more traditional work and move closer to the trains. His grandmother, Yelena Bonner, who has been one of the Russian government's most acerbic critics, is also very critical of Matvei, especially since he dropped out of a doctoral program at Yale. She has often told me that she is going to die if I don't get a PhD. What Matvei's family wants for him is the kind of life they had to forfeit. Political work took an enormous toll on his parents. It was a completely marginal way of life. It meant just forgetting about a career and forgetting about a normal, decent human life. It just meant constantly running or constantly fighting something. For Matvei, there isn't very much glamour associated with dissidents. And so he doesn't find it so strange that they would live in the suburbs. Well, maybe they got what they wanted. I don't feel like there's anything so shameful in that. Yeah, for me, just having the dissidents be something that were talked about in the house. And I probably have a more mythic view of them than you do. And maybe that's why I want to be so critical of them. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like it's hard for me to romanticize the dissidents because we never talked about "the dissidents" in my house. We talked about my grandpa and my grandma. And that was very different. And it was not really about their political choices but about survival. My name is Alexander Gessen and I am your father. My father was not a dissident, but he brought all of us here from Russia and he raised me to admire them. He now lives in a big house near the ocean on Cape Cod. And he thinks it's ridiculous that I'm asking why the dissidents haven't returned. They built their lives here. And do you want them to just extricate themselves and go back to nothing? It's very difficult. If I feel this way, it's largely because you have instilled these ideas into me. You feel what? Tell me what you feel. What are you talking about right now? Well, largely my idea of the moral life comes from listening to Galich, from listening to stories about political heroism and moral heroism. But meanwhile, we were in the suburbs. Does that makes sense to you as a contradiction? A contradiction between our lifestyle and our admirations? No, I don't think that everybody has to be a hero. Of course, if you are saying that you would prefer to have a father a hero, a dissident instead of just a suburban father, I could understand that. Well, I wasn't-- but the dissidents are also in the suburbs. So it would be the same situation, really. You mean, these people are not heroic enough, that they stopped being heroes? This is what you are complaining about, yeah? Probably they did their part and they feel that they did enough. This is why they are staying here. They did their parts. They cannot do much now and they don't have to do anything now. Of course my father's right. But somehow there's a part of me that feels the dissidents shouldn't be here. I think it's because, as a kid in the suburbs, I thought that history is what happened to other people, to people in Moscow and Paris and New York and Woodstock. They were out there doing these important things, and we were here, comfortable on Woodcliff Road, not doing much of anything at all. The suburbs are about sitting out history and about private lives. And the dissidents certainly have a right to all that. But when they were in Russia, they proved that it matters too what you do in public, that it is not enough to be moral behind the walls of your castle. They still believe that, of course, as I believe it, fiercely, from my comfortable, American home. Keith Gessen in Massachusetts. He first wrote about dissidents in the suburbs for feedmagazine.com. Act Three, Shopping for a Better Future. What's left of an old neighborhood when a new one starts to form on top of it, when lots of money floods in but the old residents stick around? This American Life producer Julie Snyder has this story. It says something that one of the most profound social experiments in Chicago is happening inside a supermarket. And while the executives of Dominick's Finer Foods wouldn't call it an experiment, there's really no other way to see it. For years, leaders from Jesse Jackson to Ronald Reagan have argued that if businesses would just locate in poorer areas, entire communities could change. This is a story of a corporation that tried to follow that model. See, this used to be, like, a predominantly black neighborhood. And up until maybe two years ago, it just like changed overnight. Overnight. Justin Thomas has lived in the Cabrini-Green housing projects on and off for the last 30 years, and works in the new store Dominick's built across the street. A thoughtful man who treats everyone like he's their older brother, he tells me that his job in the store cafe is to basically "do everything the females can't," which basically means a lot of heavy lifting and cleaning. There was a lot of crazy stuff happening over here. A few years ago, you could barely rest for shooting and gangs and stuff. And they started tearing down some of the buildings in the projects. And when the neighborhood, the community could have been in a real crisis, up pops this store. Two years ago, the Chicago city government began a massive revitalization of the Cabrini-Green area. They gave economic incentives to Dominick's to move in. Old buildings came down. A new library went up. A park opened. And acres were cleared to build three-story townhomes where trashed-out cars and crack houses once stood. The whole neighborhood began to look different, people living in the projects next door to yuppies in the new condos and lofts. One afternoon, Justin and I go out to the parking lot in front of the supermarket. Over there to the right was a basketball court. Right there where the Blockbuster is. I think it may be extended from the Blockbuster maybe to right here. Like, to maybe where this BMW is right here? Yeah. It was like a haven, really, for people that get high. Of the 6,000 people who live in the projects, 93% are unemployed. And when Dominick's cut their deal with the city, they agreed to hire 2/3 of their workforce from the neighborhood. It's one thing to set out to do something like this, and you get all of the warm and fuzzies and everything looks good. And then you get the store up and running, and then it falls apart. Dwayne Howard is the head of human resources at Dominick's. An African American man in his 40s, he first started coming to Cabrini-Green a decade ago. For years, he was here every week as part of the Cabrini-Green tutoring program and thought he knew a little bit about the neighborhood. But even he was surprised at how unprepared some people were for regular work. 35-year-old men were applying who'd never held any jobs ever. There's no other way to put it other than you need to be sensitive to what has been a way of life for some of the employees that are working in the store, having been a product of their upbringing in the Cabrini-Green housing project. The city paid for a two-week course where applicants were taught not to wear jeans to their interviews, to bring their own pens to fill out applications, to not argue with customers, to come to work on time. In short, Dominick's ran into exactly the same problems that any government agency or charity slams up against when it tries to move people off welfare and into jobs. The Cabrini store manager told me that even now, some employees won't come in for days. And when they do finally show up, they're shocked to find out they've been fired. A few months back, two step-sisters, one working the register and the other bagging groceries, had an argument brewing their entire shift, ending with punches being thrown right there at the checkout line. Most of the early hires didn't work out. One manager who'd been at 14 stores over 25 years said he'd never seen a turnover rate so high. Store execs won't say how many of the original staff of 250 are still with Dominick's, but they admit it may be as low as 1/4. And every employee they let go, they have to find and hire another from the neighborhood. None of this gives you a sense of the atmosphere in the store, which in a way is the most remarkable thing about the entire experiment. When I first walked into the Dominick's about six months ago, a store employee, a small woman in her 70s, greeted me at the door, handed me a shopping basket, and told me to let her know if there was anything she could help me find. In the aisles, customers were chatting with each other. Teens from Cabrini hang out by the pizza slice counter. Elderly men drink coffee and read the paper in the store cafe. At the checkout line, the cashier was telling a joke, a slightly racy one even, to the customer in front of me. It didn't seem like they knew each other, but they were both laughing. She was maybe 20, African-American. He was a balding white guy. I thought maybe this was some sort of special day at Dominick's, like maybe the employees were being evaluated or it was the store's anniversary. But almost every time I've gone back, the same types of things happen. If you ask an employee where something is, they don't just point in a general direction and leave. They actually drop what they're doing and take you over to the product. There's a man who works in the liquor department who has stopped my husband in the store, taken his bottle of wine out of the cart, and replaced it with a cheaper and better version. People seem genuinely happy to have these jobs and to have the first decent store they've ever had in this neighborhood. It's also one of the most comfortably integrated environments in Chicago. The diversity of the stock is almost a laughably obvious metaphor for the diversity of the customers. Collard greens sit next to arugula. Smoked ham hocks and turkey tails literally lay right next to gourmet smoked sausage with sun-dried tomato, basil, and pine nuts. I like the store. It's OK. I don't think that they really built that store for us. Who do you think they built it for? Oh, for the people moving in. The middle class people with more money than we have. Dan Underwood has lived in the area all of his life, before the housing projects were even built. He headed the grammar school's champion drill team and runs a community gardening project called Cabrini Greens where kids grow vegetables and sell them at a profit. When I ask him what remains of the old neighborhood now that it has a new shopping center, he tells me, pretty much everything-- gangs, drugs, and poor people. Standing in between three of the high-rises, it's clear the benefits of redevelopment don't extend much further than the plot of land Dominick's sits on. See now, do you see the police car sitting out front right here? He points at a squad car and one woman yelling down from the fifth floor to a woman in the parking lot who ignores her and strides away. Oh, those people. They're arguing about drugs. They're arguing about drugs. But the guys will be standing right down there selling drugs now. When the police come, they're all going out of there. How often do the police come by? Oh, God. A lot. They're here all the time. They never leave. They never leave. Dan says what everyone at Cabrini says, that it's just a matter of time before the city tears down the high-rises and sends them all packing. People said this to me months ago, and it wasn't clear if it was paranoia. And then recently, they were proven right in every detail. The housing authority has announced a plan to demolish the Cabrini high-rises and build a mixed-income community in its place. It's still not entirely clear how it will shake out, but the most likely scenario is this-- some people will be allowed to stay in the neighborhood in new and improved public housing, and the rest-- probably most people-- will be moved to poor neighborhoods, God knows where, or abandoned. Things change so much. When I was a little boy, eight, nine years old, those projects were not there. The rural houses, do you know where they are? On the other side of Oak Street, that was Italian. The Italians lived there. And black kids couldn't walk over there. You got in a fight. Italian gangs were there. And you walked over there, you got in a fight. The only time that you were allowed to come over there was on Babaluci Day, which was when they had the carnivals and stuff. You could go there. They'd let you come during Babaluci Day. And you could come to ride on the Ferris Wheel and all that kind of stuff. And the Cardinal would come and he had his float. And it was peaceful then, that day. After that, the next day, you couldn't go over there. You couldn't go over there. So in a way, right now, this time period is sort of like Babaluci Day. You can come in. You can come in. You can come in and you can come to the Dominick's. But this is not for you. You have to go. Everyone assumes the few people who will be allowed to stay in the area and live in the nice, new public housing will be the best bets, people who are off public aid, people with jobs. With this in mind, Justin, who's only worked in the store for four months, has made it his own personal project to informally recruit people for jobs at Dominick's. He talks it up at his Baptist Church. He encourages his kid's friends. When people find out he works at Dominick's, he helps to set them up with interviews. I mean, in a few years from now, if you're not in the workplace, where are you going to be? The way the neighborhood is changing, where are you going to be? You definitely can't live over here and sell drugs. That's going to be a thing of the past. So what do you do? So it's kind of like shaping up for those people that will and for those that won't. I don't know. I mean, God help them. I don't know where they'll be years from now. At this point, the results of this social experiment are as follows-- a few hundred people have gotten and held on to jobs, some in ways that have changed their lives. And 6,000 Cabrini residents will mostly feel the experiment's effects on the day they're told to move out. Julie Snyder. To visit the most interesting supermarket in America, it's Division and Sedgwick here in Chicago. Our program produced today by Julie and myself with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, and Blue Chevigny. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who kills every tender moment between us by saying-- Mm-yesss? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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One, two. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And I'm standing at the corner of Diversey and Broadway in Chicago. As I record this, it's just a few minutes after 3 o'clock on a weekday afternoon here in Chicago. And the people are everywhere, even though it's still the middle of the workday. In the bread shop just off the corner, I stuck my head in, and there are people at the tables. Some of them are just sitting there reading books. I saw two guys speaking Spanish walk in and find their friend, who greeted them in Spanish. And they headed out. A guy in a goatee and a knit cap just walked by wearing a pair of professional grade stereo headphones around his neck, talking to his buddy. In the last 10 minutes, I've seen three different people, all men, wearing professional grade stereo headphones just on the street. I didn't even know this was a trend. How you doing? A guy in a suit's staring at me. In the hours when most of us are at work or at school, there is a whole life going on out here, outside, an alternate world. I would say it's a world with its own rules, but its rules are actually a lot like the rules of Saturday, except taking place during the week and different people taking part. This is the secret world of daytime. Guy just ran the red light. Can't get his plates. Well, back in the studio now. Today, we take a little tour of the secret life of daytime with five separate stories. Act One, Why Aren't You at Work?, in which one intrepid reporter has a little chat with some of those people who are on the street at 3:00. Act Two, In a World Full of Soybeans, the Men Turn to Love, the surprising story of how people kill time at one Lincoln, Nebraska, grain elevator. Act Three, The Geography of Childhood, a tale of the secret places that children go during the day in one town in Vermont. Act Four, Invisible Man. A postman explains how it is that he can be so much a part of the scenery that people commit crimes in front of him. Crimes on quiet, daytime streets, as if he is not there. Act Five, $82.50 a Day, writer Mona Simpson reads from her forthcoming novel about the daytime life of Filipino nannies during the hours in which they run the lovely homes of certain Los Angeles neighborhoods. Stay with us. Act One, Why Aren't You at Work? Let's begin with a few simple answers to a few simple questions. All those people you see in the middle of the day when you run out to a doctor's appointment-- you see them in coffee shops and bookstores in most cities and suburbs-- who are they? Why are they not at work? Investigative reporter George Gurley tackled these tough questions on a scenic little island that we like to call Manhattan. Hello, America. I did what we all are tempted to do. On four afternoons, I approached these people and ask them why they weren't at work and what exactly were they doing. We haven't seen each other in about a week and a half. So we thought, let's get a bite to eat, and it's a beautiful day out, so we'll come to the park. Are you retired, are you still working? I'm semi-retired. I'm old enough to collect social security. But I still work a few days a week. Of course, next question is, what kind of work do you do? Don't tell my cat. I'm a furrier. Do you think that you've had a productive day today? I got showered. What are you doing right now? Why aren't you at work? I'm here on a business trip. Oh, OK. There we go. So I sort of am at work. So you're working. Right. As it turns out, a lot of these people actually have jobs, the kind of jobs where they set their own hours or work nights or weekends. They're actors, sculptors, bartenders. I met one guy who takes care of primates and other mammals at the Bronx Zoo, who has Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. Released from his cage, he spends those afternoons drinking screwdrivers, guilt-free. Daytime hours are different if you're not working. They're about going with the flow, one thing leading to another. Alana Canty, a 50-year-old English tutor from New Jersey, was in Central Park purely by coincidence. I was an extra on a TV show, which I got because-- I suffer from depression, and I don't actively pursue stuff like that. But I have a friend staying at my house. And he signed up with an agency. And they called last night, and I took the call. And I said, "Do you need any women?" He said, "Sure." OK. So I had to show up at 8 o'clock at the boathouse. And it was a taping of a scene from the program Once and Again, I think. And basically, we got $41 for standing in a crowd. So here I am having a lovely day in New York, all because my friend went to an extra agency. It's been-- The most productive I've done today is put my check in the bank. This is Jonathan Bradley, a bearded 25-year-old. I met him at the Angelica, a theater in SoHo that shows mostly independent films. It was around 3 o'clock, and a dozen or so people were waiting for their film to be announced or just hanging out. Inside the theater cafe, Jonathan was reading Village Voice after seeing his movie, killing some time before his customer service gig at a website. I asked him if there was anything else he could have achieved today. The only thing I could have done today was maybe, if I was home, I could've made some phone calls for our meditation group. I'm in a Buddhist group, and we're looking for a space. So if I was at home this morning, I could've made some phone calls on that. What would Buddha say about your day so far? That's a difficult question to answer because Buddhism is rarely a thing that is dogmatic like that, that says, you should perform this way. But I think just "use the time wisely" might be a good general statement. Across the cafe was Randy Maggiore, a long-haired 34-year-old actor. He just picked up some head shots and now is spending some free time visiting a friend. But he didn't feel like he was wasting time. For an actor, apparently, simply being awake to the world counts as work. It's sort of like my errands are, for me, part of my education because being out on the street and walking around and seeing new things and seeing people, I try to be as observant as I possibly can in regard to what I see. As an actor, it's like I constantly study character in people. So every day, right outside my door is an experience, I think, something to learn. Loafing? That's so colloquial. Loafing. This is Howard Moneth. He told me he does a little day trading, inherited some money. He was sitting on a bench and drinking a latte outside a Mott Street art gallery he helps run. Wearing a floppy blue hat and shades, he'd been catching rays there for 45 minutes and looked high on life, nearly beatific. Loafing. I would say that a lot of my life is loafing, and with spurts of activity in between, sort of trying to make up for loafing. I am loafing. Loafing is me. What do you think of the 9-to-5ers, people you see going into the subway at 8:30 and all that stuff? When I was a kid, I had summer jobs where I worked 9:00 to 5:00. And I wore a suit and a tie. My uncle ran Simon & Schuster, the publishing house. And I went down there. And I took the subway to Rockefeller Center. And I did this and that. And I go, this is the way to go. And then something happened. Something happened along the way. And I think I went a little bit off that path, and I never got back on it. And once you get away from it, once you get away from being able to get up and go to work at 9:00 to 5:00, I think it would take a catastrophic lifestyle change or a major lifestyle change-- that's a bus pulling up in front of us-- to get me back into 9:00 to 5:00. Do you feel sorry for those people at all? No, I admire them. I look at them, and in some ways, they make me feel inadequate, that they have somehow stuck nose to the grindstone. And I don't decry that as being something that I would never do. These people are heroes. While people like Howard are basking peacefully in the sun, the heroes are inside at their desks. They're looking at the clock, tired of the stress, the forced social interaction, the meetings, the constant threat of having to think, and say things to and smile at the same old coworkers, some of whom have become intolerable, talking on the phone loudly, laughing without justification, making slurping noises during their lunch. So the heroes do what any reasonable person would do. They stop working while they're at work, click around, check their stocks, shuffle to the office kitchen. Howard, at least, admits he's taking it easy. And he's outside, where the daytime hours have their own poetry, like the hours of 2:00 to 4:00. Between 2:00 and 4:00 is a very interesting time because the feeling of it, the day changes almost the most from 2:00 to 4:00. And-- --the feeling? Well, the shadows get longer. People start to get a little more energized. I think this is a-- the evening crowd, the night people, start to sort of stir at around 2:00 to 4:00. And there's a little more energy. But playing hooky from the 9 to 5 world isn't all lyrical musings about the changing of the light. None of us is going to feel sorry for any of these people. But there is a special kind of anxiety that's particular to skipping the normal work week. It can take a little while to get used to the idea that the regular world just goes on about its business without you. This is my friend Doug Elliott, who made some money as a lawyer and now doesn't work a 9 to 5 job. Walking around outside-- because New York is such a business-oriented city-- when people are walking around on the streets during the day, there's this sense of energy and going from this place to that place. And they're heading there, and they have direction. And I'm outside. I don't have any place I have to be. And I'm not part of that group. Doug spends his days on no particular schedule, negotiating business deals, writing short stories that so far haven't been published, and puttering around. Because I don't have a typical 9 to 5 job, the reality is that I'm never free. I'm never not working. I don't have that sense of closure to the day, ever, ever, ever. I always feel like there's something more I could be doing, there's something more I-- I walk into the bathroom, and I'll take work in with me. Doug and I headed outside, wandered through Union Square Park, the Heartland Brewery, Barnes and Noble, and ended up at the Old Town Bar. A few solitary drinkers were there. Doug ordered vodka. I got whiskey. Now it was almost 5:00 on Friday, the end of the traditional work week. That stillness and dreamy quality of daytime was being replaced by Manhattan noise and energy as little groups of 9 to 5ers filed into the Old Town. We watch them. They've clearly come straight from the office, excited that at last the drinking begins. At last, they've earned the right to recreation so circumscribed that its duration is even included in its name-- Happy Hour. George Gurley is a reporter for the New York Observer, for whom he first investigated the secret life of daytime loafers. Act Two, In a World Full of Soybeans, the Men Turn to Love. Let us now head to a grain elevator on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska, rising 150 feet above cornfields and railroad tracks, holding over a million bushels of corn, soybeans, wheat, and milo. Meghan Daum explains how the daylight hours are spent there. Grain elevators are, in many ways, the skyscrapers of rural America. They're the structures in the far corner of the paintings, the towers that pierce an otherwise uninterrupted sky. There are five men who work in one particular grain elevator in Lincoln. And they spend their days at one end or the other of two extremes. During harvest time, they've been known to work more than 48 hours straight. But in the winter and early spring, when crops lie dormant under layers of frost, and just a few farm trucks pull in over the course of the day, the workers at this grain elevator have something else on their minds. We have so much to teach each other. And I have so much to give to you and so much to share with you. Yeah, we are working yet. But every now and then, if a truck comes in during a commercial, it's kind of nice. It's when they come in right in the middle of the heated up things is when it gets kind of bad. I can't wait to give birth to you. And I can't wait to just kiss your face, hold you in my arms. How much you want to bet she has a miscarriage? That could well be. Every day at 11:00 AM, these men stop what they're doing, get out their sandwiches or heat up some Chinese food, and gather together in front of the small television set in the office to watch the soap opera The Young and the Restless. They've been watching it for years. This is no casual viewing. It's an obsession. I have a question for you, a very important question to me. Son, I need to understand why a boy your age, with everything going for you, feels the need to obliterate himself with alcohol. Because you did. Mom's a notorious alcoholic. Oh, really? Yeah. She lost another son to alcohol some years ago. The five men who work in this elevator seem, for the most part, just like the kind of guys you'd expect to load grain off of trucks and onto trains by the ton. Most are thick and burly. They have calloused hands, wear heavy work boots, and are often completely covered in dust. But their knowledge of The Young and the Restless is encyclopedic. They talk about it the way guys talk about sports. They do a lot of yelling at the screen. They argue about who's stalking the young, saucy Victoria Newman. They have lengthy discussions about a business tycoon's missing sperm sample and where it will end up. Noel, the supervisor, patiently explains to me how it is that Mackenzie, an orphan, ended up in Genoa City, the fictional setting of the show. Her father was a missionary in India and was presumed dead in a raid on a village. And he didn't even know he had this daughter, I don't think. He'd had it by a woman in town. And I don't know who she was, where she's gone. She's in St. Louis right now because Jill went to St. Louis looking for the mother to find out if Mac is Brock's daughter. That's Rick. He's 39 and has been doing grain elevator work for 10 years. He's married, has a six-year-old son and a job on the side as an exterminator. If I'm at home by myself and my wife and my kids are gone, I'll sit there, and I'll pop a beer about 11 o'clock and sit there and watch soaps. When he was a kid in the early '70s, he watched The Young and the Restless with his mom and his sisters. And these days, he's responsible for telling his wife what's going on in the show. He's even been known to read Soap Opera Digest while standing in line at the supermarket. So what do a bunch of relatively macho guys see in a show that's supposedly targeted at women? I can tell you that when the men at the grain elevator watch, they keep a running commentary during the love scenes, but sit in rapt attention when the characters talk business. And maybe the show was designed with this in mind. For every mushy relationship story, there are bank buyouts and shady business deals involving Jack Abbott's company, Jabot, and Jack's nemesis, Victor Newman. That's really the best part of the show, Victor trying to get back Jabot and buying all the banks and all that. We watch another one. It's Bold and Beautiful. And everybody's crying on that show at least once a day. It's more mushy. It was pretty good for about a year. And then all of a sudden, it just died off. But we still watch it, though. For these guys, the fascination with The Young and the Restless has a lot to do with one character, the enigmatic, inscrutable Victor Newman. When Victor's on screen, the men are silent. With his ambiguous, foreign sounding accent, the dignified gray around his temples, and the trademark leather sport coat that suggests he's far too important to wear an ordinary business suit, Victor is power incarnate. You can't describe him without sounding like a soap opera. Women want him. Men idolize him. The way he talks, and he's got that whisper, and when he raises his voice-- When he raises his voice, that means he's pretty upset about something. And whatever Victor wants, Victor gets, because he's got all the money that you can think of. He's buying all the banks so he can get back at Jack. And he told Jack, when he wanted to get company back-- he walked into his office where Jack was sitting in the chair acting like a big hot-shot. He put his hands in his pockets, and he leaned back. And he whispered, and he whispered. And then he gradually walked over to the fireplace. He grabbed this picture off the fireplace, turned around, and slapped it on top of some kind of trophy, and screamed and says, "I'm going to crush you. Just remember that." And then he put his hands on this collar, tucked in, shrugged his shoulders, and he walked out like a gentleman. An then Jack, I'm telling you, he was scared to death. Victor is a force that seems to spin like a tornado across the fields that surround the elevator. Around here, soaps are watched as closely as the weather. We work in a farming area. And a lot of the farmers I talk to, they'll come in with their grain. Or if they're out in the field, they always take their lunch. And I would say, probably 90% of the farmers and their wives come in, have their lunch, and watch the soaps. We'll sit here and talk on the phone even about that. But they're taking that lunch break, and they're watching the show. During the slow months, the TV will stay on after The Young and the Restless. And if the men aren't doing anything else, they'll come into the office and watch other soaps. But in a month or so, late spring will warm up the fields. And things will get busier and busier until harvest time, when the work will be nonstop. As Noel dumps 250 bushels of soybeans into the truck pit, a load from one of just a few trucks that came in today, you can only imagine what it's like to get 100 or more of these trucks every day, and then spend the night loading them into trains a mile long. These are great beans. This year, almost all the crops in Nebraska were real good quality. These guys might miss some episodes come fall. By then, the stalker might have been caught. The father of Ashley's baby might be revealed. And Victor's sperm sample might have been put to use. But part of the beauty of soaps is that they move so slowly, that you can miss months, even years, and still be able to catch up in a few days. Soaps are nothing if not daily reminders of the virtues of patience. Just as the farming community waits for the seasons to change, waits for the corn to grow, waits for the price of grain to rise enough so that they might turn a profit, they wait for something to actually happen on The Young and the Restless. We hear enough these days about how fast the world is moving. Maybe it's good to know that there's still a place in America where stalkers are at large and sperm samples are up for grabs, but where time moves slowly. Meghan Daum in Lincoln. Coming up, neither rain nor sleet nor snow-- if you know what I mean. Delivering the mail on the West side of Chicago, where the only people in the streets during the day are drug dealers-- do people even use the word snow for drugs anymore? We don't even bother to answer that question. In a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week in our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Our program today, The Secret Life of Daytime, stories of all the things that are happening in the world unnoticed in broad daylight, things that many of us miss because we are stuck at our jobs. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, The Geography of Childhood. In the early 1970s, a geographer named Roger Hart did a study of exactly where it is that children go during the daytime. For two years, he followed 86 children, all the children in a small town in Vermont, during the hours when parents were away at work. In this rural setting, nearly every child, nearly every one, had a secret hiding place somewhere, a spot that adults usually did not know about. One little boy made a clearing in his parents' crop fields. Some sisters had a spot in an opening in the woods, a kind of playhouse with rocks from the river, that were set up as a pretend telephone and a pretend TV. The extraordinary quantity of these places in those days-- that is, in a town where children were free to do what they wanted-- sometimes, I would walk through a field of very tall grass, and then, find in the middle of the field a couple of shelves, beautifully decorated with lots of little objects on it, but no walls. And this was their special place. Two children who I was just chatting with one day-- and I think they were four and five years old-- and they said, "Oh, yes, we'd love to show you our fern house." Well, I'd never seen a fern house before, so I followed them. And they had this little place that was a bower, really, of evergreen trees. And beneath it was fern that they would pick and then turn into beds and pillows. There were imaginary windows which they shared in their agreement the location of, but which could not be seen. And it was a very, very beautiful space. It sounds so romantic. Yeah. The fact was, I happened to choose a small town then because I wanted something that was manageable for me to look at. Later on, I came and did research in New York City. And certainly, in this city, there's been lots of places that are also very special, built, created by children as part of their desire, commonly with one or two close friends, to create a special place that's removed from the adult world-- often on the rooftop, sometimes in the cellar, sometimes beneath a stoop. Why do you think it is that it was so common for children to have a secret place? They're engaging and developing a sense of self as something separate from others. That is a psychological struggle that takes a lifetime, from a very early age, when children, for example, turn a chair upside down and go inside it, and say, "This is my place." They're engaging in that kind of developing a sense of self. Did you make actual maps? Oh, yes. I've got one map of just three houses, which show all the places they transformed in one year. And there was, I think, seven children there. And there's probably 14 locations that are either little houses or racing tracks, or villages or cities, or airports that they built. In a small town like you were studying, was daytime, in particular, the province of children? The town kind of belonged to the kids? Yes, I think that used to be true even in cities. The greatest users of the outdoor space were children and, ironically, the elderly. They're the people who have to find close to home an interesting environment for themselves. So the world has changed enormously for children. Children now spend much more of their time in either programmed activities or supervised activities, under surveillance, you might say. Children are not outside. You don't see kids in the street in most neighborhoods. You don't hear them at night or in the early evening like you used to. Well, I know with kids who live here in the city of Chicago, parents are careful about their kids, simply won't let them out. And the worse the neighborhood, the more strictly the kids are controlled. And so their daytime space, literally, is just in the living room in front of the television. Yeah. Even in the daytime, also, rural America children don't have the freedom they used to. There's fears everywhere. Geographer Roger Hart. He published his findings in a book called Children's Experience of Place, now out of print. You can see a few of his maps on the geography of childhood on the This American Life website, www.thislife.org. Act Four, Invisible Man. It's not just children and the elderly who are left in quiet, residential neighborhoods when the working people have vacated to go to work. Other people pass through. They see things. This American Life producer Alex Bumberg spent a few hours with a Chicago postman to find out what exactly it is that he sees. When a botanist walks through a neighborhood, he might classify the houses he sees by what kind of trees are growing in the yard. That one has an old maple growing next to it, this one an oak. It only makes sense, then, that when a mailman walks through a neighborhood, he has his own system. On this route here, you'll find that there are many different mailboxes. Just about every mail receptacle there is, you'll find on this route here. You have your mailboxes, you have your mail slots, you have a wall of mailboxes. There are many different sizes. You'll see the different forms as we make these deliveries. I'm Henry. I'm the mailman on the far west side here. And we're on a street now, one of the blocks that I deliver. And so far, it looks like a vacant street. The only thing that's moving now is a car. Maybe I see two men, one of them working on a lawn. And down the block, which I can see a guy standing about two blocks down. Now, what he's doing or what he's waiting on, I have no idea. Actually, Henry's lying. He has some idea. After all, there's only two categories of people he sees on this part of his route during the day-- elderly retirees and gang members. The guy on the corner, he's not elderly. But Henry's worked this neighborhood for 20 years. And he has to come back here every day. So no matter how many times I ask him to be more explicit, he never refers to these guys we're passing as drug dealers or gang members. He calls them businessmen, workers, or boys in the 'hood. Hello, dear. You've got company. Yeah, you got something for me? The retirees, he calls "dear." And a surprising number are waiting for him at the door. Yeah. How's Carlton? He's doing pretty good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, I've been knowing her since I came out here many years ago, many years ago. You take care of my friend, now. I will. OK. All right. Have a good day. All right, now. We're the eyes and ears sometimes on elderly people. We see the mail piling up in the box or whatever, something is wrong. You put the mail in there, it's in there for two or three days, something's wrong. Let someone know something. There was one where I had to stop a police officer. There was a lady. She was an elderly lady, lord knows. She done passed now. But her door was open. And it's never open. It is never, ever open. So I stopped a police officer and told him. I said that this lady here, she lives on my route and everything. But her door was wide open, and she never leaves it open. Fortunately for me, that particular time, the lady had fell again and hurt herself. So they were able to take her to the hospital. Just that once. But it's done happened in many cities and many different routes. Henry and I turn down a side street. Several young men in starter jackets and baseball caps slouch against a parked car. Another guy stands on an opposite corner. Right now, as you see, there's only a few of them out. If you look on some of the corners, you'll find one or two of them out there. I told you it wouldn't be many. It is their 'hood. We just work in it. And how do they perceive you? Well, they perceive me as no threat. We're not friendly. There's a wave or hello or how you doing, and we go on about our business. As we walk by, I see one guy slap something into a second guy's outstretched palm. The second guy slips his hand into his pocket. The two never look at each other. What's weird is they make no effort to hide what clearly is a violation of federal drug policy in front of a federal employee. Henry says it's always like this. Simply because they don't feel that I'm a threat to them. They do not feel that I'm a threat to them. If, by chance, you drove around in a big Ford, in most cases, they would slow down. Whatever activity was going on, they would stop because they'll get hesitant. But as far as I'm concerned, I'm not a threat. They know I'm not a threat. So they continue doing what they're gonna do. I have nothing more or less to do with-- They know that I'm not going to bother them, and they don't bother me. So it's just like you're sort of-- it'd be like stopping just because a cloud crosses the sky or something. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Exactly right. You're just sort of a part of the day. I'm a part of the day. Matter of fact, it seems like I'm part of the fixture. There are things that happen naturally. It rains naturally. You have no say in that. When the sun comes out, you have no say in that. if someone-- Hey, how're you doing there?-- If someone dies, you have no control over that. Same with the mailman. You have no control over the mailman coming into your block or not. Mailman's going to be on every block, and that's regardless. There was a situation where the guy moved. And he filed a change of address card, which is his responsibility, because otherwise, we wouldn't know where he's at. Right. And this is a customer that you've known. He's been on your route. I've known him for a while. He had been on the route for about two or three years. Well what it was, I was coming up to his house. He decides that he's going to take him a check or have me write him one. This is the impression that I'm getting because I've already told him it's been forwarded to his new address. And what's he saying to you specifically? Well, he's telling me, "You're going to give me my check. You're going to give me my check." And I keep telling him, "Well, it's been forwarded to your new address." Told him it'd probably be there tomorrow or the day after. And he says, well, he can't wait. And it looked like he was going to whoop me or something because he was taking his jacket off. And when he came to me, the boys in the 'hood surrounded him, told him, "That's my mailman. You don't mess with him." So he went on about his business. No problem. So what did you say to those guys when that happened? Oh, I just thanked them-- How're you doing, dear?-- I just thanked them for what they did. They told me, "No problem." They say, "Because you've been around here too long for anybody to be messing with you." Good morning. How're you doing? After two hours of walking, we've come across only a handful of people, maybe a half a dozen workers, one guy home from his job on vacation, standing and surveying his front lawn, four or five disembodied voices exchanging pleasantries through the mail slot. In short, the people left in a primarily residential neighborhood during non-residential hours. Henry doesn't get lonely, though. The fewer people, the better. In fact, he says he likes winter best, the empty days in mid-January, when it's only him and the occasional drug dealer on the street. But if there's no one on the street, especially if the weather's OK, that's when he gets worried. Anytime the workers disappear for a period of time, that's when you start more or less thinking more safety. You figure it should be some people out here today, but it's not. That's the scary part. Because in most cases, if there's been noise outside all along, every day, then all of a sudden, there's nothing, something has happened somewhere or something will happen. Always look at it that way. And you feel that way. You feel like you can-- You can feel it. You can feel it. It makes you start looking. It makes you start checking. You can feel the thing like your hair's just raised up on the back of your neck, that type of thing. That's the same feeling you get out here sometimes when it's supposed to be crowded out here, supposed to be people out here, but there's absolutely nobody but you. And you want to get away as soon as possible. Let me hurry up and do what I have to do so I can get out. On days like that, other people could avoid this block, take another route. Henry doesn't have that choice. He has to stick to his. I'm surprised to see you. Why aren't you at work? I'm on vacation for a week. Oh, are you? See, that's why I need a job where I go on vacation. Alex Blumberg. Yeah, sooner or later, if y'all don't hurt me out here first. Act Five, $82.50 a Day. Some neighborhoods are wealthy enough that they somehow keep those unsightly drug dealers off the corners. There, the daytime hours are filled with other kinds of people. In some places, it's children's nannies who occupy the lovely houses during the day with their own second community, second set of lives, in the same space. Mona Simpson has this excerpt from a forthcoming novel. The excerpt is told in the voice of a Filipino nanny named Wanda, somebody who's part of a community of Filipino nannies in Santa Monica, California. Ruth told me when I first came here, "I don't need to teach you children. You have been a mother to five," she said. "You know. Children are not hard. But most, you have to think about the mother. Here, the mothers are the ones who throw the tantrums. You may have had nannies, but you have not before been a nanny." I hold my hands open in front of me to take away whatever my employer is beginning. If she starts to sew a button, I finish. If she is rinsing a lettuce, I say, "I will be the one." When the guy spills something and pounds a wet napkin at the spot, I reach out my hands and say, "Give it to me. I will make it clean," all the while, with a smile. It is not hard. No, not when you have a purpose. And I have five purposes, the youngest 17, entering medicine. But I have a good job. The parents of Richard get him in the morning. While they eat their breakfast, I fix their bed, take the glass of water from the side table, pick up Kleenexes. I straighten their bathroom, fasten the top to his toothpaste. Hers, it is already done. "Always the parents first," Ruth said. "A kid cannot fire you, even here. They can love you, but they cannot pay you. And anyway, they will forgive." Ruth told me, "You have always to talk to him, even when he is still a baby. It is very important that they hear words." And I did, more than to my kids, because my kids I had one after the other, five in 10 years. But with Ricardo, I just talk and talk. I tell him everything, and now, see? He is very doll-doll. He understands more than 100 words Tagalog. In the class of 2010 at Harvard University, which is where the parents of Ricardo would like him to go, there will be 20 Santa Monica boys saying to the cooks in the cafeteria, "Excuse, where is my adobo?" And Wanda, by then, will be lying in a hammock, back in the Philippines. "What for?" Ricardo asks me. He is young. He does not yet understand rest. Ruth said, when I started with Ricardo, "I'm not going to tell you how to love him because either that will happen, or it won't." And in four jobs, 25 years, only once it did not happen to her. "And then, you need to quit. Because you cannot do the job if you do not love the baby. No," Ruth said to me at the beginning, "I will not tell you how to love. I wouldn't if I could. Because what I would tell you, if I knew, would be how not to so much. Because you will love him the same as your own, and they never do. They love you, but it is not the same." I told her then, "I know, I know. I am a mother, too." But now, I think, if you can keep them until they are five, then, they will never forget you. I ask Ricardo, "Will you remember your Wanda?" "Why?" He says. "You are not going away." "Someday," I tell him, "I will return to the Philippines." "Why? What will you do there?" "I will go and sit at my house, stare at my diplomas." "Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Come to Wanda. I have something for you," I say, because he is very angry. Usually, it is the dad. But now, it was the mother he was hitting. She put a hand to her eye, and I got ice the way I do with his boo-boos. So I take him in my arms away. I am on the ground now, in the yard. And he is strong. I cannot so easily hold him still. And Wanda told a lie. I do not have anything for him. So I make promises. "Someday, I am going to take you home with me to the Philippines. And there, we will make the ice candy." He is still in my arms, but he is not any longer fighting. His bones, they are different now, not pushing to get out. They fall in the pattern, like the veins of a leaf. "I will put you in my pocket and feed you one candy every day. And you will be happy because the ocean at our place, it is very blue. The sky, it is higher than here. And the fruits that grow on trees, very sweet. His head is down to the ground between his own knees, but he is listening. He is better now, slower, his heart. I see through the window his mother on the telephone. She holds the ice to her eye and walks around the kitchen, talking to her friend long distance, a woman who does not work and who reads many books about the raising of children. When my employer becomes upset, she calls this friend, the full-time mother. But he is better now. Only his mouth, it is still smeared outside the edges. He will come with me. I lift him into the stroller and promise him candy, not the ice candy, just candy we can buy here. "But do not tell your mother." I say, "Excuse, but we are going now." "Is that OK? Thank you, Wanda." This is how my employer believes she cannot live without me. She's telling her friend who reads the books how he is better with me than with her. And her friend will tell her that it is perfectly normal. We are just alone, Ricardo and me. This neighborhood is ours during the daytime. You do not see the white mothers walking, only getting in and out of cars, carrying shopping bags. I am pushing him in the stroller, and he sits. That is the good of fighting. It makes them very tired. The sun is solid like many small weights on our arms. I pass by the park. And in the distance, we see friends, babysitters, and they wave. But he doesn't want to get out of his stroller. So we just roll under the tall trees. When we return home, I have ready a project. We are putting into cardboard all the coins in the house. Ricardo is doing it with me. And his mother told us we could use the pennies to put in the choo-choo bank, which is for our ticket to the Philippines. I told my employers already, when they go to Europe to celebrate their 10th anniversary, I will take Ricardo to the Philippines. We are also finding nickels and dimes and quarters. And I have the brown tubes from the bank for those, too. "It is a hunt," I tell Ricardo. There is always money in this house, where people empty their pockets. Ricardo is a very good worker. We just pile the logs of finished coins. If we can also save the money that is for quarters and dimes and nickels, we will have a lot. Already I have saved $75. But I will have to find the right way to ask. The pennies, they are already ours. But the rest, I will ask the mother of Ricardo, not the dad. At the bank, we wait in line a long time. Then, when we get to the front, the lady is all business, making a total of the rolled dimes. I tell her, "This little man rolled the nickels by himself." When the lady finishes the silver, I begin to lift the bag of pennies from his wagon. They are heavy. We will get $40 from nickels, $27 from dimes, and $103 from pennies. But the lady is pushing our pennies back out of the cage. "We cannot take pennies," she says. Ricardo, whom I've lifted up to see, gives one back to her. "We can't use these," she says. For a second, his face changes. Then, he is bawling. And he throws the roll of pennies at the lady's face. Her hand goes to the place above her eye. And she says, "I cannot help you." She has already given us the paper money for the other coins. She is looking at me with hate. I have seen real hate only a few times in my life. For a minute, I am only stuck. The shape of diamonds, it is shocking. But she is hurt above the eye, and I am not white. Come on, Ricardo. I am fighting him into the wagon. I will pull all the rolls of pennies and him. We will make our getaway. He sees a garbage can, and he runs, dumping pennies in the open top. He is still crying. But he is mad now, also mad. I have to stop him. This is not right, our effort. With him, what I do is almost tackle. Wanda's not a big person. I get on the floor and hold him until the fight is out. Then, I tell him the story, still keeping him in my lap. "Once upon a time," I say, "I work in Beverly Hills, in a house that is very fancy, three layers, floors like a checkerboard, all marble. When I was first here, the lady, she opened the door and saw me. And right away, she said, 'You are hired.' She told me she knew like that, from the way I tie my sneakers. "The lady's husband, he had an office. And she wanted that to be neat, too. She hired me extra to go on the Saturday and straighten. He was there working while I cleaned. And he had one jar like this, up to my waist, full with pennies. And I asked him, did he want me to get tubes from the bank? And he said, 'You can take the pennies.' But I could not lift. And so I came back Sunday, my day off. And I sat on the floor out of his way and put all the pennies into tubes. He stepped around me when he went down the hall to use the restroom and the machines. He'd ask me how much money it was as he went by. And I'd tell him the total so far. "$36." "Good job, Wanda." The next time, it was $92. By the last time he passed, I was at $306. That time, his face looked strange, like two lines cross over it. He went down the hall, and I heard Xeroxing. "On his way back, he stopped over me and said, "Maybe you'd better leave the pennies." "Whatever you like. It is up to you." When he was back in his office on the phone, I got up and left it all there-- the rolled pennies, the pile on the floor, the jar turned over. I took the bus to my sister, and I never went back to that house. That was the end of my career for a Beverly Hills nanny." "Is that when you came to me?" "That is before. You were not yet born. But when the husband took the pennies I rolled to the bank, you know what they are telling him? They are telling him, too, what they are telling us. 'We cannot help you.' And you know what he will do then?" "He shouldn't have taken your pennies, Wanda. He is a bad man." "A little bad. Listen. You know what he will do? He will throw the pennies in the garbage and walk away in a hurry. He is always in a hurry because he is rich. He is too busy, see?" Now, I am fishing with my arm in the garbage, feeling among wet things for our tubes, the ones Ricardo threw. "But we will do something else. Come. You watch Wanda." I pull him in the wagon out into the bright air. And we roll to the five-and-dime and the candy store. Each place, I count out the money in pennies. I put it in piles of 10 on the counter, so it is easy for the register clerk. My father always said, "Spend your small money first." He remembered in the Philippines when money became toy. The smaller denominations, they would not buy anything. "And still, at that time," he told me, "There is so much wealth." Ricardo is in the wagon I am pulling, eating long orange and green candy worms. I tell him, "See? In the bank, it is nothing. But out here in the world, it is money. Not for the Philippines. But we can still buy, every day a little. It is our own private fund, our trust fund. I trust you, and you trust me. You have your candy. Now, let's use some pennies to buy Wanda her cup of coffee." Mona Simson, reading from her forthcoming novel, My Hollywood. Well, the program was produced today by Susan Burton and myself with Alex Blumberg, Blue Chevigny, and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Erik Halverston. To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you can listen to most of our programs for absolutely free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Don't forget about those maps there. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who somehow thinks that I owe him money. You're going to give me my check. You're going to give me my check. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And to start today's program, I just have to play you a recording of this television ad from Canada, an ad so popular in Canada that people chant this ad in bars. It's made the front page of every major paper in Canada, all their nightly newscasts, the Canadian heritage minister played it for a group of Americans in Boston this week to explain Canadian cultural identity. In the ad, a young man walks onto a stage before a huge maple leaf flag, goes to a microphone, taps it meekly, and begins. Hey. I'm not a lumberjack, or a fur trader, and I don't live in an igloo or eat blubber or own a dog sled. And I don't know Jimmy, Sally, or Susie from Canada, although I'm certain they're really, really nice. I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it about, not aboot. I can proudly sew my country's flag on my backpack. I believe in peacekeeping, not policing, diversity, not assimilation, and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal. The tuque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch, and it is pronounced zed, not zee, zed. Canada is the second largest land mass, the first nation in hockey, and the best part of North America. My name is Joe and I am Canadian. Near the end of the ad, the product flashes on screen, Molson's Beer, which in Canada is not called Molson's. It's called Canadian. Brett Marchand is vice president for marketing for Molson's Canadian, and even he is surprised at the reaction to the ad. People are doing things like standing and cheering in theaters when it's been shown. We played it in hockey arenas, and 20,000 people have cheered like they've just won the Stanley Cup. If you've been in one of those arenas or been in a theater and seen how people generally have reacted, you can't help but think, gee, something's going on here. There is now spoofs all over the place. In fact, there was a double-page spread in one of the national newspapers yesterday that had a picture of our actor in the middle of it and written up spoofs all around him. I think someone forwarded one to me, it's I am Pakistani. Hello, my mom doesn't have a dot on her forehead and my dad doesn't wear a turban. I don't live in a grass hut or eat curry every day or own a flying carpet. And I don't know Rabindra, Priya, or Akshay, though I'm sure they're very, very nice. I have a military dictator, not a prime minister. On and on and on, down to, Pakistan's the second-largest safe haven for the politically displaced, the first nation of cricket, and the most corrupt part of South Asia. My name is Khan and I am Pakistani. Of course, every ethnic group in Canada is weighing in with its own version of the ad. People feel misunderstood, people feel overlooked, and to have a call to arms that, on the one hand, gives you the thrill of being in a cheering mob yelling we are number one, while, on the other hand, is simply just kind of a joke, that is a very appealing package. You get the pleasure of being in a mob without the threat of mob violence, of rising totalitarianism, of rampaging and rioting. There is a deep part of most of us that takes pleasure in being in a crowd, a real crowd, I mean. A mass of people that is thinking and feeling the same thing at the same time, jumping to its feet as one unit, yelling for a cause, or a team, or a band, or whatever. Today on our program, the pleasure of being in a mob, the terror of being in a mob altogether. Our program today in three acts. Act One, Among the Thugs. Bill Buford joins a mob as it riots, and he writes, I felt weightless. I felt nothing would happen to me, I felt anything might happen to me. Act Two, One Tin Soldier Rides Away. What happens when a teacher in a small town in Connecticut turns a class of seventh graders into an angry mob on the rampage? Act Three, The Hissing of Winter Lawns, in which Alix Spiegel explains how a 21st century mob may be different than its predecessors. Stay with us. Act One. In 1984, Bill Buford set out to try to understand the soccer hooligans who were rioting in ways large and small on a regular basis after soccer matches in England. He drank with them, went to matches with them, got to know them, and his account of his time with them, called Among the Thugs, is this remarkable document. As Buford points out, since ancient times many people have written about the behavior of mobs, but they were almost always outsiders, frightened observers standing outside the action. Few people have written from the perspective of someone caught up in the violence. And by the time he is done, you understand that the thrill of being in a rampaging mob is as hardwired into us, as basic to us as a species, as the ability to love. Bill Buford agreed to come onto our program and read an excerpt from his book, a scene in which he goes with 257 fans of the soccer team Manchester United on a trip to Italy to see their team play. There is a phenomenal amount of drinking. Some supporters are arrested. On the buses to the stadium, they urinate out the windows, they moon the Italians, they scream obscenities at the Italians, they threw bottles at the Italians. And finally, an Italian boy responds a way that I think many people would after this kind of assault. He answers in kind. He throws a stone back, one stone. The effect on those inside the bus was immediate. To be, suddenly, the target came as a terrible shock. The incredulity was immense. Those bastards, one of the supporters exclaimed, are throwing stones at the windows. And the look on his face conveyed such urgent dismay that you could only agree that a stone-throwing Italian was a very bad person, indeed. The presumption-- after all, a window could get broken, and someone might get hurt-- was deeply offensive. And everyone became very, very angry. Looking around me, I realized that I was no longer surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants. I was now surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants in a frenzy. And anything that came to hand-- bottles, jars of peanuts, fruit, cartons of juice, anything-- was summarily hurled through the windows. Those bastards, the lad next to me said, teeth clenched, lobbing an unopened beer can at a cluster of elderly men in dark jackets. Those bastards. When the buses of the United supporters pulled into the cool evening shadow cast by the Stadio Comunale, a large crowd was already there waiting for the English. Somehow the match started, was played, ended. And while it could be said that there was no single serious incident, it could also be said that there was no moment without one. Things were coming at us from the air. Not just bottles and pieces of fruit, but also long sticks, the staff of the event's flags, firecrackers, and smoke bombs. Several people were hurt, and one supporter was taken away to the hospital. And then when the match ended, everything started moving at great speed. Everything would continue to move at great speed for many hours. I remember that riot police started kicking one of the supporters who had fallen down. I remember hearing that Sammy had arrived and then coming upon him. He was big, well-dressed with heavy, horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a physics student, standing underneath the bleachers, his back to the match, an expensive leather bag and a camera hanging over his shoulder, having just come from France by taxi. I remember some screaming. There had been a stabbing, I didn't see it. And with the screaming, everyone bolted, animal speed, instinct speed, and pushed past the police and rushed for the exit. But the gate into the tunnel was locked and the United supporters slammed into it. It was impossible to get out. Throughout this last period of the match, I had been hearing a new phrase. It's going to go off. It's going to go off, someone said, and his eyes were glassy as though he'd taken a drug. If this keeps up, I heard another say, then it's going to go off. And the phrase recurred. It's going to go off, it's going to go off, spoken softly. But each time it was repeated, it gained authority. Everyone was pressed against the locked gate and the police arrived moments later. The police pulled and pushed in one direction and supporters pushed in another, wanting to get out. It was shove and counter-shove. It was crushing, uncomfortable. The supporters were humorless and determined. It's going to go off. People were whispering. I heard, watch out for knives. Zip up your coat. I heard, fill up your pockets. I heard, it's going to go off. Stay together. It's going to go off. I was growing nervous and slipped my notebook into my shirt up against my chest and buttoned up my jacket. A chant had started. United, United, United. The chant was clipped and sure. United, United, United. The word was repeated, United. And through the repetition, its meaning started to change, pertaining less to a sporting event or a football club and sounding, instead, like a chance of unity, something political. It had become the chance of a mob. United, United, United, United. And then it stopped. The gate had been opened and the English supporters surged forwards. And when they emerged, they came out very fast with police trailing behind, trying to keep up. They came as a mob with everyone pressed together, hands on the shoulders of the person in front, moving quickly, almost at a sprint, racing down the line of police-- helmet and shields and truncheons-- a peripheral blur. The line of police led to the buses. But just before the bus door, someone in front veered sharply and the mob followed. The police had anticipated this and were waiting. The group turned again, veering in another direction and rushed out into the space between the two buses. It came to a sudden stop. And I slammed into the person in front of me, and people slammed into me from behind. The police had been there as well. There were about 200 people crushed together, but they seemed able to move in unison like some giant, strangely coordinated insect. A third direction was tried. The police were not there. There were no police anywhere. What was the duration of what followed? It might have been 20 minutes. It seemed longer. It was windy and dark and the trees, blowing back and forth in front of the street lamps, cast long, moving shadows. I was never able to see clearly. I knew to follow Sammy. The moment the group broke free, he had handed his bag and camera to someone, telling them to give them back later at the hotel. Then Sammy turned and started running backwards. He appeared to be measuring the group, taking in its size. The energy, he said, still running backwards, speaking to no one in particular, the energy is very high. He was alert, vital, moving constantly, looking in all directions. He was holding out his hands with this fingers outstretched. Feel the energy, he said. There were six or seven younger supporters jogging beside him. And it would be some time before I realized that there were always six or seven younger supporters jogging beside him. When he turned in one direction, they turned with him. When he ran backwards, they ran backwards. No doubt if Sammy had suddenly become airborne, there would have been six or seven younger supporters desperately flapping their arms trying to do the same. The younger supporters were in fact very young. At first, I put their age at around 16. But they might have been younger. They might have been 14. They might have been nine. I take pleasure even now in thinking of them as nothing more than overgrown nine-year-olds. They were nasty little nine year olds, who, in some kind of prepubescent confusion, regarded Sammy as their dad. At one moment, a cluster of police came rushing towards us. And Sammy, having spotted them, whispered a new command, hissing that we were to disperse. The members of the group split up, some crossing the street, some carrying on down the center, but some falling behind, until they'd got past the policeman whereupon Sammy turned around, running backwards again, and ordered everyone to regroup. And the little ones, like trained dogs, herded the members of the group back together. I trotted along. Everyone was moving at such a speed that, to ensure I didn't miss anything, I concentrated on keeping up with Sammy. I could see that this was starting to irritate him. He kept having to notice me. What are you doing here, he asked me, after he had turned around running backwards, doing a quick head count after everyone had regrouped. He knew precisely what I was doing there. And he had made a point of asking his question loudly enough that the others had to hear it as well. Just the thing, I thought. [BLEEP] off, one of his runts said suddenly, peering into my face. He had a knife. I dropped back a bit, just outside of striking range. I looked about me. I didn't recognize anyone. I was surrounded by people I hadn't met. Worse, I was surrounded by people I hadn't met who kept telling me to [BLEEP] off. Nobody was saying a word. There was a muted grunting and the sound of their feet on the pavement. And every now and then, Sammy would whisper one of his commands. I remember thinking in the clearest possible terms, I don't want to get beaten up. And then Sammy, having judged the moment to be right, suddenly stopped. And abandoning all pretense of invisibility, he shouted, stop. Everyone stopped. Turn. Everyone turned. They knew what to expect. I didn't. It was only then that I saw the Italians, who had been following us. In the half-light, streetlight darkness, I couldn't tell how many there were, but there were enough for me to realize-- holy [BLEEP]-- that I was now unexpectedly in the middle of a very big fight. Having dropped back to get out of the reach of Sammy and his lieutenants, I was in the rear, which as the group turned, had suddenly become the front. Adrenaline is one of the body's more powerful chemicals. Seeing the English on one side of me and the Italians on the other, I remember seeming quickly to take on the properties of a small helicopter, rising several feet in the air and moving out of everybody's way. There was a roar, everybody roaring, and the English supporters charged into the Italians. In the next second, I went down. A dark blur and then smack. I got hit on the side of the head by a beer can, a full one, thrown powerfully enough to knock me over. As I got up, two policemen, the only two I saw, came rushing past. And one of them clubbed me on the back of the head. Back down I went. Directly in front of me, so close I could almost reach out to touch his face, a young Italian-- a boy, really-- had been knocked down. As he was getting up, an England supporter pushed the boy down again, ramming his flat hand against the boy's face. He fell back and his head hit the pavement, the back of it bouncing slightly. Two of the Manchester United supporters appeared. One kicked the boy in the ribs. It was a soft sound, which surprised me. You could hear the impact of the shoe on the fabric of the boy's clothing. He was kicked again, this time very hard, and the sound was still soft. Muted. The boy reached down to protect himself, to guard his ribs, and the other English supporters then kicked him in the face. This was a soft sound as well, but it was different. You could tell that it was his face that had been kicked and not his body, and not something protected by clothing. It sounded gritty. Another Manchester United supporter appeared, and another, and then a third. There were now six, and they all started kicking the boy on the ground. The boy covered his face. I was transfixed. It was as if time had dramatically slowed down and each second had a distinct beginning and end, like a sequence of images on a roll of film. Two more Manchester United supporters appeared. There was no speech, only that soft, yielding sound. Although sometimes it was a gravelly, scraping one, of the blows, one after the other. The thought of it, eight people kicking the boy at once. At what point is the job completed? A policeman appeared, but only one. Where were the other police? There had been so many before. The policeman came running hard and knocked over two of the supporters. And the others fled. And then time accelerated. No longer slow motion time, but time moving very fast. We ran off. I don't know what happened to the boy. I then noticed that all around me, there were others like him, others who had been tripped up and had their faces kicked. I had to sidestep a body on the ground to avoid running on top of it. In the vernacular of the supporters, it had now gone off. With that first violent exchange, some kind of threshold had been crossed, some notional boundary. On one side of that boundary had been a sense of limits, an ordinary understanding, even among this lot, of what you didn't do. We were now someplace where there would be few limits, where the sense that there were things you didn't do had ceased to exist. It became very violent. I caught up with Sammy. Sammy was transported. He was snapping his fingers and jogging in place, his legs pumping up and down, and he was repeating the phrase, it's going off, it's going off. Everyone around him was excited. It was an excitement that verged on something greater, an emotion more transcendent. Joy at the very least, but more like ecstasy. There was an intense energy about it. It was impossible not to feel some of the thrill. Somebody near me said that he was happy. He said that he was very, very happy, that he could not remember ever being so happy. And I looked hard at him, wanting to memorize his face so that I might find him later and ask him what it was that made for this happiness, what it was like. It was a strange thought. Here was someone who believed that at this precise moment following a street scuffle, he had succeeded in capturing one of life's most elusive qualities. But then he, dazed, babbling away about his happiness, disappeared into the crowd and the darkness. The group crossed a street, a major intersection. At the head of the traffic was a bus. And one of the supporters stepped up to the front of it and, from about six feet, hurled something with great force-- it wasn't a stone. It was big and made of metal, like the manifold of a car engine-- straight into the driver's windshield. The sound of that shattering windshield, I realize now, was a powerful stimulant, physical and intrusive. Crossing this intersection, traffic coming from four directions, supporters trotting on top of cars, the sound of this thing going through the windshield, the crash following its impact had the effect of increasing the heat of the feeling. I can't describe it any other way. It was almost literally a matter of temperature. We moved on. A bin was thrown through a car showroom window. There was another loud crashing sound, a shop, its door was smashed. A clothing shop, its windows were smashed, and one or two English supporters lingered to loot from the display. The city is ours, Sammy said. And he repeated the possessive each time with greater intensity. It is ours. Ours. Ours. What happens when a crowd goes over the edge or the cliff? The metaphors, though hackneyed, are revealing. This is the way they talk about it. They talk about the crack, the buzz, and the fix. They talk about having to have it, of being unable to forget it when they do, of not wanting to forget it ever. They talk about being sustained by it, telling and retelling what happened and what it felt like. They talk about it with the pride of the privileged of those who have had, seen, felt, been through something that other people have not. Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences, and for those capable of giving themselves over to it, it's one of the most intense pleasures. I felt, as the group passed over its metaphorical cliff, that I had literally become weightless. I had abandoned gravity, was greater than it. I felt myself to be hovering above myself, capable of perceiving everything in slow motion, and in overwhelming detail. And for the first time, I'm able to understand the words they use to describe it. That crowd violence was their drug. What was it like for me? An experience of absolute completeness. Bill Buford reading from his book Among the Thugs. He is the literary and fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine. Coming up, class warfare seventh grade-style. That is, when seventh graders become an angry mob. That and more in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, the pleasure of being in a mob and the terror of being in a mob. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, One Tin Soldier Rides Away. We tend to believe that it's other people who will be susceptible to the lure of the mob, not ourselves. Karen Bernstein doesn't feel that way because of something that happened to her in the seventh grade in rural Connecticut. It's the incident she remembers more than anything else that happened that year in school. 26 years later at her class reunion, this incident sparked the most animated conversations. So she went back and interviewed her former classmates and her teacher. I have before me a Xerox of a teacher's private lesson plan. It's dated September 24, 1973. It's handwritten in the neat, cursive script if my seventh grade social studies teacher, Mr. Les Levitt. It's titled, Course on Totalitarianism. It reads, objective, I want the students to realize how a person or a small group of people can hypnotize a large group of people into following them. Rather than run away from the fear and danger, I want the students to experience all of the emotion, fear and terror firsthand. By providing such a learning experience, I hope to provide the students with enough information to avoid such a situation in the future. Method for achieving objective, a simulation of a totalitarian takeover as a class project. Mr. Levitt was the most popular teacher at Shepaug Middle School where this all happened, probably the youngest. He was hip, perhaps a little on the hippie side. He had long sideburns and wore aviator glasses and bell bottoms. And we loved him. One day in class, he told us we had rights, that we should have a voice in how the school was run, that we could eat without a lunchroom matron telling us where to sit. When I tracked him down, Mr. Levitt remembered it this way. I had planned to do something nice and easy, maybe a couple of days or a week. I started on the project and started to get them into kind of a rebellious mood. And I said, maybe what we ought to do is we ought to be able to write a bill of rights or something like that for students. And then I remember telling them a little bit about protesting Vietnam. And they said, were you one of those protesters, Mr. Levitt? I said, yeah, I was protesting. Oh yeah, I wore the armbands and everything. I'll never forget it. I was standing there and I was just looking at them, and they were just so attentive. And it just came upon me like, wow. I could really do something here, because everybody is so into it. Why not carry it a step further? So with Mr. Levitt, we made armbands. We also created a flag, like the flag from the movie Billy Jack. Then the school administrators commenced a series of repressive actions, all designed to rile us up. The head of the social studies department banned the flag and the armbands in a bluntly worded edict, demanding their immediate destruction. We countered by sending a letter to the principal demanding that he allow our new armbands in school. And I remember going into the classroom and having Les Levitt start chanting whatever it was that we were, some power chant. He got up on the end of the desks and walked around the desks on top of the desks. And he stopped in front of me. He bent down. And he said, do you think that my walking on the desks is strange? Let me read to you for a second from a letter that you signed around September 27 or so, so three or four days into the experiment itself. I guess we're demanding, at this point, that armbands be allowed worn and that flags go up. And at one point, you say, regarding tradition, the flag and the armbands are our tradition. We are exercising our rights under the Declaration of Independence. We suggest you read the document, especially the second paragraph. Which meant we would have had to have read it in order to cite it. The principal wrote us back saying, regarding tradition, you are on pretty shaky ground on this point. Whoever heard of a two week old tradition? But who am I to quibble? Go, go and fly your ugly flag. And how about an appropriate song to go with your flag? My title suggestion? "It's a Grand Old Rag." So he's responding back by playing the bad guy, reinforcing the enemy. And what was our reaction? Oh, you were livid. I mean, you were livid. And the more we drew you into this, the more you lost sight of what was going on around you. We were at war. And Mr. Levitt organized the class into a strict military hierarchy. A few of the most popular and well-adjusted kids were tapped to be members of the elite inner council. Others were freedom police, some were runners for the inner council. Mr. Levitt became General Levitt. He created intricate wall charts listing each student's rank and duties. We took these ranks very seriously and real competitiveness started between us. OK, takeover tactical. September 24, the flags are put up. 26, demands made to Glenn to wear armbands. I asked Mr. Levitt to read me his master plan, the timetable of everything that he wanted to happen. September 1, freedom police take over the lunchroom supervision. Oh, that was terrific. We demanded that we were going to take that over and we stormed the lunchroom and said, everybody out. The thrill of being in this mob of seventh graders is that you belong to this group. You're part of this thing that you believe so intensely. Everybody looked at us in school and we were somebody. We weren't just lowly seventh graders that nobody ever talks to. On the 3rd, demands made to have to have the matron in the lunch room eliminated, whoever that was. And then on the 5th, we had a victory rally because we had actually won this. We made further demands for freedom. What were we trying to do? That's like the big burning question. That's what's scary. In my recollection, I can't even remember what we were fighting for. I just remember the unity was there and that it was something different. And we were trying to change the situation. Yeah, but what was the situation? To a bunch of 12-year-olds, what was the most disillusioning aspect of being in Connecticut at age 12? I know. Then we put flags and emblems everywhere in the school. On the buses, you name it. They were all over the place. And then the demands that the flags be in every room and that all the students-- all of them-- wear armbands. The whole school would have to wear armbands. Not only were we going to just take over the seventh grade, we were going to take over the whole school here. There was never a point at which I stepped outside of that and said, what's going on here? I had been signing all sorts of unbelievable manifestos about the things that we demanded that the principal put into place. I used to say that one of the most valuable lessons I learned from it was never to sign anything you don't read. I said that for a long time until I stopped to think about it. And then I realized that at the time, even if I had read that, I would have signed it anyway. The next week here, demand for a middle school student to be principal. And my escape and the rally in the planetarium, and the assembly to announce our takeover of the middle school. On a humid October Friday, the experiment finally ended. It was morning, and runners for the inner council came around to all the seventh grade classes, Paul Revere-like, with urgent messages and confirmation of the rumors we had already heard. General Levitt's about to be fired. The inner council has been arrested and held in the principal's office. Now is the time for all good seventh graders to come to the aid of their classmates. All over the school, kids who had never failed to turn in a homework assignment or even disobey authority in any way decided to skip their next class and overthrow the school. I don't remember exactly how we all ended up in the planetarium, but in a spectacular display of our underground network and peer bond, it worked. And by the next period change, over 100 kids stood before General Levitt with armbands on, flags and drums poised for battle. He stood before us dressed in his father's World War II officer's coat and he gave us the speech of our little lives. I said, your plans to take over the lunch room, the plans to take over the school, they're in danger now, because a lot of people found out. I'm in trouble. They're going to come and get me. And you've got to protect me against them, because if not, then everything is going to go down the drain. And I said, the inner council has been arrested. And I don't know what's going to happen to them. But we can't allow anything to happen to them. And the only way we can do it is if we all stick together, stay together, and you protect me, and then they can't do anything with 100 kids. General Levitt finished his speech and went into hiding. And we took matters into our own hands. We said the chant. We went out running through the mall area. There were other students. People were just looking at us, thinking, what is going on? And I remember heading towards the principal's office, getting in there and hearing crying and screaming. And I remember looking into the office and seeing [? Kathy ?] McDonald hiding underneath the desk. And then we staged a sit in Principal Glenn Anderson's office, his outer office. And he came out and was like, you have got to stop. And we just sat there and ignored him. And you have to understand, for a 12-year-old girl like myself, this was just incredible. I had never done anything against any elder in my life. And then something unexpected happened. Levitt showed up, obviously not arrested. We were shocked. Then he did something even more unexpected. He saw Glenn Anderson, our principal, the man we'd been fighting for weeks, the man who had arrested the inner council, public enemy number one. And Mr. Levitt crossed over and stood next to him. And his body language changed. He deflated from messianic revolutionary to small town social studies teacher. The principal read an announcement over the PA system, saying that this had all been a simulation, an experiment, a hoax. It was like falling off a cliff. I just remember sitting back in my seat thinking, I can't believe I let myself be so controlled by these people, and just feeling so used and so taken advantage of. It was kind of devastating to me that here I'd been tricked or fooled by the very person I was suppose to respect. Then they went on to explain to us that this was a very positive thing, that we'd really learned from this experience, and we can take this with us. But it just didn't matter. Nobody wanted to hear that at that moment. For months after the totalitarian experiment ended, parents and school officials argued over it. The local press kept it alive. The school board held public hearings that became like a circus, featuring every local interest group, the back to basic parents, the back to Earth parents, the Christian fundamentalists. In the end, Mr. Levitt was allowed to keep his job and more than two decades later, all the classmates I spoke with said that they were glad it happened to us. How would I be different had I not gone through that? I think I would probably have taken a longer time to see my own dark side. I'm actually happy that I was able to see it at a young age, when I couldn't do much damage. But I think we all have a dark side. And so the lesson here for me, this is the kid who on every level was a kid who had been well-raised, respectful, worked hard, wanted to please her parents, wasn't rebellious, tried to be a good sister. I was a kid who was what you want all, I think at that point, kids to be. And yet, I was the perfect little fascist. I was the perfect little Nazi. That's what's scary about it, that it can take all of the good potential and harness it for evil without you having any sense at all that you've lost your way. It didn't scar me for life. It didn't traumatize me beyond that first day. I got over it. I bounced back. You move on. And you just try to put it into perspective. And we then moved right away into the study of the rise of fascism in Western Europe. And there's no comparison, obviously, to studying the rise of fascism in Western Europe after having been a fascist. John Maloney is now a therapist working with teenagers who are in gangs. He says he'd never run a simulation like Mr. Levitt did. I'd probably worry about how kids are handling it and not saying anything about it. I don't know. Not all of us are as durable as everybody else, you know what I mean? I'd feel responsible until the day that-- I don't know when I could feel that I undid it if it were negative. Many of my classmates wondered what had happened to Mr. Levitt. One of the most surprising discoveries when I had caught up with him was that at the time of the experiment, he was only 22. It was his first job. And of course. Who else but a 22-year-old would try something so brazen? Not long after the simulation, Mr. Levitt quit teaching, went to seminary and into the ministry, which he just recently left. These days, he's remarkably young looking. No gray hair, though a certain energy he used to have has faded. He told me he's lost his sense of mission. He seems unsure of himself. When I asked him if he'd do a simulation like the one he tried on us again, he said, no, probably not. It was tough. It was really hard to do, let me tell you that. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, because I thought I was going to be doing it as a teacher, who had taught everybody a valuable lesson. When I saw your faces and when I told you, I felt I'd let you down, that I had duped you, I had tricked you, I had totally used you in order to teach you a lesson. And I can remember going home and just being up most of the night. And it was very, very difficult. I am 38 eight years old now. My personal experiment in peer group conformity continues. It comes and goes. And I remember Mr. Levitt's experiment now and then in odd moments. When I see someone preaching to a crowd, I'm suspicious. And the more magnetic the speaker, the more suspicious. The truth is, I loved those three weeks in 1973. I had felt a swell of belonging and then a chill. That is the victory, I suppose. Karen Bernstein is a producer for public television in New York. Act Three, The Hissing of Winter Lawns. What happens when a crowd converges over something they strongly believe in for weeks and months in front of television cameras that never go away? To what degree do the cameras change the character of being in a crowd? A few days before Elian Gonzalez was seized by federal authorities, reporter Alix Spiegel went to the lawn of his home where activists camped out 24 hours a day. In the evenings, the crowds would swell and there'd be choreographed protests and prayers for the TV networks. Media savvy, everyone knew the appropriate things to say to reporters. But in other ways, Alix Spiegel reports, they were like any political gathering. When I arrive at 1:00 in the morning, there are about 40 people awake and milling around, swapping stories and guzzling soft drinks like neighbors at a Sunday barbecue. The first person I meet is a man in a lawn chair. He's got a portable CD player in his lap and his earphones on, and he's grooving to some music. His name is Javier and he takes me on a tour. It looks like a refugee camp. All the truly committed have the seats in the front. To the right of the police barricades, under a blue tarp strung between street signs, are the hardcore supporters who have been here from the beginning. In a similar place of honor, on the opposite side of the street, the survivors from the Bay of Pigs. And then there are the cheap seats. The street, the sidewalk, the driveways. This is where Javier sleeps. He's been here 10 days. He came, he says, with a sleeping bag, a few changes of clothes, and his CD player. Abandoned his home and job and family to come and protect little Elian. In the morning I see him again. And again, he's got on his earphones and he's grooving to his music. So I ask what he's listening to. And he tells me it's a song by Mr. Phil Collins, which reminds him of little Elian. He says that since he arrived, he's listened to this song well over 70 times. Whenever he's feeling down or overwhelmed by the 24-hour vigil, and that he also likes to play the song for the other supporters on the street. He says that often when he plays the song for the other supporters, their eyes will fill with tears. This makes me curious, so we sit down on the sidewalk and he presses the earphone of his CD player to my microphone and sings along. [SINGING] Now stop your crying, it will be all right. Just take my hand, hold it tight. I will protect you from all around you. I will be here, don't you cry. A few days ago, Javier was taken to jail for attempting to break down a police barricade. And the other supporters, who had known him less than a week, raised almost $1,000 to bail him out. It's easy to find this kind of ad hoc solidarity here. It's also easy to find sentimentality, melodrama, and paranoia. Several people, I'm told, have made out their wills, expecting to die in front of the TV cameras on Elian's lawn. Javier tells me that there are dangers all around. Four days before the feds seize Elian, rumors circulate in the crowd that Janet Reno is hiding out in Miami. They say she only pretended to board a plane and fly back to Washington, but in actual fact, landed the plane close by and is now stationed somewhere inside the city limits. There's another rumor that the feds have been practicing stealing little Elian away in a big white van disguised as a plasma unit. They will sedate him, probably with gas, and deliver him to his father, who will take him back to Cuba where he will eventually be killed. I hear that Elian will be killed from six different people, people anxious for me to understand why it's so important to be vigilant, even when that means being on guard against one another. You can see when people's eyes are [WHISTLES]. They're not really listening, they're not all there. They can't say the national anthem, they can't say the Cuban anthem. And some people act like they're with us. And when they're saying the anthem, they're not saying it, they're mumbling it. It's a matter of fact. A couple of days ago we had two of them. They were laughing and they were telling us that they were tourists. As a matter of fact, one of them tells me that he just came a couple of days from Havana and his other friend came from Cleveland, Ohio. And he came to pick him up. And they were going to do the South Beach scene. And they heard about Elian and came over. I said listen, guys. I was born here. My husband is a military man. If it looks like an agent, if it smells like an agent, you guys are an agent. And you look the part. And he says, look, I've got a driver's license. I said, you really think that we're that ignorant here? These are not just people who got off the boat, for god's sake. Our conversation is interrupted by a press conference. For some reason, as soon as the cameras begin to roll, Javier pops up and makes his way behind a stripe of yellow police tape, through the private yard of the neighbor directly across the street from Elian's house and into the restricted press area. I follow him and observe, as he crouches behind a cameraman, pulls out a pad of paper and a pen, and starts scribbling notes. He is pretending to be a reporter, using the pen and paper as props, occasionally raising his hand as if he's going to ask a question. I'm so busy watching him that it takes a full 10 minutes before I realize that I, myself, am being watched. A Cuban woman with long black hair is spying on me as I spy on Javier. I catch her eye, and she signals for me to come over, which I do. She wants to know exactly what Javier thinks he's doing. So naturally, I ask her why she wants to know. I'm concerned because everyone is being observed as far as any kind of conduct to provoke violence or disorder, because we don't want that. And this individual has done that. And he was taken to jail, and we took him out. We bailed him out with our own money. And now he's out. And he's got a lot of unexplainable and mysterious sources and phone calls. You're afraid that he's like some kind of plant. And people have been talking about the possibility that he is? Yeah, I was called yesterday. In the afternoon I was called to make sure that I just keep an eye on him, that's all. See what he's doing. Her name is Rita. She left her baby son with her mother two months ago, and has been sleeping in a lawn chair under a tarp in front of the barricade every night, waiting for the feds to come. She tells me that the people who asked her to keep an eye on Javier are part of an organization. She can't tell me very much about it, not even its name, only that 7,000 people are involved and that they're all good people who don't want to cause any trouble. How can I explain this? We're trying to filter the bad people out. We don't want anybody, especially anybody sent by Castro. So you think that Javier might be sent by Castro? That's still under speculation. But yeah, sure. Many people have come here that are sent by Castro. As Rita whispers, Javier emerges from the press conference. He's laughing and congratulating himself on his hoax as Rita approaches and casually starts up a conversation. She tells him that she goes to college at Miami Dade. That's fantastic. I'm studying human behavior. and? I'm very good at it. Because I love kids. You seem very educated in what you're doing. I really admire that you came here and everything. I can't believe you went to jail for this cause. I wasn't interested in going to jail. If that guy hadn't grabbed me, I wouldn't have gone to jail. I was going to cut those two [UNINTELLIGIBLE] chains. Why were you going to cut them? It's a long story. Who told you to cut them? I can't tell you. And I can't tell you if somebody did tell me to cut them. You can't tell me? Why can't you tell me? Because everybody is doing what they could for the cause. My job is to cut the chains. That's what I did. No one that I know-- and I know everyone here-- told you to cut that chain. Was it Jorge? I'll tell you what, when all this is over, I'll introduce you to him. That won't helps us, right? OK, turn it off for a second? I scurry off and mingle with the other supporters while Rita and Javier work it out. The next time I see Rita, she's lying down under her tarp with a cloth over her face, nursing a headache. She looks tired. Rita, hi. How did it go? It's OK. I'm just going to observe from afar. What did he say? He just kept explaining and giving excuses. And he was just too jittery. I don't know. I don't want to judge him. Rita, it turns out, hasn't slept in two days. She's been too busy worrying and wondering when the feds will come. And the rest of America is like, oh, come on, we're just sick of this. Just send the boy home. The boy should be with the father. Of course, but they're not seeing the whole story. They don't want to. They're too busy wondering whether their portfolio is going up or down. The whole story goes something like this. Rita's grandfather was killed by the Castro regime for saying three words, this isn't good. The man who sleeps in the last chair next to hers says he watched his friends and neighbors be machine gunned into the ditch behind his house. The blind woman who stays across the street says she was thrown into a mental institution for dissonant behavior. And it's as if, by saving this one boy, all this history will be redeemed and these people will finally get justice by proxy. Look, something mysterious has called me to do this. You have to do this, no matter what. In the past, in the future, you have to do this. Justice has to be served here. And I can not see beyond that. I can not believe that I'm doing this. Remember, I was raised American. I've been here since I was two years old. I should be back with the internet crowd and talking about 'N Sync and all that. That's what I should be doing. But I'm here because I have a calling that's beyond all that superficial ignorance. So does this feel better to you than anything that you've done before? Yes. It makes me feel like I'm alive. It's certainly true that there's real anger here, present just under the surface, which erupts with little warning at any suggestion of dissent. I'm standing in the middle of the street watching a group in a semicircle mumble their way through a prayer, when a man standing next to the circle pulls out a sign which communicates his sentiment that Elian belongs with his father in Cuba. And this single act has roughly the same effect as throwing a match into a pool of gasoline. Instantly, a mob rises out of nothing and converges on the man. Men and women are screaming and flailing their arms. And literally, within seconds, the peaceful prayer circle has been transformed into a full-blown human tsunami. Overweight cameramen stream out of the press area, shouldering heavy equipment and flood the mob with TV lights. There is a lot of jostling and noise, but the circle of people closest to the man keep the rest of the mob from actual violence. Through the chaos, the mob somehow chooses a direction. They move the man organically, almost beautifully, down the street to the police cars at the end of the block where they deliver him, minus the sign plus a couple slaps on the head, to police officers who stuff him in a car and speed away. Before the car has cleared the block, the mob begins to disperse. They wander back towards the rest of the crowd and cluster around TV vans parked on the side of the street to watch the video of themselves now being fed to local stations for the 11:00 news. As they watch the footage, a consensus appears to emerge, a consensus which has little to do with what actually happened and everything to do with how they want what actually happened to play in the media. This is the consensus. The mob decides that it was not a mob. We're having our peaceful demonstration, and we're having our prayers, and all of the sudden there's a man with a sign that said Elian needs to go home. And we were trying to take him peacefully out, but he resisted. Nobody hurt him, nobody nothing, we just walked him out. Together with all the rest of the people, including the men, we saved him. They repeat this line to any media person who asks. This is, after all, a 21st century mob, a media savvy mob. A mob so conditioned that even in the middle of an authentic expression of rage, they're half-conscious of how that rage will play, are both encouraged and constrained by that consciousness. In other words, a mob unable to entirely lose themselves in the act of being a mob. In the fading light, I stand and watch the men watch themselves through the open doors of the TV van. They seem mesmerized, in spite of themselves, by the spectacle of their own unchoreographed fury. Alix Spiegel is a reporter in New York City. Our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, and Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Eric [? Poverston. ?] Eric leaves our program today for greener and possibly more musical pastures. We wish him the past. You can listen to our programs for free on the internet at our website, where I strongly urge you to go so you can have the thrill of watching that TV ad we started our program with. www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who is alert, holding out his hands with his fingers outstretched, saying-- Feel the energy. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. The city is ours. It is ours, ours, ours. PRI, Public Radio International.
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It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. There's a story by Tillie Olsen in which a mother of five stands at an ironing board contemplating a note from a teacher asking her to come in and discuss her oldest daughter. "She's a youngster who needs help," the note says, "and whom I'm deeply interested in helping." The mother mulls this over. Should she go in? What is there even to say about her daughter's life? Here's Tillie Olsen, reading. Even if I came, what good would it do? You think because I'm her mother, I have a key? Or that, in some way, you could use me as the key? She's lived for 19 years. There's all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me. And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I'll start, and there will be an interruption, and I'll have to gather it all together again. Or I'll become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been, and what cannot be helped. And then, as she stands there ironing, she reviews her daughter's life, point by point, from the baby she was through all sorts of troubles and mistakes. A working mother trying to be there for her children, trying and learning as she goes, making it up as she goes. Until, at the end, she finally comes to this beautiful passage, this almost encyclopedic list, of everything which can happen with one's children. I will never total it all. I'll never come in to say she was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. She was dark, and thin, and foreign-looking, in a world where the prestige went to blondness, and curly hair, and dimples. She was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother. I was a distracted mother. There were the other children pushing up, demanding. Her younger sisters seemed to be all that she was not. There were years she did not let me touch her. She kept too much in herself. Her life was such that she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear. Let her be. So, all that is in her will not bloom, but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know, help make it so there is cause for her to know that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron. Being a parent is an improvisation and things go wrong. As in any daily undertaking, things go wrong. And, in the end, so many mothers feel unappreciated. Mothers are taken for granted. This is, as you'd might expect, a mother. In fact, it's my mother, Shirley Glass. She is a psychologist in Baltimore. Mom, I was wondering if you've noticed that every year since we started This American Life four and a half years ago we've done a Father's Day show, but we've never done a Mother's Day show. Actually, I never noticed it until you pointed it out to me. I guess I've become accustomed to ignoring those kind of slights. [LAUGHING] Oh, really? Well, I have a generic answer for that. You do? Yeah, why you've done Father's Day shows and you haven't done a Mother's Day show is because mothers are taken for granted. Like, how do you mean? Well, for example, I knew somebody who told me that the summer that he was at camp and his mother wrote to him every single day. And his father wrote to him once. And he kept the letter that his father sent for the rest of his life because it meant so much. And he didn't keep any of the letters that his mother sent. Well, is that because it was so surprising that his father would be emotionally expressive? Whereas his mother was always emotionally expressive? Exactly. The child is so secure with the mother that he doesn't need to hold onto a souvenir or a symbol that she cares about him. Hm. That's what I just said, that we take the mothers for granted. Well, obviously, some mothers believe that mothers are taken for granted. Today on our program, we try to right this terrible wrong in our small, little way, here on the radio, with stories for Mother's Day. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, you're listening to This American Life's Mother's Day show. Our program today in three acts. Act One, "She Said, She Said," in which Alex Blumberg conducts an investigation, perhaps the first ever, with people who compulsively imitate their mother's voices in everyday conversation, well into adulthood. Act Two, "Are You My Mommy?" When a 14-year-old was sent into adult prison in Florida, the state did such a terrible job taking care of her that, incredibly, several women, an embezzler, a convicted murderer, and some thieves, stepped in to mother her. That story from writer Alex Kotlowitz. Act Three, "Mom Music." Beau O'Reilly confronts his mother about her dirty little secret with Johnny Cash. Stay with us. Act One, "She Said, She Said." There are, as far as we can tell, no scientific studies proving what we're about to assert to you. Our evidence is anecdotal and preliminary. We invite the scientific community to pick up the thread where we leave it. Our findings, thus far, are these. We have discovered that there is a vast subset of American families that crosses all social classes in which the children do imitations of their mothers all the time, even into adulthood. What does it mean? Alex Blumberg tells all. In my un-scientific survey I can tell you this, it's always people who have close relationships with their mothers, whose mothers are still powerful forces for them, who end up imitating them. What's always striking is how vivid these imitations are. My name is Jonnafer. I'm from Milwaukee. And the typical conversation with my mother, or my favorite thing to imitate her, is in the morning, when we were children, she'd come in the room to wake us up. And there were three girls in the room. And so she would come in every morning and she would first wake up my sister, Sharon. And Sharon was the hardest one to wake up. And so, every morning, she would come in the room and she'd go, "Sharon. Sharon? Sharon? Sharon. Sharon. Sharon! Sharon, I know you hear me talking to you, Sharon. Sharon, get up. Sharon, I'm going to wake up the rest of the babies trying to wake you. Sharon, get up. Lord, I don't know how you don't want to get-- Sharon. I know you-- Sharon? I wish you would get out of that bed! Girl, get up!" And that was every morning. And it would always start off very sweet. "Sharon? Sharon. Sharon. Sharon." And it's not Sha-ron, it's, Sharn. Sharn Sharn. She talked all the time. If you would say that, you know, "I'm studying now." "Oh, you studying? What you studying? Let me look at that book. And we didn't have books. See, we didn't have books like this when I was in school, Jonna. We had a little, old slate. And you'd put your name on there with some chalk. And then, when you were done, you'd just wipe it right off. That's how that worked back then, Jonnafer." Jonnafer's been imitating her mother since she was four or five years old. She says, originally, it was to be mean, to mock her. Her mother talked so country, she says. But then, she started imitating her mother for a different reason after her father got sick. She was different, her mother was different. Her voice actually changed during that time period. It came not so much out of her throat, but from her heart. Because, I think, she thought that everything she would say, particularly to him, may be the last thing. And so her voice actually changed during that time period. Her voice got very low. It wasn't, "How you doing Jonnafer?" It was, you know, "Jonnafer, how are you," because everything was just, you know, "Lord, don't know." Everything was just so hard and so trying. "And I just--" And then she would always say, that she hardly ever said before, "I just don't know. You know I don't know what," you know, "he's just getting so sick lately." And then everything started to sound like that. Even if I call her now, "How you doing?" "Well, I'm doing fine. Everything's all right." And she whispers a lot more now. Even though people she's talking about aren't in the house, she'll whisper. "I think she's going to come over tomorrow and help me with my puzzles." During the whole, I would say, last year of his life she was taking care of him, but we were taking care of her. So you spent a lot of time talking to her and talking to my siblings about her. So, I think, when we got to the point where we were always calling each other-- and my phone bill was, like, $300 or $400 during this whole time period, month after month-- we would imitate her to each other. But it was more of a way to relay this information in a way that didn't hurt so bad. It was easy for me to call my brother up, or my sister up, and say, "You know, Toots doesn't like anything." We call her Toots. You know, Toots is complaining about this. "And the grass ain't cut. Now, I wanted my grass cut at 4 o'clock. You know, David didn't show up until 4:30. I had to push that lawnmower by myself." It wasn't so hard to hear then. I always wonder, and I think my siblings always wonder, is it as bad as she says it is, or isn't it? And so, by imitating her and trying to get it as close to it as possible, it is conveying more information, you know? "David didn't cut that grass til 4:30," is a lot different than, "Lord, David didn't cut that grass til 4:30. I just don't know what I'm going to do." When her voice is like that, it's just like, oh my, somebody get there now. But if it's, "I don't know why that boy didn't cut that grass," she's fine. She's complaining, she's fine. In our family, we always imitated our mother to each other. Another thing I can tell you, if one person in the family imitates the Mom, everybody does. Take Julia Sweeney's family. It was actually a main source of bonding between the kids, of us telling each other stories of something she said or did to each other. OK. For example? My sister, Meg, who lives in Japan, if she and I are talking about my mother, she'll say, "Well, I called Mom and Dad last week, and Dad's reading more books about dogs. And he's still considering getting a dog, and we had a great talk about that. And then Mom said, 'Well, I don't know why you chose to move 10,000 miles away. A person who decided to move 10,000 miles away from their family must have some reasons for moving. And you should think about that, why you need to be 10,000 miles away.'" And then we'll laugh because one of the reasons you are 10,000 miles away is because someone near you could be saying things like that to you. [LAUGHS] My mom used to do these things like, she had weird, confusing-- it's kind of like with the money thing-- confusing gift. Like, she would say, "For your birthday, I'm going to give you $50 towards that $200 microwave I want you to have." And then you'd say, "Well," [LAUGHING] "Then I have to spend $150 on the microwave, and I don't even want that microwave." And she'll say, "No, I've checked out all the microwaves. I've gone to Sears. I've gone to The Bon. I've gone everywhere. This is the microwave for you to have. But I have a budget on your birthday for $50. So I thought, if I put down the first $50, you could pay it off over time. And then that would be my birthday gift to you." I think part of it is to offset what may be uncomfortable with a funny way of imitating something that, if you weren't imitating, it might be just plain upsetting otherwise. Really? Well, you know, it's just easier because it distances you from the person, and then you can imitate them and then look at them as a funny way. In some ways what your brain is saying is, "I'm not them. I'm so not them. I'll make a character that's them and say what they would say as them. That's how much I'm not them." You know? Like that. Julia Sweeney is an actress. And for years, when she was just starting out, she would assume the character of her mom in sketches with The Groundlings Comedy Troupe in LA. But, when her mom came to see the shows, she'd pull the sketches. It was the same when she was on Saturday Night Live. One skit was based on this idea. My mother would always tell-- it's actually, it's so funny to me. She tells you the story of a movie from the point of view of the character who is most like her in age and point of view in the movie, no matter how small that character is in the movie. So, if it was Romeo and Juliet, say, she would say, "I saw a movie about this nurse. And she takes care of this girl, who's 14, who's very rambunctious and hard to manage. And she's had a hard time controlling her. And she runs off with a boy that no one wants her to be with. And everyone tells her she doesn't know what she's talking about. And the nurse is very concerned about this girl. And, of course, they end up dead at the end." And so I was going to do this on SNL. And then I just couldn't. I was too nervous about-- I just didn't want her to see it. I wanted to protect her. Eventually, Julia's mother did see herself on stage in Julia's one-woman show, God Said Ha! Even after several years, her mother still recalls certain scenes she took offense at, which Julia understands. Mothers have feelings. On the other hand, I have to say it's a way of loving them and enjoying them, maybe, in the only way you can. Because I have a huge amount of love for my mother, and I really enjoy her, but one way I think I learned to enjoy her was to make her a character to me that was also funny. And sometimes my mother says incredibly insightful, true things. And maybe it was a way for me to feel more intimacy with her in some weird, inside-out, perverted way, by making her into a character, and then relating to her as that character, and, in some ways, even allowing that character to have really true insights. One of the paradoxes of imitating your mother is that you expose certain aspects of her personality in precise detail, or you simplify and make cartoon-ish her personality as a whole. Sarah Koenig, whose mother was born overseas and still has her British accent, says it's because the portrayals leave huge chunks out. I think the character of my mother that I play is sort of more dotty and sort of talking all about, "Well, I went to the fish shop. And they didn't have enough tuna, so I got the swordfish. And I don't have the right-- it's so irritating," you know, this kind of bumbling, silly, English woman. And she's actually not really like that. She is really impressive in what she's had to deal with in her life. So I don't know if that comes through. That's probably missing. And I don't know how you make that come through. I mean, I don't know if you can bring that out in any kind of dopey imitation of your mom. She's always trying to get you, or my brother, or my sister to do chores by-- she bills them as fun because we'll do it together. She'll say, "Oh, Sarah, can't you just help me in the garden a bit?" [LAUGHS] And I'll say, "Oh, Mom, please, I don't want to. Can we do it a little later?" "Oh, Sarah, it's so much fun when we do it together." And she gets a lot of flack for that. Why does she get flack for that? Because it's such a ruse, so clearly a ruse. It's not fun. And sometimes they were bad jobs. "It's so much fun if we do it together." Hello? Hello, Mrs. Matheson? This is Alex. Oh, hello Alex. Well, it seemed unfair not to consult the real protagonist of this story. I called Sarah's mom, and it turns out she knows Sarah's imitation quite well. I would make my usual little homilies of when we were gardening. And I would try to entice them to help me and say, "Now, let's do it all together. It'll be such fun." [LAUGHS] And Sarah would say this back to me with a little slant. And I realized that I was sounding absurd. Although, I wished they would come and help me. And I do think it's more fun when we do it all together. In fact, Sarah and her mother both remember a time when Sarah didn't do imitations, when she was too afraid of her mother to even attempt them. And they both remember the exact moment when everything changed. My sister and I would fight, which we did all the time, loudly, violently occasionally. And, one time, my sister and I were fighting horribly. We must've been, like, 10 and 12, or nine, and then, nine and 12, or something. I couldn't stand the wrangling any longer, the fighting. It was endless and always, wrangling and fighting, until it drove their poor mother berserkers. I remember exactly where it was in the house, in this tiny, little alcove where there was a phone. I mean, there wasn't even room for the three of us. And my mother got so fed up that she grabbed my sister and me by the collar, kind of. And then I threatened them. And said that I would bang their heads together if they didn't stop. And they didn't stop, so I banged their heads together. And then, what happened? And they laughed. That's what they did. And we started laughing, uncontrollably. It was so absurd. And you could see she wanted to laugh, but she couldn't. It was this critical moment of discipline, and she couldn't. I was really shocked. I was guilty and horrified, and I was mad as well. I think the realization, at that moment, was we both knew that my mother was never going to discipline us the same way, ever again. Like, that there would be no more corporal punishment around the house because it was too absurd. I became, from a feared and authoritarian mother, to a figure of fun. And, suddenly, nothing worked. I went from being afraid of her wrath to mocking her wrath. [LAUGHS] And she knows it, she talks about it. That's another thing she says all the time, "It's so awful." She says, "You wait 'til you have children and you go from a figure of fear to a figure of fun." By making the things that I thought important, or wanted to make important, absurd, it freed her. I do think that. And it freed her from what, exactly? Well, you know, I'm a sort of overbearing person, and it's hard for them to get away. Sarah, at one point, said to me when she came back from Moscow and I was trying to have her make tea. And she didn't want to have tea. I have tea every afternoon, I'm a creature of habit. And those sorts of habits irritate her, that I'm very habit-bound. And I said, "You're very disagreeable. You've come all the way from Moscow," and, et cetera. And she said, "Well, don't you understand? I can't bear to be here, and I want to be here all the time." I think that this form of diverting me from my purpose is very good for me because it makes me see myself in a different way. And sometimes it's very loving, and it makes me relax and not want to control all the time. It's taken me a long time in order to give up that control, and it's a great relief. I mean, keeping control is very exhausting, I think. You know how everyone--- there's this maxim that we all become our mother or we all become our parents. And, generally, I really wouldn't mind becoming my mother. I really like her, so I wouldn't mind becoming her. But I definitely need to edit her. And, I think, if I imitate her and I'm making fun of her, those are the parts of her that I would edit out of myself. If I have to become her in the long-run, then I'd like to not become those parts. If I can isolate those bits and repeat them frequently, perhaps I can avoid them. Which brings me to my last finding, imitating your mom doesn't mean you don't get along with her. Jonnafer talks to her mom on the phone almost every day. Sarah recently went with her mom to a health spa in the desert for a week and actually found it relaxing. And Julia just spent 10 days with her mother in Spokane and came back with nothing she wanted to mock. Alex Blumberg is one of the producers of This American Life. Well, coming up, who makes a better mother, a convicted criminal behind bars or the state of Florida? Answers in a minute. From Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different stories on that theme. Today's program, stories for Mother's Day. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, "Are You My Mommy?" Tougher sentencing laws all across the country have resulted in more teenagers being bumped up from juvenile court to adult court, where they get adult sentences. And if you're, say, 14, and get sentenced to serious time like this, in most states, you will serve the first few years of your time in a juvenile detention center, someplace designed for young people, where they'll make you go to school, where there are facilities for you and people trained to deal with you. But, in some states, you can get sent, right away, to adult prison from the start. 7,000 young people are in adult prisons right now. And, of course, in that situation, the state has taken on the job of being your parent. And it isn't always such a good parent. Alex Kotlowitz has the story of one teenage girl who was sent to adult prison in Florida. And the prison did such a sloppy job caring for her-- it wasn't set up for this job after all-- that other prisoners stepped in to mother her. Jessica Robinson is a slender girl with emerald green eyes, her hair on this day styled in a short bob. Her forehead is marked by a light case of acne. We met in an office at the Dade Correctional Institution, a sprawling prison complex which lies on the edge of Florida's everglades. We sit in chairs knee-to-knee. Jessica stretches, arching her back. She answers many of my questions with the phrase, "Yes, but no." She cracks her knuckles. She yawns. She snatches a piece of paper from the desk and rolls it up tightly. She picks lint off of my microphone. She tugs at the hem of her prison-issue navy blue skirt. She is, to put it mildly, fidgety. "Were you scared when you first got to prison?" I asked. Scared when I went in Jefferson? No. What are things you miss the most? Having fun. Like what? Going out with Barbara, mainly. Because we used to go to the beach and stuff. Going shopping, oh I miss shopping. Going to the movies, going to the pet shops, seeing the little puppies in the windows. If you could get out tomorrow, what would be the first thing you'd do? I don't know, I'd probably go to Taco Bell and eat. Go to Taco Bell? Yep. I love Taco Bell. Jessica is 16, the youngest prisoner here at Dade. She's a girl among women. She's been in prison, adult prison, for two years and is serving a nine-year sentence for armed robbery and kidnapping. But I'll get to that shortly. In July of 1998, Jessica arrived at her first stop after the county jail, the Jefferson Correctional Institution, an all-women's prison near Tallahassee. She was 14. She had long, dirty blond hair that fell to the small of her back, and she was reed thin. Shortly after her arrival, she met Suzanne Manning, who's serving 30 years for embezzlement. The first time I ever saw Jessica, it was actually sitting in the child hall at Jefferson Correctional Institution. There had been a lot of rumors going around about this little girl that was at Jefferson. And Jefferson's considered kind of a tough prison. And there are three gun towers. It's pretty intimidating. It's very strict, you walk in a little yellow line on the side of the walkways. So, in the child hall, I had heard all the rumors. Well, when I saw her walk by, I was in shock because, when you looked at Jessica-- and this was years ago now, a couple of years ago-- Jessica looked like a child. Her cheeks were rosy red, she still looked like she had baby fat on her. And she looked totally lost. Not too long after I first saw her she moved into my dorm, in B Dorm. And my heart just broke when I saw Jessica and I got to talk to her because she was a child, she was a baby, and she was thrown into this hellhole and didn't have a clue. Suzanne Manning's 39. She's a handsome woman. Her six years in prison have turned her curly hair gray. She became the first in a line of women to watch over the 14-year-old. Well, I thought I would start helping her with some school work. We went to the library, and they had kind of a children's section. And Jessica ran over and got a book, The Little Mermaid, and wanted me to read that book to her. And I think it brought out a lot of my maternal instincts because my son was 13 when I came to prison, and I missed a lot of those times with him. So being able to sit and read with Jessica, it really did both of our hearts good. Jessica was born in Austin, Texas. Her father was a heroin addict and, according to Jessica's mother, Teresa, he physically abused her and their two daughters. When Jessica was three, Teresa fled from Miami to be near her parents. There, she waitressed nights at Denny's and, by her own admission, wasn't a very patient mother. She and Jessica fought frequently. When Jessica turned 13, she began to run away from home, once, staying away for three weeks. She was detained in a juvenile facility on three occasions, all a result of inter-family squabbles. Once she threw a plate at her older sister. Another time she bit her mother on her hand. Teresa told me she'd called the juvenile authorities hoping she could get her daughter psychiatric help, but she had no health insurance. Indeed, a psychologist who saw Jessica in detention recommended that she be placed in a residential program where she could receive therapy. Nothing ever came of that suggestion. She was released a few days later. At one point, Teresa sent Jessica to live with her grandparents, but Jessica quickly alienated them as well. She argued with them, and they too called the authorities. Jessica sought revenge. On a late Saturday night in July of 1997, Jessica, who was 13, and two other teenagers, a boy and a girl, showed up at her grandparent's. Jessica and the other girl snatched jewelry and cash while the boy forced the two grandparents at knife point into a back room, ordering them to kneel on the floor. The boy threatened to kill them with a flower pot and, at one point, cut the grandfather on the hand. The three were arrested a couple of days later. Under Florida law, the state's attorney could choose to prosecute Jessica as an adult, and did, charging her with armed kidnapping and armed robbery. Jessica pled guilty. Her mother wasn't present for the sentencing. She'd married a serviceman and followed him to Germany. In court, Jessica initially refused to apologize to her grandparents. And at the sentencing, the judge told Jessica that her dogs were better behaved than her. The judge also told Jessica, and I quote, "I don't think we need people like you in our country." She sentenced Jessica to nine years. Jessica became the youngest girl in Florida's adult prisons. Suzanne Manning then entered Jessica's life. I couldn't imagine being a child growing up-- I knew what my son, at the age of 13, was eating when I left home, and I knew how important snacks were. I knew how important chips were, and juice when he wanted it. And then, all of a sudden, to realize, here's this child in prison who couldn't eat when she wanted to eat. And, sure, everyone would chip in and buy Jessica snacks and stuff, but do you know what it's like to feed a child like that on $30 a week? I mean, it's virtually impossible. We used to look at her at night thinking, what can we do to get food for her? It was horrible. Prisons are pretty strict on touching. It's called unauthorized physical contact, and you can get a DR, disciplinary report, and go to confinement for it. And, many times, officers would catch me hugging Jessica, or rubbing her head, or her head on my shoulder if she was crying, and they wouldn't say anything, they'd just walk past it. And I understand that they couldn't encourage it, or acknowledge that they saw it without having to write me up because they would have to keep the rules for everybody. There is not a rule that says if you're 14 or 15 someone can hug you because you need a hug. But they would let you? Many times. Many, many times. There was one time in our dorm, when I walked in, everyone got real quiet, and a little circle was formed around, in the back around people. And Jessica was in the center of it in an argument. I didn't even recognize her voice, OK? She was in an argument with this girl and they were just going at it. And this circle had been surrounded around them by adults who wanted them to fight. And I actually got between two of the women, and I took Jessica and pulled her up to the officer's station. Now, let me guess, Jessica must've really pissed at you. Well, in the beginning, she was. I'm not going to say she wasn't. She told me that she needed to prove her point, and she needed to stand up, and all the rest of those con words. But she didn't need to do it. And she ended up being OK after that. Christmas was really big for her. She said she could remember Christmases with her mother. And I remember one Christmas, one of my friends named Susan made Jessica-- she melted down some Hershey bars and made Jessica a Christmas tree out of Hershey bars that were melted. She mixed some nuts in it. And then she took M&M's and smashed them up and put them on top to make it like it was lights, and shaped it all up and got it hard, and gave Jessica that. And I ran out to the store. I thought of it at the last minute. I hadn't even thought that she was a child and it was Christmastime and she might want something. So I ran out to the store and I got Jessica a radio and some headphones and some batteries. When I came back down, and I gave that to Jessica, she didn't stop hugging me. She jumped up and down. And then I realized what a solace that was to her to be able to listen to the music. I mean, she stayed on her bed after that and didn't bother us, pretty much. She could listen to music. She knew what was going on. She walked around with it at rec. And I thought, why didn't I think of that before? She's a child. Children like music. Jessica started calling Suzanne Mommy, but Suzanne discouraged her. She started that, "Mom, you're my mom." And I sat down and told her, "I'm not your mom. Your mom is in Germany. And I'm Suzanne, and I'll do anything I can to help you." And a lot of people think that's cruel. I don't think it is. I think it's a reality. I'm not your mom. Another reality is, if you try to be in groups like that or bond like that with people here, in prison, you get shipped. I mean, you can get shipped today. This morning they could've woken me up and said, "You're going to Dade." On Tuesday, they could wake me up and say, "You're going to Lowell." Jefferson had one shipment day, and that was Tuesdays. People were shipped on Tuesdays. So, every Monday night, I'd say, "Jessica, do you realize that I can be shipped tomorrow? Do you realize you can be shipped tomorrow?" Suzanne was transferred to another prison. But, before she left, she wrote to the Children's Advocacy Center at Florida State University's law school detailing her concerns about Jessica. Jessica needs more milk, Suzanne wrote. Jessica receives a prison diet tailored for a grown man or woman. It includes only one cup of 2% milk each day. Claudia Kemp was a law student at Florida State, and she took on Jessica's case. Claudia is 47, a former hardware store owner and the mother of three daughters. She made a commitment to see Jessica every week. And, pretty soon, she'd become the second woman to step in as a kind of surrogate parent to Jessica. One time she was not feeling well. And she just put her head down on the table and said, "I want you to take me home with you." And you said? And I said, "I wish I could." I mean that I wish I could take you out of here. I'm sorry you're here. Other times she would say, you know, "Couldn't I just go out for a drive?" "Can I go to the beach? I wish I could just go to the beach." And it's not even that she was asking to be let out, but just couldn't I go out for a little while, like a field trip. It's sort of what she was asking for, was a field trip. Just to go out. And it was very hard because you have to repress a very natural reaction. Which is? To want to take care of her. She had never been to the visiting plaza, which is the visiting that happens on the weekend when people's families come, because she never had any family to come. So she had never participated in that visiting schedule. And so I made arrangements to come see her on a Saturday. And a friend of hers grandparents were also there on that same day, so it was like a party that we had. I stayed there for four hours. And Jessica and her friend made us lunch, which is another one of these recipes they have where they take a variety of items from the canteen, like Spam, and oriental rice with seasoning, and Cheetos, and they make this almost-- I'm not even sure what to call it-- like a little cornmeal roll of some kind. In October of last year, Jessica, for the second time, lost an adult who was looking after her. She was transferred to the Dade Correctional Institution, which is eight hours from Tallahassee, too far for Claudia to visit any more. And Jessica can't write Suzanne Manning since correspondence between inmates isn't allowed. Here at Dade, which houses 521 women inmates, Jessica has found other mentors, which she describes as her prison family. I have two dads, two moms. I have a great grandfather, a great grandmother, uncles, aunties, brothers, cousins, sisters. And, as a family, do they watch out for you? Yeah, they do. Her prison family is such an elaborate affair that two of her moms, their nicknames Blackie and Tattoo, both in for murder, had a custody battle over Jessica. I didn't ask Jessica how the dispute was settled, but suffice it to say that Blackie won and Tattoo is granted visiting rights on Wednesdays and Sundays. Her family gave her a Sweet 16 party, making a cake out of Pop Tarts, cream cheese, and melted chocolate. One woman made a Teddy bear out of socks, which Jessica took to bed every night until it was discovered by a guard and confiscated. Stuffed animals aren't permitted. Who do you go to here for advice? My great grandfather, Sarah Allen. She's 21. She's in my dorm. She lives in my dorm. Wait, she's 21, and she's your great, great grandfather? She's just my great grandfather. Yeah, only 21. Her great grandfather, Sarah Allen, is in for killing a 40-year-old man in a hold-up. One mom, Blackie, along with an accomplice, robbed an elderly couple at their home. The accomplice hacked them to death with a machete. Another mom, Tattoo, along with an accomplice, stole checks from an elderly gentlemen. Her accomplice beat the man to death. These are the women now in Jessica's life. During my visit at Dade, I met with Jessica's prison step-mom, Wanda Dennis, who's serving 22 months for check forgery. I will not see anybody harm her or do anything to her. She's a baby. To me, she's a baby. I have a child, what? Two years younger than her? And if one of my kids was to come here, in the same situation as her, I want someone older to look out for my child also. And I look out for her in that aspect, as if she was one of my own children. If she calls you and you do not move right that minute, oh, she blows up and she storms off. She's gone and she's mad. And then, when you see her, "Oh, I don't want no-- you don't never have time for me." And, "No, you have time for everybody else." And we're like, "But, Jessica, we just spent all day yesterday." It doesn't make a difference. Every day is Jessica's day. Oh my god. She has this little walk. I think it's her little grown-up walk. And I hate it when she does it. And I tell her all the time, "Stop walking like that." I don't know, I could just picture her walking the compound right now. But, you say she's got an adult-like walk, you mean just kind of swiveling her hips? Yes, that's the walk she does. Yes. But it's just her own little walk she's picked up since she's been here, I think. Kind of testing those adult waters, I guess. Yes. Yes. She has, in a way, to me, she doesn't have a choice. She either has to blend in with adults or act like a child. If she acts like a child, then she gets talked about. The fact is, this isn't an environment that leaves much room for experimentation. And Jessica's no longer a rosy-cheeked 14-year-old. She'll be 17 in August. She smokes. She curses. She wears dark eye shadow. She lifts weights. Not surprisingly, she suffers from depression and takes anti-depressants. The women in Jessica's life worry about her. Jessica's mother, her real mother, has re-entered her life. And she and Jessica have had a reconciliation, of sorts. They talk twice a month. Claudia Kemp, the law student, also keeps in touch by phone with Jessica. She's helped file a motion to get Jessica transferred into a juvenile facility where there'd be teachers, counselors, and therapists to work with her. It's also a place where Jessica could be among other children, which, she told me, is what she misses most of all. Towards the end of our time together, I told Jessica I was planning to visit Suzanne Manning the next day. Jessica excitedly recounted the Christmas Suzanne gave her the radio with headphones. She then paused. "I miss her," she said. Suzanne misses Jessica as well. I ask all the time. Anybody who comes from Dade, I ask a million questions about Jessica. I heard that right after I left she actually got her GED. Is that true? I don't think so. No? I heard that she got her GED. We used to study every night. Even on weekends, we worked on her homework. It was really hard saying goodbye to Jessica because, I guess, she knew that I was leaving. I mean, it was pretty obvious. And the next morning I went over and said goodbye, and I gave her a hug. And she just sat on her bed and looked at me, like, she couldn't believe I was abandoning her. And that's a pretty painful thing for me to have to deal with. Did she say anything to you? She said "Goodbye." That was it. And what were your parting words? I told her I loved her and I said goodbye. I said, "Bye, Jessica. I love you," I said, "and you'll be OK." But I don't know that that's necessarily true. When I asked an official at the Dade Correctional Institution whether it was difficult having such a young girl among adults, he replied, "We treat everyone the same here." That may just be the problem. There's no one, for example, to make sure Jessica goes to school. She stopped attending GED classes because, she told me, "the others in the class were too noisy." There's no one to stop her from smoking. In fact, her prison family supplies her with cigarettes. There's no one to advise her to think twice before getting a tattoo. She's tattooed the initials of a friend on one finger and, on her forearm, has imprinted the letter M. It was to spell Mom, but, she tells me, she never got around to finishing it. Alex Kotlowitz is the author of The Other Side of the River and There Are No Children Here. Jessica Robinson gets out of prison in the year 2006. Act Three, "Mom Music." Hello, my name is Beau O'Reilly. And this is my mother, Winifred, here to my right. How do you do? This is my son Richard John. Oh, no. [LAUGHS] And the reason he's laughing is he changed that along the way. He's now Beau, and that's the way he's known. I call him that too. And so, Mom, you have 14 children, correct? Mm-hm. Yes. And it's Mother's Day, and we're here to celebrate Mother's Day. Do you have any memories that you'd like to share? I was remembering that-- I was thinking about the love part when we made this decision with Ira, that we would go in a love direction. I was thinking about when we were still pretty little and we lived in the house on Edgewood Avenue. Yes. And I remember being really little and figuring out, at a certain point, that you listened to the opera on Saturday mornings. Oh, yes. And that, if I was interested in opera, I could spend more time with you. Because everybody else was not interested. They were running around outside, which was a reasonable thing for them to do. And so I would come and sit by the radio. And you would listen to the opera. And you would tell me a little bit about the Italian or the German, what the language meant. But you would mostly tell me the story of the opera. And I really didn't care very much about the music, but I loved hearing you tell the story of how the opera worked. Thank you. I hadn't heard that before. My memory of listening to the operas on Saturday afternoon is more I would put the little gate up, which we had when each little child was in the crawling stage. And I'd put the gate up, and I'd say, "I'm going to be in the living room listening to the opera. If you want to be quiet and listen, you can come in. If you want to make a lot of noise and have fun, stay out." [LAUGHS] Right, because it was your private time. It was my private time. Yeah. And the private time thing was really important to me when I was a kid, to get private time with you, because I was always surrounded by brothers and sisters, because the place was so small and we all were there all the time. And so I remember, actually, I would calculate little things. Like, OK, am I sick enough to stay home with mother? And there was this period of time, when I was in 5th, 6th grade, something like that, where I would get this stuff that would come out of my eyes. I don't know what it was, it was probably an infection. And I would wake up with my eyes glued shut from this gunk in my eyes that would glue them shut. And I would lie on the bunk bed with these slices of cucumber. You would give me slices of cucumber. And I'd lie on them with the cucumber on my eyes, which, I guess, pulled the stuff out of the eyes. And then you would slip me slices of cucumber to eat. And you would tell me different stories and talk about things. And that is when I remember that you confessed to me your love of Johnny Cash. My goodness. Because you would listen to Johnny Cash on the radio. And you were kind of like, "Well, it's country music, and it's kind of dorky, and the rest of us shouldn't know about the Johnny Cash thing. But I really love his voice, Beau." And I loved that about you, that you had this little secret Johnny Cash thing. There was a time when I, of course, for many, many years, I would be up in the middle of the night feeding a baby. But there was nothing else on the radio but the Barn Dance. Right, it was late at night. And I thought, "Now, these are real people. I don't know this music at all, this country music, but I like the integrity I'm getting here. I like this feeling." And, of course, it also helped me through the night. Yeah. Well, the singing was always, really, a very important part for you. And, then, therefore, for us. And that was a lot of what we did, as a group, is that we sang together and told stories. Do you want to sing now? I was thinking that this is a lullaby. I sang it frequently. [SINGING] Lullaby and goodnight, with roses bedight, With lilies o'er spread is baby's wee bed. Lay thee down now and rest, may thy slumber be blessed. Lay thee down now and sleep, may thy slumber be deep. I was just thinking about this the other day, is that-- I think I was in the 7th grade because I was already tall, because I was as tall in 7th grade as I am now. So I was, like, 5' 9", and I was very skinny, but I was that tall. And I woke up one morning in the attic. I slept in the attic with my brothers. And I got out of bed and I fell down on the floor because my leg, my right leg, didn't work. It just went completely numb and didn't work. But, somehow, the decision was made I would go to school anyway. The leg must be asleep, and it would wake up, and I would go. So, I went to school. And I got to school on the bus, which was, maybe, two miles from where we lived, two and a half miles. And when I got to school, it was obvious that the leg still wasn't working. It just wasn't working. And so one of the nuns called you and, I think, at the neighbor's house because we didn't have a phone. And the neighbor went and got you. And you walked from home to the school to get me. And you came to the classroom and you picked me up. And I still remember how it felt to be picked up, at that point, because you put your arms around me and you picked me up at the trunk, like, at the chest and shoulders. And you pick me up, like this, with your two hands kind of linked together, and picked me up, and a lifted me up, and carried me out of the school. And I was taller than you were, and so my feet dragged along the sidewalk. And I remember that too, the physical sensation of that. And then you carried me from that section of the town to the other section of the town where this doctor was, which is another mile and a half, maybe, maybe two miles. I'm not exactly sure. And you carried me the whole way. And every once in a while you would say, "OK, now honey, we're going to stop." And you would just put me down, and we would wait. And then you would pick me back up and you would go. And the whole time you talked to me as we walked, and you told me about your day and what you were doing. And you treated it as if this was just a normal thing. And you made me feel very comfortable with it. And there was no fear in it. And then we went to the doctor. There was nothing really wrong. They sent me home. The next day, it went away. It was this weird little phenomena. But what I remember most about it was that feeling of being taken care of by you. Do you remember that? I think I remember it now because I hear you telling it. But I wouldn't have had it in my memory bank until it was brought up. I think that that's what a mother does. A mother takes care of the situation the best she can at the moment and doesn't think of the inability to do it, just I have to do this. Happy Mother's Day, Winifred. I don't see how I could have anything else, but a happy Mother's Day. I love you, Mom. I love you, Beau, Richard John. Beau O'Reilly's play, Not Only Sleeping, is currently in an extended run at Chicago's Curious Theater Branch. Winifred O'Reilly, his musical review that goes up at the end of May in Skokie, Illinois. It's called It's About Time. Well, our program was produced today by Blue Chevigny and myself with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike and Consigliere Sarah Vowel. Production help from Todd Bachman and Mary Wiltenburg. Musical help from Mr. John Connors. To buy a cassette of this, or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you can listen to most of our programs for free, on the Internet, at our website, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who doesn't know how it happened to him, and he keeps warning me about it. You wait 'til you go from a figure of fear to a figure of fun. I'm Ira Glass. Happy Mother's Day. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Well, in this moment of our presidential election process, let us consider the plight of a group whose sad fate we do not usually consider, a group we do not usually count among society's victims. I refer to moderate Republicans, because they have seen the future. And the future has a name. And the future's name is Bob Dole, the man now invariably referred to as the presumptive nominee, except of course by himself. He always refers to himself as Bob Dole. And they are a pragmatic, roll up your sleeves, get the job done group, as a whole, the moderate Republicans are. And they will do what is necessary for victory in the fall to get the White House. But just last week, when we convened a small, unscientific panel of four Republicans, only one of the four was actually happy about the presumptive nominee. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it is Your Radio Playhouse. I'm Ira Glass. In our program today, politics, economics, you know, the big picture. And later on in our program, we hire two temp workers. And we put them to work doing a radio story about being temp workers. And these guys aren't office workers. These guys are part of the massive number of workers in our country right now who do temp work in factories and industrial settings. That will be Act Two. That means later. Because right now, we're on Act One, Presumptiveness. The Republicans we convened for our panel were these people, and gave very generously of their time, I should say, because the power went out in Navy Pier in the middle of our interviews. So these people not only-- we started our interview, then we had to take them out for drinks, and then we had to bring them back. So this is not just presumptiveness, but it's presumptiveness on the rocks. That's what this segment is. Our Republicans were [? Will Tinken, ?] a bonds trader, Diane Cohen, an attorney who is, I think it'd be more accurate to describe her as a libertarian than a moderate Republican, but still shared some views with these guys. [? Brian Castle, ?] a bonds trader and money manager and 43rd Ward Republican committeeman. And Dan Parisi, who owns a pizza restaurant out in the suburbs and also works as a telephone technician for Ameritech. And as of last Tuesday, this was Junior Tuesday, before Super Tuesday, before the New York primary, before Bob Dole was fully named the presumptive nominee, Will was the only one of the four people in our panel who would look you square in the eye and actually say he had a favorite candidate. Dole. And the reason I like Dole is I just like the way he's held together in this past month. Talk about a trial by fire. His resume is impressive. He's got a unique perspective. And dare I say, I might be excited by Bob Dole. Smiles all around, I should say for people in the radio audience. Everyone else at the table just had a little grin. And there was a sort of rolling of eyes from Diane. Diane? I'm just in denial. I'm waiting for Jack Kemp to announce. So I'll pass on that. So you're having trouble finding a candidate who you like. Yes. They don't represent the ideals that brought me into the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan brought me in. And candidates I see are just not inspiring me in the same way. Brian? Well, I had liked Governor Pete Wilson of California early on, and so I was probably the most wrong person here at the panel, as he went out quickly. But I think Bob Dole would probably be a very good president. And I like Forbes as well. Dan, what about you? Are you having trouble finding a candidate you can love? I wish that Bob Dole could get as excited about Bob Dole as Will has gotten about Bob Dole. At the time, Dan and Brian were still deciding between Dole and Forbes. Diane described herself as "off the map," no candidate at all. They all said they wanted the next president to be somebody who would reduce the size of government, cut regulations. Brian and Dan were especially forceful about the idea of eliminating the federal deficit. And so I proposed a theoretical candidate to our panel, somebody who would balance the federal budget in just a few years, somebody who promises to reduce the size of government and cut the capital gains tax, somebody who is for the death penalty and tougher sentences for juvenile offenders, somebody who is pro-choice. All four of them said they would at least be curious to hear more about such a candidate. Or as Diane put it-- Well, I'd like to hear what she has to say. And then I revealed to them that this theoretical candidate, the person who I was describing to them as an acceptable moderate Republican, was, if you haven't guessed this already, President Clinton. This is where he stands on these issues. Is that where he stands this week? Want to elaborate on that point? Everybody around the table, again, smiled. I'll echo what Dan says. We may agree with a lot of the positions that President Clinton carries today. And again, I say today. But we don't know where he'll be tomorrow. I don't happen to believe that President Clinton is as high of integrity person that we should have in the White House. I think that most of the Republican candidates right now do hold that integrity. And I'd rather see one of them in there. Will? I can't think of anybody in the field right now, the Republican field, that would not do better than President Clinton with the same views. For many people, the coming presidential election is a lot like the last one in one significant way. For these people, there is only one issue. They do not like Bill Clinton. But maybe, maybe, moderate Republicans could be persuaded over to Bill Clinton's side, the way that moderate Democrats in droves, in masses, in national waves, were persuaded over to Ronald Reagan's side and George Bush's side-- once, anyway. I enlisted a little help to find out. OK, well, joining us now by telephone is Gary LaPaille, who's state chairman of the Democratic party. Gary LaPaille, are you there? I'm here. All right. So you're there. So Gary LaPaille, let me just review for a second. The four Republicans who are seated here with me have conceded that when it comes to the issues, many of President Clinton's stands and promises are fine with them. But when it comes to him the man, they are perhaps not so comfortable. Do you want to try to sell them on the idea for a second? Absolutely. Well, this is a person that is probably the first generation, our generation, that has become president. And our generation, I think it's our time to provide the leadership of this nation. You [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to a Bob Dole, he's had his time. He's had some-- Now I should say that at this point, the panel looked around at each other, and everybody was shaking their heads. This was clearly not working with our panel. And this might seem like an odd approach for Gary LaPaille to take. But according to newspaper reports, to differentiate President Clinton and Bob Dole, who share many of the same stands on many issues, White House officials are saying that they're going to play up the age and generation difference. Gary LaPaille is basically giving us a preview here of what we're going to be hearing throughout the next few months as we get into the general election. Gary LaPaille is saying what basically any leading Democratic politician will be saying about the president at this moment. And what was interesting about it was it was not persuasive with our panel. Gary, I agree that he is of course of a certain Baby Boom generation. But that's no excuse for some of the things. But I guess what Ira was saying before was we agreed with some of his positions today. But they're not positions he necessarily held six months ago, a year ago, or two years ago. How do you answer the question that he doesn't stand on the issues firmly? Well, I would have to say that when he first got into office, the first six months, we stood very firmly and got this economy back on track and put a plan in place, supported by only Democrats, that has reduced this deficit three years in a row, first time since Harry Truman, and has reduced it by over 50%. That was the whole debate in 1992, and we did it-- A brisk discussion of the economy followed this. People were astonishingly well informed, I should say. They threw around budget numbers and dates and specifics about the first Clinton budget and the second Clinton budget and consequences for Social Security. And what was interesting was that none of the Republicans gave President Clinton any of the credit for the eight million jobs created over the last four years, or the rising stock market, or the record number of new small business starts. Our panelists said that the normal business cycle would've done all of that anyway. They pointed out that among these jobs were a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs. And even the one area where President Clinton did stick his neck out, on his first budget, which did make dramatic cuts in the federal deficit, even here, they gave the president no credit. The cuts were not deep enough and not done with real conviction on his part, they said. Gary LaPaille, however, kept trying. Even the federal budget, people say, "Oh, well, Democrats are big spenders. And we've got to cut government." Right now, under Bill Clinton, we have the lowest federal government workforce since the days of John F. Kennedy, 270,000 less federal employees under this president from the day he took office. So something's working. He's agreed to balance his budget in seven years. Gary Lapelle, I'm afraid I don't think you're winning many converts here. People are shaking their heads no. I've tried to deliver you four potential voters, but I don't believe that you've brought them home. We may be right on all the issues regarding pro-choice. We may be right on some of the economic policies to go after moderate Republicans. But if you have people that are basically Republicans, they don't like being out of office. And they're going to stick with whoever their Republican nominee is. Of course, the thing that bothers these Republicans the most about Bill Clinton, his waffling on the issues, is something that the presumptive Republican nominee does plenty of as well. Bob Dole has gone back and forth on the "No new taxes" pledge. For a while, when Pat Buchanan was scoring lots of votes with economic populism, Republican-style, Bob Dole tried to pick it up. Bob Dole even wavered on abortion rights a few weeks ago on television. But as Brian Castle on our panel pointed out, our panel still prefers Bob Dole's wavering to the president's. Well, Bob Dole certainly has made some changes in his positions over a period of time. But I guess I'd have to believe that someone who's spent so many years in Washington, who has learned the process as well as Bob Dole, does have some base beliefs. And I believe that. And I really have a hard time believing that the current president does. I think Bob Dole would be much preferred to President Clinton, even with a waffle here or there. See, because I wonder, as somebody observing this process, if in the end, whether it's Dole or Clinton in the White House, if we'll end up with significantly different policies coming out of the White House. That is, under the Clinton presidency, what we've seen is the debate driven by the Republicans in Congress. And that's certain to continue even in a Dole presidency. And the president, if he's a kind of accommodator, who either Clinton or Dole is, will simply follow the political tide to where it goes and get similar results. Well, I think-- to some extent, I wanted to offer a bit of a reality check, because I think that even if we have a Republican president come in, we'll have most likely a Republican Congress at the same time. The Republican ideas will then become law in some form. They may not be the exact form that we want at one particular period of time, but the country will trend in that direction. And I believe that's good for the country. Diane, what about you? I would vote for Bob Dole, even with my concerns, because I would view him as a facilitator of a Republican Congress. And that is where my hope lies, that together, we could see progress. So you don't see President Clinton as being a kind of moderate Republican who happens to simply go under the name of Democrat? I think Bill Clinton has proven that if we want moderate Republicans, he'll be a moderate Republican. If we would like a lounge singer, he'd be a lounge singer. Will Tinken, Diane Cohen, Brian Castle, and Dan Parisi. Act Two, The Economy. And let's begin this act with the man who made the economy a national issue again and the man who he steals all his best lines from. I believe in free enterprise. I believe in capitalism. But I believe we all ought to share in the prosperity. We think corporations should make profits. We support international free trade. But corporate greed is skewing our economy. I think it's wrong for us to put our own workers into dog-eat-dog competition. People in Mexico make $1 an hour. The American worker can't compete with the Mexican worker, can't compete with the Chinese worker. We cannot compete with slave labor. And we should not have to. It is wrong to force our workers to compete with people who make shoes in China for $0.25 an hour. Well, that was Patrick J. Buchanan. And did you ever wonder what that J stands for, huh? Could it be, could it be Jesse? Well, no. It couldn't. And of course, Patrick J. Buchanan's prescriptions for our nation are very different than those offered by Jesse Jackson. Thanks to Patrick Buchanan, we've had about a month of front-page, front-burner discussion of what is happening in the economy. And to review those facts briefly, I find one phrase coming to my lips. It is a phrase, I have to say, that has never come to my lips before, kind of a radio phrase, and that phrase is "Let's do the numbers." A New York Times survey shows that 1/3 of all American households have had someone laid off since 1980. 1/10 of the adults in this country say that a layoff precipitated a major family crisis. And while most people who get laid off do find new jobs, 2/3 of them do not find jobs that paid as much as their old jobs. Median wages in this country have fallen 3% since 1979, adjusted for inflation, while stock prices have set record levels and corporate profits have risen. And one way that lots of businesses have helped their bottom lines is by replacing full-time workers with temporary workers and with contract workers. And one sign of the times is that the largest employer in the United States, outside of the government of course, the largest private employer is now a temp agency, Manpower, Incorporated. They send out 800,000 temps a year. And to give you a sense of just how big that is, let's compare that with some other numbers. Could we have that music again, please? General Motors only has 347,000 employees in North America. Boeing only has 106,000. Wouldn't it be irritating if every time somebody says a number on the radio, they would just be going along, and they'd just be talking about this and that and this and that, and then suddenly they'd mention 14, and you hear-- It would be like some weird, distorted, adult Sesame Street nightmare, is what it would be. Although it is the largest employer in the country, when you visit Manpower's downtown Chicago office, it doesn't feel like it's the outpost of a corporate giant. It feels like what it is, a small office, just seven people, with the idiosyncrasies of any small office. For example, where other offices might use Post-it notes or those "While you were out" message pads, these people use coasters, round, with gold borders, left over from some promotional something years ago. But Manpower is as good a vantage point as any for observing trends in the economy. Manpower spokesperson Stephanie Black says that in the last five years, the nature of the temp business has changed a lot as companies have looked for ways to lay off permanent staff and replace them, as needed, with temps. The business environment has changed enough where with the competitive global market, they need to maintain a core amount of staff that is productive and that they keep for all the time. And then they fill in for special projects or peak periods or seasonal fluctuations by using temporary help. While Manpower has been the beneficiary of these changes with the increased business, Stephanie Black takes pains to say that Manpower did not create the shift in the way that corporations hire or lay off workers. It simply responded. It responded well, though. Some companies use so many dozens of temps all the time that Manpower sends a full-time Manpower representative to work on-site at the company to coordinate all the temps. And while 40% of Manpower's business is office workers and 40% is industrial workers, the fastest-growing part of its business, rising from nothing to 20% just in the last few years, is a category whose very existence tells you a lot about what's going on in the economy. These are technical workers. Computer programmers, LAN administrators, CAD designers, chemists, biologists-- I mean, all sorts of different types of assignments. And many of those are project-based assignments, where they last six months. Come in, install a new network. Six months later, it's over with. They don't want to hire someone. A company doesn't want to bring someone in full-time for a position that's only going to last six months. This is the kind of work that 10 or 15 years ago might have been done by full-time employees. Now having said all that, it's important to note that one reason that Manpower has become the largest employer in the country is that it gives the people who work for it a fairly good deal, health insurance, paid vacation, and decent money. Skilled secretaries from the Chicago office make from $9 an hour to $16, and Manpower will train them to do particular jobs that it knows there's a market for. But to get to the bottom of what it's like to be a temp in today's economy, we at this radio program decided we needed to go to the source. And so we hired two temp workers ourselves. And when they showed up at the radio station, we told them that their job while they were working for us was to prepare their own radio stories about what it's like to be a temp. The two guys we got came from an agency called Labor Temps, whose motto is "Yes, we can." As opposed to most of the temp agencies we called with this assignment, who told us, no, they could not. Our two temp workers were named Lee and Tito. And they normally don't get sent to office jobs like this. Normally, these guys do light industrial work, general labor, factory work. Two of our producers, Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike, took them into the radio studio with a list of possible questions they might use in preparing their radio reports about being a temp. Check this one out. Does temping pay the bills, or do you have another job? And describe [? your family. You got to have another job. You're damn real. I can't see-- well, no, some people work full-time at their temp. But I don't see how you live unless you live 80 in a house. You're not going to get rich doing this, that's for sure. Definitely. But you keep a hot tortilla on the table. That's Lee, who made the little tortilla joke towards Tito. He was constantly ribbing him with these little ethnic-- I don't even know the word that we should use here in polite company on the radio, just a little ethnic ribbing. And just so you know, Tito gave as good as he got. Here's how he described Lee when we asked him to describe Lee for our stories. Long-haired, North side white boy. If I didn't know him and be walking down on the street, I'd think he's a pot-smoking, hooker-buying, drinking, just listening to rock and roll, banging his head into walls, and bar hanging out all the time type of guy. I should say that they seemed to have a lot of fun doing their stories, despite these two little quotes, as you will hear presently. The assignment was profile your fellow temp. So in other words, Lee interviewed Tito and did a story about Tito's experience. And Tito interviewed Lee and did a story about Lee's experience. We have two reports for you. The first one that we'll hear is the report that Lee prepared about Tito. Hi, I'm Lee. I work at Labor Temps with Tito. Tito, he's Puerto Rican, young, about 21. He's got tattoos, gym shoes, loose-fitting clothes, and a kind of "what's up for lunch" attitude. When you work at a Labor Temp, you get up early in the morning and go to an old garage-looking place and wait around with a bunch of people waiting to get work. It's two steps, one small one and one big one. Stand on it like a little stair. Maybe four people will fit there a little uncomfortable, three people comfortably standing right there [? unaccounted. OK, you go there, you'll have at least 10 people standing there, without exaggerating, on that one step, holding on to the edge. "Come on, send me, send me," and all that type of thing. So you go there. You might have at least a good 100, 150. OK. And then you might have probably 10 companies that call today. They probably want five people each. That's what, about 50 people? You've got to look at it like that. So that's why people will say you got to be up there in their face, because they got to choose. All kinds of people work at Labor Temps, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, black, white, lots of women. Everyone's there for a different reason. Some work one day a week for beer money. Some are trying to support their families. For me, it's mostly a part-time thing. My main job is doing some floors with a friend of mine, Mike. I do some graphics. I worked that about six years. I have knowledge in that field. And I do some computer programming, because I went to DeVry a couple years before I ran out of cash. I started about two years ago at Labor Temps when I was laid off a graphics job. Here's what Tito did before working with Labor Temps. Sell drugs. Well, I was raised in a way of surviving. Surviving, street survival, be streetwise always. So I was always raising-- if you can't make it here, hey, go to that corner. When did you stop? When I went to jail. That's where the temp came in. You go from jail to being a temp. Tito says as he makes about $150 a week at Labor Temps. Selling drugs, he can make five times that in a single day. I look at a temp like a drug. How? How's that? A female gets you to do it. The female gets you to do it. I mean, the way I got into Labor Temps-- Explain yourself. The way I got into Labor Temps was I had just finished coming into Chicago not too long ago, either. And I was staying with this female. I met this female. She liked me, whatever. We moved in together. And then well, "Why don't you go to this agency?" It was a block away. So I went. If it wasn't for her, I would've never got in there. And it's like drugs. You know what I'm saying? You don't do that to every drug. But if it's your girlfriend, and she's like, "Come on, honey, please, please, please," you're going to do it eventually. Temp agencies and the factories which call these agencies for temporary workers don't care that Tito spent six months in county jail. They don't care because they're mostly jobs nobody wants, garbage jobs. Most jobs that are temp jobs only give minimum wage. It's hard to have any strikes against you like Tito. He didn't finish the eighth grade. I think the people that say "Yeah, we'll call you," and they never call you, I think that's what it is. You know, when you apply, did you finish school? Should I be honest? OK. I'll be honest. They say, OK, we'll call you. And they just throw it out. Once they see the school thing, it's over. For Your Radio Playhouse, I'm Lee, the temp. Hopefully, one day, I'm hoping, wishing I'll be at that level where I don't have to worry about waking up in the morning and, "Damn, are they going to send me to work today or not?" I'll be waking up in the morning saying, "I have to go to work. Damn, I'm going to be late for work. Honey, uh--" you know, "Breakfast, where's my breakfast? My lunch, hurry up," all that type of thing. Family, kids running around, kiss a kid goodbye and whatever. The dog, kick him out of the way because he's in front of the door. All that type of thing. Well, that was the story that Lee did about Tito. Next, we have the story that Tito did about Lee. I'm Tito. I work with Lee. Lee's been temping a lot longer than me, and he's seen some crazy jobs. He's worked at different agencies, but he's been in Labor Temps the longest. Lee had one assignment through an agency that lasted a whole year. That's the funny thing. Temporary doesn't mean "short." It means no benefits, no pensions, no job security. That's why they hire temp workers. Some companies run on temp workers, all three shifts. They keep the smallest possible staff of full-time workers, just to keep everything running and organized. There's maybe five employees, and they have three shifts running. And they're all temps, shifts after shifts of temps. 30 here, 20 here. They'll have three different companies in there with three different sets of temps. Yeah, that's true. Most places we go, though, there's a mix of permanent and temp workers. It's a weird relationship. Sometimes the bosses treat you better than the permanents. Sometimes they treat you worse. Sometimes we work faster than the permanents, and they don't like it. They'll mess with you. Once, Lee worked at a factory that made tar sealers. The tar sealers were delivered through these big pipes. All of a sudden, you hear this gurgling in the whole system. Everybody took off. I'm the temp. Every takes off diving behind things and hiding. And this is all a matter of seconds. I see this happening, so I turn around and start running, diving behind a skid or something. And this big air bubble comes out, and this ooze just splatters all over. Everybody's laughing, man. I said, "Why didn't you tell me?" "Forgot." So every once in a while, it gets a big bubble in the system. And if you don't work there, you'll never notice. Sometimes, companies offer you full-time jobs. That happened to me once, but it fell through at the last minute. I would take pretty much any full-time job, $5, $6, $7 an hour. Anything's better than $4.25 an hour. Lee feels different. Nobody wants to pay any money for any kind of skilled labor. I noticed that. Like I'll go to a graphic place, I'll go to a typesetting house, they don't pay anything anymore. We'll give you $5 an hour to run optical [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. One guy wanted me to work his computer system. Wanted to give me $650. I was like, "Pfft. Give me $20,000, you pay off my education, and I'll do it." Because I said, "No way, man. You're nuts." Greedy mother-- They want to pay little for certain work that takes years' experience. For Your Radio Playhouse, I'm Tito the temp. You know what's the funny part about all this? If we walked down the straight, we would never admit that we work in an agency. But we will go on live radio for it. I mean, go on radio, have our voices on radio saying we work for an agency. Get some weird jobs out of them. So why would you never admit that you worked at an agency? Because out there, it's an embarrassing thing. It's like a person that-- You're a low-life. You're a nobody. OK, so to have music to end the story, I asked both of you guys-- Tito and Lee are here in the studio with me-- I asked you both to bring in some music. Tito, this is the song that you brought in. It's off a cassette. What are we hearing? Pull up to the mic. Ice Cube, "It Was a Good Day." And why did you choose this song to come after your guys' story? Because he talks about it being a good day. Nothing happened. Nothing bad happened. No cops messed with you today. No gangbangers messed with you. Everything went smooth today. That's what it meant, happening to me, just running smooth. OK, Lee, so what'd you bring? You have a tape here somewhere. Right there. Let's see. OK. Well, I wanted to play Nugent's "Stranglehold," because it's my favorite song. But it's kind of long. So I figured the mood working for temps, I figured Johnny Cash and Folsom Prison song would be the best. Life keeps dragging on. Go Lee. Hey, is your boss listening to this show? Yeah. Yeah, they are. Yes, they are. Yeah, good luck on Monday. Wait, was that the end of the song? That was the end, huh? We got to rewind it. Yeah, we got to get the beginning. All right. --had it coming. I know I can't be free. Can't be free. But those people keep a-movin', and that's what tortures me. Lee, if you want to sing, now's your chance. I was playing this all day where we were working. Is that true? Yeah. Where were you guys out today? It's Water Warehouse. They sell products for pools and spas and all types of things. All right. Now let's let the song play out. We got to do a little break, and then we're going to come back. OK? We have more stuff. Lisa Buscani, a tour of an economic development project, and we're going to talk to you guys a little bit more. OK? So stay tuned. Our program continues in a minute. You're listening to Your Radio Playhouse. It's Your Radio Playhouse. OK, well Tito and Lee, you guys are both still here. Wait, let me get that Folsom Prison music going here. Hold on. Oh no. So we can get some background music. And you guys are still looking for jobs, right? Definitely. And so people who are listening to the radio story, they could hear about some of the things you do. I guess we should set this up, so we're going to station Alix Spiegel at our Your Radio Playhouse phone. If you have a job-- now what kind of job are you guys looking for here? Anything. Anything. OK, pretty much that narrows it down. What kind of pay range? Whatever. Like I said, anything's better than $4.25. You drive one hard bargain here, Tito. I think exploitation is about to happen. I could use a job that stretches your brain. All right. All right. You could hear these guys. I can tell you they were our employees for three days. They came in on time. They were prompt. They were courteous. They were a pleasure to have around. Our phone number here is 832-3380. An operator is standing by. Let's see if we can hustle you guys up a job in the next 20 minutes. And if you're not at a phone now, but you've got a job for these guys, call us during the week here at the radio station, 832-3380 in the 312. Act Three, Dad. Well, we asked Lisa Buscani if she had anything to contribute to our program today about the economy. Lisa is a Chicago poet and writer, performer, winner of the National Poetry Slam, now resides in New York City. And she said she did have something. She had a story about her father. When I remember him during that time, that time that will exist "forever," in quote marks, emphasized heavily to save the family from having to actually discuss it at length, it is morning. It is always morning because no matter how many talk shows or war movies he stayed up to watch the night before, he rises with the sun or its winter absence. He rises because there is work in the morning. There always has been. Either it was assigned to him, or he found it himself. But there is work, and morning is the time to begin it. I hear his knees popping as he sits at the kitchen table with black coffee and his cigs to read two papers, the Toledo Blade and the Detroit Free Press. Two papers because that would lower the odds, that would double the chances, increase the opportunities to find work, work that he has recently lost. When I see him, there is no work. It is northwestern Ohio in the middle of its continuous recession. He has shaken both papers of all of their news, and there is no work. It is all he can do to keep from dropping his pride like the seventh veil and answering the aluminum siding or used car sales ads. Some days are better than others, though. On the good days, there is work. And he circles the ad with an exuberant, victorious red pen and heads upstairs to his office. His office, for as long as I can remember, had a huge desk cluttered with spec sheets and promotional brochures featuring whatever he was selling at the time, bright, four-colored photos of appliances or mattresses arranged in ways that would prove these items to be necessary, essential to the customer's well-being and happiness. Whatever he was selling, it was always essential and necessary. But when I see him, the desk is bare. The clutter has been swept away. Even his answering machine message is empty, because he has no company that he proudly represents, no business cards. Time has become his greatest enemy. His unemployment insurance is running out. He has long since passed the age when most companies will consider hiring him. He leaves the age blank empty on the application form, but personnel managers still rush him through interviews after one look at his tastefully graying temples and some simple math on his job experience. Time has become a shifting, empty, immemorable thing. Two months becomes six months. Six months becomes a year. He tries to fill it by painting the house and organizing the basement. I see my mom, weak with the weight of it. She's pale from going to work and arriving home without the sun. I see her lips thin and her knuckles whiten as she puts a bill payment off another month, as they max out another credit card, as they second mortgage the house. It has never been this bad. Together, they put three kids through college, and it was never this bad. She's struggling with her tongue, with her ever-present desire to scream at him, "Do something." Everything they built together is slowly crumbling, and she wonders if they'll survive. When I see him, he's typing cover letters, a hesitant, two-fingered pecking on an old Smith Corona with a fading ribbon. The family smiles quietly and rewrites, corrects his grammar, telling him, "Daddy, take this out. You sound too desperate." But after all, you write what you know. And what he knows is he has 30 years of experience, 30 years of smiling when he didn't want to, 30 years of forcing laughter into the phone, of looking into narrow, skeptical eyes, of fast food, 30 years of paperwork, of business trips in cut-rate motels, of driving backwater towns in white-out storms. 30 years of the word "no," 30 years of straight commission, which is the hardest, toughest, way to go. And god dammit, that's got to be good enough for someone. He's living with the firm knowledge that there is nothing that he cannot do and the terrifying reality that he will not be allowed to do it. I see us talking, my dad and I, about his unemployment and his prospects for the future. Nothing is ever said because most of the time, there is nothing to say. I wish him luck and faith, because sometimes only the intangibles can set things right. When I see him, he thinks he is alone. But he is not. All across Ohio, the Midwest, America, thousands of white, middle-aged men just like Dad are attending workshops, haunting placement agencies and training centers, filling their chests with the ghosts of their bravado, straining to understand why what once worked for them does not work any longer. They play their losing game the way they always have, pulling desperately on bootstraps, noses frantically to grindstones. These men refuse to question the validity of the business structures that they've established, a vicious system that whipped around and bit them the first chance it got. It is this ignorant, blind faith that makes me think, "Good. Let the men who made the rules and carry out the policies suffer the consequence of these policies. They chose management's pay scale. Let them live without the protection of a union. Let the most privileged class of our society taste the fear and frustration that the rest of us know on a daily basis." Then I think of my dad, how he waited, how time weighed him down and wore on him like the sea over stone. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Act Four, Economic Development, Chicago Style. Well, we as a nation are not helpless in the face of broad economic forces. We can take action. We can spur economic development. Witness one of the high visibility projects put into place by the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois at a cost of $156 million of taxpayer money, Navy Pier. Navy Pier is a downtown waterfront project on Lake Michigan, not far from the heart of downtown Chicago, but not in it, either. Lots of cities have development projects like this. There's Faneuil Hall in Boston, Baltimore's Inner Harbor, New York's South Street Seaport. Navy Pier features a big Ferris wheel and the Chicago Children's Museum and one of those IMAX movie theaters. There's convention floor space. There's some shopping and a food court. The atmosphere is that of a second-rate mall anywhere in America. The roof leaks. The food's nothing special. The stores aren't the kind you'd go out of your way to visit. We at this radio program are very familiar with Navy Pier because Chicago's public radio station recently moved to a new building located halfway between the Ferris wheel and the convention space. Our staff has spent so many hours walking the drafty hallway between the food court and our offices that associate producer Peter Clowney has committed to memory the song "Here Come the Hawks," the official theme song of Chicago's hockey team that, for a while, for reasons we've never been able to fully understand or explain, played incessantly in the hallway PA system. We have watched with fascination some of the strange conventions that have come and gone here at Navy Pier. One day, strolling to the end of the pier for some fresh air, I looked into Exhibit Hall A and saw an entire carnival midway, complete with full-size rides, multicolored lights, loud music, equipment so massive it's hard to comprehend how they even get it indoors. But here it was, under the artificial lights, during the dead of Chicago winter. A few months before, we all gawked at a convention whose purpose was to help small businesses market their products to Generation X. This was, as far as we could determine, American capitalism at a disturbingly odd nadir, sunk so low you didn't want to see it there, trying to market to a generation whose supposed defining characteristic is that it's comprised of non-materialist, non-conformist, slacker types who, above all, resent products being marketed to them. --the contest. He's going to demonstrate karaoke for you. Johnny Vaughan will demonstrate karaoke for you. And we're taking the next four people. I think we have two people signed up for our contest. Johnny Vaughan, we'll start the CD, and we're off. Hello. We can only wonder if the Generation X karaoke contest would have been more popular had there actually been an audience in the hall to participate. But the Generation X convention was one of the least successful events at the pier. The most important single fact about this $156 million economic development project is that, by all accounts, it is a huge, huge success. Crowds are twice as large as anyone expected, three and a half million in just six months. People even came during the winter. And at many stores and restaurants, business is good. This is by far, I think, our best seller. Describe what this is. This is a T-shirt. It's just a T-shirt. And we have it in both designs. We have just a plain white T-shirt. And what it is kind of a different look of the skyline, of fun, instead of your regular old skyline picture, just a really fun design showing Chicago with a nice little heart world representing the earth. Mary Beth Pullman owns the store Oh Yes Chicago, which looks like an upscale Gap store with blond wood floors, selling T-shirts and caps with the word Chicago on them in various designs. None of them, she'll tell you proudly, with the hackneyed old Al Capone, Chicago mobster, Mrs. O'Leary's cow images. The T-shirt she was showing me sells 25 or so on a typical day at $15 a shirt. Most of her customers are from out of town. They're going to maybe come in here, buy something for themselves and for a loved one, whether it be a child or a spousal unit or-- These are the kinds of jobs and businesses that have been created so far for $156 million. Mary Beth Pullman's happy at the pier. Her sales have exceeded expectations and projections. But like most businesses anywhere, it takes a while before you realize real profits. The pier's been open less than a year. She figures it'll be another two before the store is comfortably profitable. And in the meantime, she's earning less than she did in her old job renting shopping center space. Fortunately, she has a spousal unit of her own out in the suburbs earning money, so she doesn't have to draw a salary from the store right now. Any money that I'm taking out of the store is really being put right back in for inventory and such. It's because we are coming in to our peak season. So that's how, I mean, my compensation is I could draw the salary out if I wanted to. But at this point in time, it's in my best interest and the business' best interest to just put it right back in for inventory. This store has seven employees, and they earn between $6.00 and $8.00 an hour, which is about par for Navy Pier. That's $12,000 to $16,000 a year, not much if you're trying to raise a family. But most of the people you see working at the pier are in their 20s and early 30s, just starting out. Nigel, for example, works in the T-shirt store half the week and uses the money to go to college the other half. He lives with his parents, hopes to go to law school, take international law. I do speak Spanish. I'm bilingual. So in the long run, maybe have some business dealings in Mexico, South America, maybe in Spain. That's what I want to do. For now, I'm just happy working for Mary Beth here at Oh Yes Chicago. In fact, many workers on the Pier said they were glad to have these jobs. They didn't complain. The one maintenance man told me that he made more money at the hair care products company he used to work for, before layoffs sent him to the pier. He was looking for another job. Navy Pier officials are tight-lipped about the number of jobs that have been created for $156 million in taxpayer money. They say no economic projection or impact statements were ever done for the project. But after weeks of refusing to provide any numbers for this radio story, they finally turned over a few. Let's do them. The Navy Pier Authority says they have 137 full-time and 451 part-time employees. These are the people who work for the pier itself, security people, parking, maintenance. The Navy Pier Authority would not provide information on the salary ranges of its employees, or even a breakdown of employees' jobs. The Pier Authority refused to allow us to interview any pier employees for this report. In addition to the pier employees, there are 37 stores and restaurants located on the pier. At the very most, we figure they employ 600 additional people, bringing the pier total, at most, to 1,200 workers. The government put $156 million dollars into the pier. That works out to $130,000 per job at the very least. And remember that more than half of these jobs are part-time. Well, we had no idea if this was good or not, $130,000 per job created. So we called someone to find out. Joan Fitzgerald is a urban planner at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I would say it's a lot of money per job for service sector jobs, and particularly given that the number of those that are-- because you're counting your part-time jobs in there. And chances are those are jobs as shop clerks and so forth. So we're not talking living wage jobs here. It's very high. Joan Fitzgerald says that it used to be common for governments to create-- you know, we played that David Brancaccio music, and now I feel like I'm reading exactly like him. Now I'm going to try to read like myself. It's irresistible, once you play that Marketplace music, it has an effect on you that's so profound. All right. Joan Fitzgerald-- friends at home, I just want you to try this yourselves. Get a copy of that Dave McKenna "We're in the Money." And good luck finding it, because it's out of print. But let's not even go into that. And then play this thing. And I swear, you start to read like David Brancaccio on Marketplace. Well, I'm just going to read like him. That's what I'm going to do for this section of the story. Joan Fitzgerald says that it used to be common for governments to create jobs for $10,000 or $12,000 per job, but there's been a bidding war to pull in employers and businesses. $130,000 per job is high, but still a fraction of what Alabama just spent to get a Mercedes-Benz plant. And Joan Fitzgerald says that if Navy Pier helps bring tourists to the city and convention business and hotel business, then the investment makes more sense. You can't just look at each project in and of itself. You have to look at it as part of a broader tourism development strategy. Chicago city officials like Greg Longhini, assistant to the commissioner at the Department of Planning and Development, would prefer if we would not try to come up with a per-job cost at all for Navy Pier. Absolutely not. It's a crazy way to look at the question. The project was not to create jobs. What was the purpose of the project? The purpose of the project was to restore a civic landmark, a treasure, kind of like the restoring of the Reliance Building. I was not aware of it being a job-generating or primarily an economic development project. So there was no notion that the idea of this was to bring some sort of business or help business in Chicago? No, I'm not saying that that's not the case. But to start analyzing the number of jobs created by the investment doesn't make sense. So how should we evaluate the success or failure of Navy Pier? I think we should evaluate the success or failure of Navy Pier on how it's viewed by the citizens at large, how many people visit the place, what people think about it, whether or not it adds to the image of Chicago as a good place to live and a good place to visit or not. Well, my friends, we've got so many beautiful little kids out here in the audience. We want to ask all of the little ones to come up and join us here on our stage, because we want to sing this next song directly to you guys. So come up here and stand right by us. In the middle of the atrium at Navy Pier, near the McDonald's and Oh Yes Chicago, a strolling troupe of a cappella singers called the Navy Pier Players pulls a few three- and four-year-olds from a crowd that numbers about 60. If it weren't for kids, have you ever thought there wouldn't be a Santa Claus. And look what the stork just brought, thank god for kids. The three children being held in various singers' arms and laps stare blankly into the middle distance. Each of the Navy Piers Players is dressed as a different character. The lead singer is a Da Bears-style sports fan. There's Mrs. O'Leary, whose cow supposedly started the Chicago fire. There's a cheerleader and a nerdy college boy, a guy in a mock zoot suit and a wide brim hat, a sailor girl, and a female character whose gimmick is simply that she likes shopping. They do four shows a day, five days a week. And they work up a sweat, all that pep, dancing and singing. Seeing them belt out an a cappella rendition of, say, "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the food court to a group of tourists and stunned-looking children, you do not think this is an easy job. Anything but. God bless America. This next song goes out to all the patriots here at Navy Pier. Hut, 2, 3, 4. Hut, 2, 3, 4. After the performance, I spoke with this woman, the one in the sailor costume. She carries an American flag and after every answer, gave me a little salute. Yeah, I worked in a Japanese restaurant playing the piano. I started a little production company called [? Koose ?] City Productions, and I put on two shows with that. I give piano lessons. Yeah. And right now, so this is one of many-- you just saluted. Yeah. This is one of many jobs that you have right now? Well, this is my primary job. 350 people auditioned for these eight jobs. It may not be the greatest money in the world, but there aren't many full-time jobs for actors and singers in Chicago. And with two Navy Pier officials standing by to make sure no one said anything inappropriate, she said she was glad to get the work. Today's program was produced by Peter Clowney and by myself with Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and Dolores Wilber. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Paul Tough. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. If you want to buy a tape of this or other Playhouse programs, you can call us at WBEZ. If you want to give jobs to our two temp workers, Tito or Lee, you can call us for that reason, though we have received one call at least. 312-832-3380, our phone number here. Again, 312-832-3380. And if you get the answering machine, just leave a message. We'll call you back when we can. You can email us at this email address, [email protected] We broadcast from WBEZ Chicago. We'll be back next week with more stories of this American life. I'm Ira Glass.
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What's it mean to do politics in this country these days? Consider the story of a man named Jack Robinson. One day this March, he held a press conference to announce that he was going to start gathering signatures to get on the ballot to run for senate in Massachusetts against Teddy Kennedy. He had never run for political office before. And then literally within 24 hours of putting our name forward, we were hit with a withering attack, literally within the first day of even announcing the campaign. I was at Republican State Committee headquarters having interviews with the press. And sitting down with one of the reporters, the reporter asked me after I said why I'm running, by the way, have you ever been arrested for drunk driving? And I said, yes. No one would know about that because we sealed the case file, since I had been found not guilty and I'd passed the Breathalyzer test. I was very forthright and then gave the details. But that was the beginning of it. And then it just didn't stop. Then, have you ever had a restraining order ever taken against you and then this and then that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The plan was to announce the campaign and, perhaps this was political naivete on my part, maybe get a week or so of general publicity about what we stand for, who are we. Little did I know that within a day of announcing the campaign, no one would care about any of that stuff, who I am or what I stand for, but what's in my past. And so Jack Robinson decided to take action. He issued a long public statement that is simply one of the most remarkable documents of current political life in this country. He called it "The Robinson Report" and posted it on the Internet for anybody to read. It outlines, in matter of fact prose and a disturbing level of detail, everything he thinks he's ever done wrong: an unpaid speeding ticket from the 1980s, an illegal martial arts implement that a police officer found in his pocket when he was a graduate student, his failure to pass the bar exam three times, a plagiarism case against him, a restraining order that a woman put against him, a variety of business lawsuits. "By making this information public early in the campaign," he wrote, "I hope to have offered my fellow citizens a full and fair description of my personal background in a manner which allows them to decide whether I am capable of representing them in a position of public trust, confidence, and honor." I've been told I've been the first person in American political history to drop a dime on himself. But I think the citizens will have to decide over the foreseeable future as to how much they want to know about people. I've done nothing wrong. I've committed no crimes. I've got no record. At the end of the day, people don't care about my drunk driving arrest 15 years ago any more than they care about Chappaquiddick 30 years ago. Jack Robinson mentioned Chappaquiddick and what he called "Ted Kennedy's foibles," four times in the hour that I spent with him, each time declaring they should not be part of any campaign. Sort of nasty. But what exactly is a man to do? This is the state of politics in America. And as we head into another season of presidential campaigning, Al Gore is already pounding on George Bush. And George Bush made clear in the primaries that went threatened, he'll get as nasty as he has to. The next few months of our political lives are going to be ugly, just ugly. So in preparation for all the mud, we asked today, what are we to think of all this? What are we to make of what our culture has become? From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today, to shed light on the current situation, true stories of character assassination-- political and nonpolitical. Our program today in five acts. Act One, "Those Who Ignore History are Condemned to Repeat It-- but Those Who Pay Attention to History are Also Condemned to Repeat It." Act Two, "Sonny Takes a Fall," in which David Foster Wallace reports on a turning point in the primary campaign of John McCain. John McCain's last moment as a serious contender-- the moment when his opponent started attacking and he had to decide how to handle it, and how he decided-- wrong. Act Three, "When Slime is Good." A former political consultant explains why it is that he tried to bait his opponent into attacking-- sometimes. Act Four, "Who are you Going to Call?" A conversation with one of the people that you'll hire if you're attacked. Act Five, "When Attacks Really Count," a look at character assassination when it occurs in a far more devastating arena than politics, I'm talking about junior high school. Stay with us. Act One, "Those Who Ignore History are Condemned to Repeat It." Ask most historians about dirty political attacks and they will tell you that they go back to the very beginning of our nation, Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson funded an opposition newspaper to trash President George Washington while Jefferson was actually part of Washington's administration. For most of the next 200 years, politicians routinely accused each other of being philanderers, of having illegitimate children, of being atheists. The only things that are different now, says historian Richard Norton Smith, are that first, none of us remember that because none of us knows anything about history. And second, because of television and the other electronic media. We see every reaction flash over these guys' faces, which gives it all a certain emotional power. I mean, it's all in close up. It's much more intimate-- politics is much more intimate today. One hundred years ago, or even the early part of the 20th century, presidents were essentially remote figures. We saw them in newspapers. We didn't see them 24 hours a day. They didn't come into our living rooms. They weren't, in effect, an extended member of the family or a member of the extended family. There's an intimacy about the modern presidency. In fact, that intimacy extends to all politics at every level. For example, what could be more intimate than this phone call which made statewide news in Massachusetts? Even the car guys played it on their program on NPR. Senatorial candidate Jack Robinson was on his cell phone talking to reporter Toni Randolph from Public Radio station WBUR. She was recording an interview asking about that day's news, that Governor Paul Cellucci had dropped his support for Robinson. Basically, what you have is a Republican governor abdicating the United States senate campaign to Senator Kennedy just because the Governor doesn't think that there could be. I just got in an accident. Sorry about that. Are you still there? I'm still here. Are you-- you got into an accident? Well, somebody just hit me but I'm OK. Unfortunately, the other guy skidded across the highway here. But at any rate, boy, everything's happening to me. Cellucci's withdrawing his support and now people are sledding across the highway at me. But I'm OK. Looks like the other guy is too. You sure you're OK? Yes, I am. I'm fine. OK. I don't know-- I'm in new territory here. Yeah, I know. I think we'll have to stop the interview. But you got what you need. Sorry about that. With the car accident, the stream of attack stories, the sheer oddness of putting out "The Robinson Report," detailing his own past-- at some point, a kind of pile-on mentality kicked in with the press and Jackie Robinson. And at this point, the press and other politicians don't seem to take him very seriously. But when another WBUR reporter, Sean Cole, spent a day watching Robinson meet Republican voters, they were all so relieved that anybody would run against Kennedy, they embraced him. So it's hard to say if revealing all this about himself has helped or hurt him. Do you feel like it's fair that a person should have to say this much about themselves to get an office? I don't know. It's difficult for me to answer that intellectually honestly. Whether it's fair or not really is not for me to determine. The people of Massachusetts will have to determine that. But what do you think, personally? I don't know. I mean, I've done it. But personally, do you feel that it's fair? Does it feel right that you should have to do something like this to run for office? No, it's definitely not right in my opinion. Clearly, I can answer that today. That's not how we should be picking candidates, as to who's got the strongest hide to disclose everything in their personal background that could possible be used against him. There's this notion you hear sometimes that the viciousness of modern politics keeps good people from running for office. But sometimes the politics of attack simply hastens the political demise of a candidate whose prospects weren't so great from the start. Meeting Jack Robinson, you wonder about his seriousness. In his last official filing with the federal election commission, his campaign war chest had $613 in it as compared with his opponent's $3.7 million. He has yet to articulate any policy positions he seems truly impassioned about. And when I visited his campaign headquarters, there were no signs in the windows, no campaign posters out front, nothing that would let anybody know that anybody was running for anything. Act Two. "Sonny Takes a Fall." It turns out that if both sides in a political fight start throwing mud at each other, contrary to what you might think, it can definitely benefit one side more than the other. In a sense, this is the scenario that decided this year's republican nomination for president. David Foster Wallace happened to be reporting on the South Carolina primaries on the campaign of John McCain, when he got a chance to see this happen firsthand. Even the network techs, who are practically zen masters at waiting around and killing time, are bored out of their minds today. The way the techs handle deep boredom is to become extremely sluggish and torpid. So that lined up on the makeshift ottoman, they look like an exhibit of lizards whose rock isn't hot enough. Nobody reads. Pulse rates are maybe about 40. The ABC cameraman lets his eyes almost close and naps in an un-restful way. The CBS and CNN techs who like cards today are not even bothering to play cards but are instead describing memorable card games they've been in in the past. Outside the riverfront hotel's side door, where it's so cold and windy you have to smoke with mittens on, Jim C. and his partner, Frank C.-- no relation-- engage in some off-the-record discourse about the 12 monkeys. This is the tech's private code name for the most elite and least popular pencils in the McCain press corps. The 12 monkeys are a dozen marquis journalists and political analysis guys from the really important papers and weeklies and new services, and tend to be so totally identical in dress and demeanor as to be almost literally surreal. 12 immaculate and wrinkle free, navy blue blazers, half-windsored ties, pleated chinos, Oxford cloth shirts that even when the jackets come off stay 100% buttoned at collar and sleeves, Cole Haan loafers, and tortoise shell specs they love to take off and nibble the arm of. Plus always a uniform self-seriousness that reminds you of every over-achieving dweeb you ever wanted to kick the ass of in school. The techs avoid and try to pretty much ignore the 12 monkeys, who in turn treat the techs the way someone in an executive washroom treats the attendant. On return from the smoke break, we pass through a huge, empty, lobby-like space. It takes a long time to traverse this area, 100 yards of nothing but flagstone walls and plaques with the sad, pretentious names of the riverfront hotel's banquet halls and conference rooms-- the Oak Room, the Windsor Room. But now out here are also half a dozen different members of the campaign press, each 50 feet away from any of the others for privacy and all walking in idle little counterclockwise circles with a cellphone to their ear. These little orbits are the cellular waltz, which is probably the digital equivalent of doodling or picking at yourself as you talk on a regular landline. There's something oddly lovely about the waltz's different circles here, which are of various diameters and stride lengths and rates of rotation, but are all identically counterclockwise and telephonic. We three slow down a bit to watch. You couldn't not. From above, like if there were a mezzanine, the waltzes would look like the cogs of some strange, diffused machine. Frank C. says he can tell by their faces something's up. Jim C. says what's interesting is that media south of the Equator do the exact same cellular waltz, but that down there all their circles are reversed. And it turns out, Frank C. was right as usual, that the reason press are dashing out and waltzing urgently in the lobby is that word has apparently started to spread that Mr. Mike Murphy of the McCain 2000 high command is coming down to do a surprise, impromptu press avail regarding a fresh, two-page press release still slightly warm from the Xerox, which two press liaisons are passing out even now, and of which the first page has, in bold caps, "Bush campaign caught red-handed with negative ads-- unethical push polling." This document is unusual not only because McCain 2000's press releases are normally studies in bland irrelevance-- "McCain to continue campaigning in Michigan today," "McCain has two helpings of potato salad at South Carolina VFW picnic." But also because no less a personage than Mr. Mike Murphy has indeed now just come down to spin this abrupt change of tone in the campaign's rhetoric. Murphy, who is only 37 but seems older, is the McCain campaign's senior strategist, a professional political consultant who's already had 18 winning senate and gubernatorial campaigns. He's a short, bottom-heavy man, pale in a kind of yeasty way, with baby-fine red hair on a large head and sleepy, turtle eyes behind the same sort of intentionally nerdy horn-rims that a lot of musicians and college kids now wear. Among political pros, Murphy has the reputation of being, one, smart and funny as hell, and two, a real attack dog working for clients like Oliver North, New Jersey's Christine Todd Whitman, and Michigan's own John Engler in campaigns that were absolute operas of nastiness. He's leaning back against the file-and-feed room's wall and is surrounded in 180 degree arc by the 12 monkeys, all of whom have steno notebooks or tiny professional tape recorders out and keep clearing their throats and pushing their glasses up with excitement. Murphy says he's, quote, "Just swung by to provide the press corps with some context on the strident press release and to give the corps advanced notice that the McCain campaign is also preparing a special response ad which will start airing in South Carolina tomorrow." Murphy uses the words "response" or "response ad" nine times in two minutes. And when one of the monkeys interrupts to ask whether it'd be fair to characterize this new ad as negative, Murphy gives him a long styptic look and spells out very slowly, R-E-S-P-O-N-S-E. He says that the press release and new ad reflect the McCain 2000 campaign's decision, after much agonizing, to respond to what he says is G. W. Bush's welshing on the two candidates' public handshake agreement in January to run a bilaterally positive campaign. For the past five days, mostly in New York and South Carolina, the shrub has apparently been running ads that characterize McCain's policy proposals in what Murphy terms a, "Willfully distorting way." Plus there's the push polling, a practice which is regarded as the absolute bottom feeder of sleazy campaign tactics. But the worst, the most obviously unacceptable, Murphy emphasizes, was the shrub standing up at a podium in South Carolina a couple days ago with a wild-eyed and apparently notorious fringe veteran who publicly accused McCain of, quote, "Abandoning his fellow veterans after returning from Vietnam," which Murphy says, even without going into McCain's well-documented personal bio and heroic legislative efforts on behalf of vets for nearly 20 years, is just so clearly over the line of even minimal personal decency and honor, that it pretty much necessitates some sort of response. The 12 monkeys, who are old pros at this sort of exchange, keep trying to steer Murphy away from what the shrub's done and get him to give a quotable explanation of why McCain himself has decided to run this response ad, a transcript of which the harried press liaisons are now distributing from a fresh copier box, and which reads, in part, "I guess it was bound to happen. Governor Bush's campaign is getting desperate with a negative ad about me. His ad twists the truth like Clinton. We're all pretty tired of that." The 12 monkeys now point out that, in particular, the "Twist the truth like Clinton," bit seems negative indeed, since in the year 2000, comparing the GOP candidate to Bill Clinton was roughly equivalent to claiming that he wears ladies' underwear while presiding over satanic masses. While checking their Prolyx equipment and getting ready to board the press bus for McCain's next stop, the GOP Lincoln Day Dinner in Saginaw, the network techs listened to this reporter's summary of the press release and Murphy's comments and confirmed that the shrub has indeed gone negative. Be advised that these network camera and sound guys, who all have worked countless campaigns and who have neither the raging egos of journalists nor the self-interested agenda of the McCain 2000 staff to muddy their perspective, turn out to be way more acute and sensible political analysts than anyone you'll read or see on TV. And their assessment of today's negativity developments is so extraordinarily nuanced and sophisticated that only a small portion of it can be ripped off and summarized here. And the techs now kill the last of the time in the riverfront by coolly analyzing Bush's negativity and McCain's response from a tactical point of view. Going negative is risky. Countless polls have shown that voters find negativity distasteful in the extreme. And if a candidate is perceived as going negative, it usually costs him. But of course, G. W. Bush is a creature of his campaign advisers. And these advisers are the best that $70 million and the full faith and credit of the GOP establishment can buy. And if Bush 2000 has gone negative, there must be solid political logic behind the move. Under the techs' lens, this logic turns out to be indeed solid, even brilliant. The shrub's attack leaves McCain with two options. If he chooses not to retaliate, some South Carolina voters will credit McCain for taking the high road. But it could also come off as wimpy and might compromise McCain's image as a tough, take-no-[BLEEP] guy with the balls to take on the Washington cleptocracy. So McCain pretty much has to strike back, the techs agree. But this is extremely dangerous. For by retaliating negatively, McCain runs the risk of looking like just another ambitious, win-at-any-cost politician. When after all, so much time and effort and money has gone into casting him as the opposite of that. Plus, the CBS cameraman points out that an even bigger reason why McCain can't afford to let the shrub, quote, "Pull him down to his level," is that if Bush then turns around and retaliates against the retaliation, and so then McCain has to rre-retaliate against Bush's retaliation, and so on, then the whole GOP race could quickly degenerate into just the sort of boring, depressing, cynical, charge and counter charge contest that turns voters off and keeps them away from the polls. And the other techs agree that the really important tactical point here is that John S. McCain cannot afford to have voters get turned off since, after all, his whole strategy is based on exciting people and inspiring them and pulling more voters in, especially people who'd stopped voting because they'd gotten so disgusted and bored with all the negativity and bull-[BLEEP] of politics. In other words, this reporter proposes to the techs, it's maybe actually in the shrub's own political self-interest to let the GOP primary race get ugly and negative and have voters get so bored and cynical and disgusted with the whole thing that they don't even bother to vote. Well, no, [BLEEP], Sherlock H., the ABC techs, in essence, respond. Good old Frank C. then explaining more patiently that, yes, if there's a low voter turn out, then the majority of the people who get off their ass and do vote will be the die-hard Republicans, meaning the Christian Right and the party faithful. And these are the groups that vote as they're told, the ones controlled by the GOP establishment, an establishment that's got $70 million and 100% of its own credibility invested in the shrub. CNN's Mark A. posits that this also explains why the amazingly life-like Al Gore, over in the Democratic race, has been so relentlessly negative and depressing in his attacks on Bill Bradley. Since Gore, like the shrub, has his party's establishment behind him with all its organization and money and the die hards who fall into line and vote as they're told. It's in Big Al's interest to draw as few voters as possible into the Democratic primaries. Because the lower the overall turnout, the more the establishment voters' ballots actually count. Which fact then, in turn, the CBS cameraman says, helps explain why, even though our elected representatives are always wringing their hands and making concerned noises about low voter turn-outs, nothing substantive ever gets done to make politics less ugly or depressing and to actually induce more people to vote. Our elected representatives are incumbents. And low turnouts favor incumbents for the same reason soft money does. By this time, the techs are on the press bus. And since it's only a 10-minute ride to the Saginaw GOP dinner, they have their cameras down and boom sticks retracted, but all their gear still strapped on, which forces them to sit up uncomfortably straight and wince at bumps. And in the bus' mirrored ceiling, they look even more like sci-fi combat troops on their way to some alien beachhead. In their opinion, tomorrow's response ad is not a promising start for McCain, especially the "Twist the truth like Clinton" line that the 12 monkeys jumped on Murphy for. This lines too mean. It does not sound high road. It sounds pissed off, aggressive, and it will allow Bush to do a react and now say that it's McCain who has violated the handshake agreement, which the techs say will, of course, be bull-[BLEEP] but that it might be effective bull-[BLEEP]. And that it's McCain's aggressive ad that's giving the shrub the opening to do it. The tech's basic analysis of the motivation behind the ad's "Twist the truth like Clinton," line is that McCain is genuinely, personally pissed off at the shrub and that he has taken Mike Murphy's leash off and let Murphy do what Murphy does best which is gutter fight. McCain, after all, is known for having a temper. And Jim C. thinks that maybe the truly ingenious thing the shrub's strategists did was to find a way to genuinely piss McCain off and make him want to go negative, even though his staff had to have warned him that this was playing right into Bush's strategists hands. Jim's analysis suddenly reminds this reporter of the thing in The Godfather where Sonny Corleone's fatal flaw is his temper, which Barzini and Tattaglia exploit by getting Carlo to beat up Connie and makes Sonny so insanely angry that he drives off to kill Carlo and gets assassinated in Barzini's ambush at that tollbooth in the Richmond Parkway. And a taciturn but cinephilic CNN cameraman speculates that the Bush campaign's brain trust may actually have based their whole negative strategy on Barzini's ingenious ploy in The Godfather. Whereupon Frank C. observes that Bush's equivalent to slapping Connie Corleone around was standing up with a wacko vet who claimed that McCain dissed his Vietnam comrades, which at first might have looked stupid and unnecessarily nasty of Bush, but from another perspective might be sheer genius if it made McCain so angry that his desire to retaliate outweighed his political judgment. Because, Frank C. warns, just watch. This retaliation, and Bush's response to it, and McCain's response to Bush's response-- this will be all that the 12 monkeys and the rest of the press corps are interested in. And if McCain lets things get too ugly, he won't be able to get anybody to pay attention to anything else. And sure enough, events of the next few days bear out the techs' analysis pretty much 100%. On Tuesday morning on the Radisson's TV in North Savannah, South Carolina, both Today and Good Morning America lead with, "The GOP campaign takes an ugly turn," and show the part of McCain's new ad where he says, "Twist the truth like Clinton." And sure enough, by midday the shrub has put out a react where he accuses John S. McCain of violating the handshake agreement and going negative and adds that he, the shrub, is personally offended and outraged at being compared to W. J. Clinton. And by Wednesday night, focus polls are showing that South Carolina voters are finding McCain's ad negative and depressing. And the next couple days' polls then have both McCain's support and the primaries projected voter turnout falling like a rock. And the daily press are having to turn out piece after piece about all the endless picayune charges and countercharges. And everyone on the bus is starting to get severely dispirited and bored. And even the 12 monkeys' strides have lost a certain smug spring. And McCain not only, of course, loses South Carolina, but then a couple weeks later the whole Carlo and Sonny scenario plays out again on super Tuesday, only bigger this time with McCain lashing angrily out at the Christian Right and calling Robertson and Falwell agents of intolerance and basically alienating the whole GOP's die hard right-wing. And why? Because some person or persons unknown had gotten Falwell and Robertson to tape certain anti-McCain remarks and disseminate them via automated phone call to registered voters in key states, remarks so off-the-charts mean and distorted that they pissed McCain off enough that he goes on TV and gives the Christian Right the public finger. While Murphy and the McCain 2000 high command doubtless stand there and bite their wrists in frustration, practically seeing McCain's glossy coupe pull angrily up to that tollbooth. David Foster Wallace is the author of several books, including Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This was an edited excerpt of a story that first appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. Coming up, how to run a smear campaign in junior high school and how not to run one in a presidential race. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program-- "Character Assassination," true stories to prepare us for the coming battle between George Bush and Al Gore. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, "When Slime is Good." Ron Susskind's an author who's been on our show. But years ago he was a political consultant. He says that when he began in politics, he thought there was nothing lower than negative campaigning. And then, in 1980, he learned that sometimes when your opponent attacks, it can actually help you. At the time he was working on John Anderson's campaign for president, Anderson was being attacked by candidate Ronald Reagan and by candidate Jimmy Carter. The Democrats would say, he's Don Quixote. He's flaky. He's on an ether binge. I mean, they just went after him. And on the Republican side, Anderson is a liberal and is controlled by his wife. That was a big thing that came out. And the more they attacked, what did it do to Anderson's popularity? Well, that was the interesting part. The more they attacked, the better it was for us. His poll ratings rose steadily through the summer. Steadily and swiftly. He almost seemed to feel their focus and intensity on him, by virtue of their attack, and say see, they do care about me. They are worried about me. They are attacking me just to prove that. And it doesn't bother me one little bit. That's interesting. Because as a third party candidate, his big problem was that people might not take him seriously as a threat. And here he's got the two other candidates letting people know he is a threat. Exactly, by virtue of their focus on him. Do the attacks do anything else, in terms of people's feeling about a candidate? Yeah, they do. They do. They provide opportunities where the candidate must be real and genuine and show his or her self to the public. They break through the noise of the canned stuff. And when the attacks come, people sort of snap to attention. Because they figure whether or not the attack is credible, what I'll see now is I'll see candidate X actually respond like a real person, like I would. And it allows for that window, that moment for the voter to actually see the face of something real. Ron Susskind in Washington, D. C. Act Four. "Who You Gonna Call?" Character assassination, you know, runs all through our society. And there is an entire class of consultant who does nothing but help people and companies that are under public attack. Eric Dezenhall is one of these people. He works for a crisis management firm in Washington, D. C. What is very important for people to understand is that character assassination has become big business. There are a series of folks who package attacks. And they include plaintiffs' lawyers, activist groups, individuals with random axe to grind and who are willing to get on TV and say something bad about either a product or a person. And the media are very, very likely to embrace these attacks. There is a huge infrastructure and distribution channel by which to sell it. For example, when Kathie Lee Gifford was attacked by the magazine, The Globe, where her husband was set up in a hotel room with a stewardess, if that's what you'd like to call her. A stewardess who was paid by The Globe. A stewardess who was paid. The very same people who claimed they were disgusted by this type of thing drove up The Globe's sales by 15% that year. It's interesting to me. One of the things that you argue is that one reason why these kinds of things happen a lot is that we want somebody to be the villain. You write about filling the villain void. And that there's something in us where we want to see somebody brought down. Yeah. The attack on Kathie Lee Gifford was, of course, engineered by finding a vulnerability with her husband. But there's no question that the target was Kathie Lee Gifford. People were out to get her for a long, long time. And my feeling is, when you get on television day after day and you talk about your perfect marriage and your perfect children, you have a lot of people out there who are saying, I don't have a perfect marriage. I don't have perfect children. Enough with her already. And the public was extremely receptive to any negative information they got from her, about her. Can we just talk about the strategy used by Kathie Lee Gifford and her husband, Frank, once this news came out? The fact that they let people know that they were hurt, that this hurt their marriage, that this caused them pain, how important is that? I think the first thing that the Gifford's did, as I recall it, was incorrect, which is to deny that this had happened. Ultimately though, they found out a little uncomfortable fact which is, there was film. That's right. The Globe staged it very cunningly. First they released the news, and then they got the denials. And then they came out with the video the week later. Well, that's exactly right. Initially, they denied it. And when there's hard core evidence-- no pun intended-- it's a very, very hard thing to back out from. But the next thing that the Giffords did was absolutely correct. They acknowledged what the most fundamental thing that the public wanted to hear was, which was that they are human and that they are hurt. And one way to get people off your back is to concede that you're human. And that is really what, a lot of times, the goal of these attacks are, to bring you down to our size. I think that the media understand that there are certain basic things in human nature where the narratives have to be repeated. And the public enjoys seeing someone who they believe has too much fall. One of the things that's striking about it is, when the attack comes, they are cast as characters in this drama. And at that point, it's almost as if they have to choose what role they want to play and have to give people the satisfaction people would get from a drama. That is, people want to see them take a fall. They have to be contrite. If they're defiant, they won't be playing the character that will actually end the story. Every news attack is packaged like a traditional Hollywood entertainment. There is a villain. There is a victim. There is a vindicator. And you can either be the villain, the victim, or the vindicator. In this particular case, the Giffords were the villains. They were people who lied to us about the quality of their marriage. The victims, of course, were us, the American public, who were duped by these horrible people. And the vindicator, of course, was The Globe, who came forward to bring this truth, this hideous truth, to us. The Giffords have a choice at that moment. They can either stay the villains or they can become the victims. And neither is a wonderful choice, by the way. And the best choice for them at that point was to come forward and show their humanity by playing the role of the victim. The thing about an attack is that it must end with a clear and unequivocal conclusion or the public is frustrated. We want total guilt. We want total innocence. The conclusions have to be unequivocal. What would you advise somebody like Governor Bush to do about the attacks on his record and tenure that are happening now? For example, the vice president is saying that Governor Bush isn't ready for office, that his tax plan and his foreign policy plans are risky, that Texas-- his record in Texas-- is terrible because Texas has substandard health and education policies. The vice president calls Texas the most polluted state in the country. What should George Bush do against that? What are his options? In order for an attack to work, it doesn't have to be true. It has to be plausible and resonant. And the first thing he has to do is find out which of these attacks is resonating. I think that the biggest attack on Bush that does resonate is this broad notion-- not of this policy or that policy-- but that he is not a guy who has the seasoning to handle this job. And the best thing he can do is demonstrate that he does. And one of the ways to do that, unfortunately, is to go on the attack back against Gore. Now, if your follow-up question is, are you saying that he should defend by, in effect, attacking-- unfortunately, that is what I'm saying. Whoever attacks wins the market. Whoever attacks gets to the news cycle most quickly. And I think that his best overall response is going to be continuing to attack Gore. And one of the reasons why I think that this campaign is going to be intensely negative is because neither of these guys is likable and can skate on their charm. Is it possible, when attacked, to respond simply with the truth? Or is it always better to respond with another attack, a counterattack? I am not speaking as a moralist. I am speaking as a clinician. And as a clinician, I can tell you that I do not see clients that have been immediately forgiven for confessing certain things. Morally, I think that is disquieting. But in terms of reality, as I look over my clients over two decades, I have not seen a correlation in my career between confession and forgiveness. Hm. Eric, do you feel like there's something Pollyanna-ish about even wanting to get the attacks out of politics? That is, do you feel like, in fact, in a deeper way there's nothing wrong with these attacks in politics? Well, I don't think that all of these attacks are nearly as destructive and as new as the public likes. I just think, at some level, attacking does ferret out the truth. The problem, in my view, is differentiating between attacks that are a part of debate and attacks that are just plain smears. But in the case of politics, it seems like the kind of smears that one sees are things that-- they have an element of truth, but how much truth they have is open to debate. For example, George Bush saying about Vice President Gore, "He'll say anything to get elected." Well, there certainly is an element of truth in that. And we all have seen that. And the same thing on the converse. You know, the vice president saying about George Bush, "He isn't seasoned." Well, he isn't seasoned when it comes to all these kinds of policies. Yeah, I think that these are examples of attacks that are legitimate. The fact is-- these so-called attacks are really a part of a broader debate that get to certain critical questions. Look, I believe that even the questions about Bush's alleged drug use are germane. Because I believe that one of the things that is nagging at a lot of the country-- and this was true of John F. Kennedy as well-- is, is it a healthy thing to have a rich kid who has never had a tough day in his life sitting in the oval office? Whether or not the allegations, one by one, are true isn't as important as the fact that the broader questions are being asked. And frankly, I don't think it's the most unhealthy thing in the world. Eric Dezenhall of the Nichols-Dezenhall Communications Management Group. He's the author of a book about his craft called, Nail 'Em. Act Five, "When Attacks Really Count." Though Washington, D. C., you think that's mean? Just remember junior high school. That's when character assassination really hurt. We have this story. I guess this is about Dave and me, right? Dave and I became friends in fourth grade. And we were friends through sixth grade. And I have to describe him physically, because that's a huge part of his personality. He was, and he still is, an extremely wiry person. Very thin. He looks emaciated. And he also-- his skin is like a jaundiced yellow color. He was always very acned and he just looked sick all the time. He was a very meek, quiet kid, very un-assuming. Nobody ever really noticed him doing anything. I don't really know how we became friends. We were in class together in grade school. And our favorite group was the Village People. And we used to listen to the Village People all the time and just totally obsess about them. And The Dukes of Hazzard was another one, and Star Wars. Those were very big things. And as things progressed into fifth grade, it became pretty clear that our friendship was the most intense friendship in the class. Teachers started separating us in the classrooms constantly, like on the first day of school. They wouldn't even think about it. We would talk on the phone at least once a day and for hours. We would just talk for hours. I basically discovered sexuality through him. And we used to-- I remember the first thing that we did together that was sexual was we went into his parents' bedroom. And we got the J. C. Penney catalog and looked through it and went to the bra and panties section and looked through this. And it was the first time I had ever indulged in this. I always kind of skipped it over. And then the other thing that we did was we used to play Spin the Bottle in his room. And we would take off an article of clothing for when it would land on us. And it was the first time we'd ever been naked in front of another person except for our parents. And it was petrifying. But it was also just this whole discovery period of just seeing another man naked there. And it became this whole game that we played often. And we just would revel in the fact of just standing there in front of each other, totally naked, assuming these characters just like-- hi, Mr. Jones, how are you? Nice to meet you. Businessmen and everything, just standing there completely buck naked and so terrified that we were ever going to get caught. Because his parents were always home. They were always in the house and everything and we were just so afraid that someone was going to knock on the door. The point that it started to change was as we were going into sixth grade. And that's around the time when people start to-- people in sixth grade start to realize that there's a difference between someone who's straight and someone who's gay. And there was just rumblings happening. People were accusing us of being homosexual. We weren't in any way. But we also knew of all the things that we had done with each other, in each other's presence. And "faggot" was like the most derogatory thing you could call somebody. And people were thinking these things. I think when people started to think that we were gay, we suddenly realized that there was a cool thing and a not cool thing. And we were definitely not cool in the friendship that we were in. And that's also around that time when-- in my town at least, and I think in a lot of small towns-- when sports just become the most important thing in your life. And I was not a good athlete then at all. Dave was a good athlete. And Dave organized a big football party one weekend where we were going to go out there and play football and have a sleepover and then the next day play more football. Dave just organized this thing unbelievably. He had jerseys printed up with numbers and names on them. He had teams with rosters. He had practice for his team with plays. There was like a playbook. This is for a little football game like three-on-three football or four-on-four football. And every single minute was decided upon beforehand by him as to what we would do-- where we would be, what we would eat, the food we would eat, when we would play football. It was all timed out. He's just so organized and anal retentive about it. And so when we got out there and played, I don't remember very well, but I can't imagine that I played tremendously well. And there were other really good athletes there. And I was horrible. And I think-- I was thinking about this today. I was trying to think of the moment when everything changed. And I'm almost positive it was that event. It was the football party. And immediately after that, he just totally stopped talking to me. I remember going into class in seventh grade on the first day of school and him not talking to me and everybody just wondering. I mean, the whole school was wondering why there was this big fight going on between Dave and Bob. And I remember just not having an answer for anybody. I used to tell them to ask Dave. I had no idea. And I remember that, all of a sudden, he just was completely bent on turning everyone against me, the whole school. And he did it very well. He was the one who formed the "I hate--" they used to call me Cooz then-- and he was the one who formed the "I hate Cooz" club. He never did anything to me himself. He would never come up to me and make fun of me. He would never come up to me and hit me. But he would just get everyone else to do it for him. I remember one time in the lunchroom, Sam saying, have you ever been caught masturbating? And of course, either answer is-- you damn yourself if you answer yes or if you answer no. And I remembered hearing Dave tell him to ask me that. He was just able to organize people into these different factions. He was able to shift their focus really well. But from a really guarded position far away. He would just say, go over to Cooz and just shove him into a locker. And they'd go do it. People would make fun of the way that I chewed at lunch. People would make fun of the way that I laughed. People would make fun of the way that I coughed, that I sneezed. But that makes it even sound less violent than it was. It was just a mocking. It was a very pointed mocking on everyone's part. I remember sitting alone at the lunch table with no one to talk to and just wanting so badly for no one to turn their attention to me because I knew that the attention would be negative. I remember just not understanding what was going on. I had been in such a sweet position with this person. We had such a good friendship and then all of a sudden everyone had just turned against me. That was the worst period, I think, of my entire life, was that period. I used to go home from school and cry after school. I used to go to my dog and hug my dog and say, you are my only friend in the world. I remember one thing that he did was-- there was this guy, Mike, in my class. And Mike was, what we called in my hometown, a scummer, which meant that he was on welfare. He perhaps didn't have a pair of pants for every day of the week. He was very smart, which was a strike against him at that age. And he just didn't fit in. He was a real geek. And so Dave organized this fight between Mike and I, a fist fight to prove who was the bigger faggot. Whoever would lose was the bigger faggot. And he positioned us, he spun it so there was no way I could not fight. If I didn't have this fight, then things would just get worse for me. Things would get worse. Mike was at the bottom of the barrel. And I was there with him. And Dave had to prove that I was below him. And so he organized this whole fight. And everyone in the class was like, are you going to fight Mike? Are you going to fight Mike? And I finally just conceded and I conceded to fight him. And Dave organized the whole event. It was to happen at this playground. And we went. And he tried to get this whole audience to come and see it. Unfortunately, nobody came but him. Well, I guess, fortunately. Nobody came but him and one other person. So Mike and I went there. And neither of us wanted to fight each other. Neither of us had any reason in the world to fight each other. So I just remember standing there facing him just laughing, just like, what are we supposed to do? We're standing here. We've been forced into this just to save our own souls. And now we have to inflict pain on each other. And we stood there for the longest time and Dave kept trying to push us into fighting. He was saying, come on, just throw a punch, just throw a punch. Just start. And we waited for the longest time. And then finally, I was just like, this is ridiculous. So I went up and I shoved him. And then we started to fight. And we weren't really into fighting. But we had to do it then. And I pushed him at one point and he fell backwards and he hurt his wrist. And I got on top of him and I held his wrist. And I remember saying to him, do you give up? And he wouldn't give up. And I was holding his wrists back. And each time, I kept asking him if he was going to give up. And he kept saying, no. And each time he'd say no I'd bend his wrist back a little bit more. And he was just crying in pain. And I kept saying, I'm going to bend it back. I'm going to bend it back. I'm going to bend it back, thinking, I don't want to break this person's wrist. I have no reason to break this person's wrist. And I was faced at that moment with either giving up and just getting kicked even more or going ahead with really hurting this person and hoping that it would save me in some way. And I broke his wrist. He came in the next day, into school, with a cast on. I don't know how his family paid for his cast. And everybody saw that and said, you idiot, Cooz, what did you do? You idiot. And they just-- it made it even worse for me. It just made it worse. Dave, he had no reason for this. He didn't understand it himself, I don't think. It was a complete visceral reaction to an allegation of homosexuality, I think. And so he, in order to preserve himself, just pointed at someone else and said, they're the one. And everybody just turned with him. And I think that people that age are looking for things like this. Those are grades where you are forming factions. You're forming groups. And the easiest way to be part of a group is to just point at somebody else, I think, and say, I'm not like him. I went to the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts in my junior year, the summer between my junior and senior year. And I remember very clearly, there was a moment at Governor's school where I thought that the clouds just cleared and everything became possible. It was after lunch and we were going out of the cafeteria and I'd forgotten my bag in the cafeteria. And I went and I said, oh just wait for me one second. I just want to go get my bag. And I went down to the cafeteria and I got my bag. And I came back up and they were still there waiting for me. And I remember, so distinctly, remembering-- oh my god, these people, they waited for me. That meant so much to me because I felt like, there are people out there. And I'm not this idiot. I'm not this geek. I'm not a person who everyone should hate. I'm actually a pretty good human being and people like me. Bob Cucuzza is now a filmmaker and does theatre in New York. He spoke with Paul Tough. And then literally, within 24 hours of at least, of putting our name forward, we were hit with a withering attack. Indeed you were. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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A while back, I was in a taxi. The driver was a man named Ali Youssef. He has this pretty music playing on the tape deck, though the tape was a little on the warbly side. So at some point I asked him, what is the music? What is that? And he said, well, that's the music from his country, which, if I remember right, was Somalia. We talked for a while. And then he says to me, that's my wife. I say, really? And he says, yeah. She's still back in Africa. She's a singer at weddings, and like that. And he was here, and she was there. And he would drive around all day in his taxi, listening to her sing, hour after hour, on the road, thinking about her, missing her. I picture him out there on the road right now, his tape playing, just one of the many people on the road right now. So much of the life of this country happens in cars. So much of it. Imagine for a moment that you could look down on all the streets and avenues and windy country roads and highways from above somehow, highway cloverleafs in a vast meadow spread before you. Each little car below its own little self-contained world, each one like its own little world when you go inside. In one, a high school sophomore tries to convince her boyfriend, Tony, and his friend, Milo, to buy tickets to the prom. Tony, pay for prom. I'll get some money. Tony says he's broke, though he's about to spend over $100 on the paint job for the car. I want to go to prom. I got a dress, too. I got three. You do. Tony turns to his friend. Because I'd like to take her out. No! Tony, you're going to regret this for this rest of his life if he doesn't. Yeah, you would? Yeah. Trust me, because I'm regretting the date up to here. Meanwhile, in a four-door white 1991 Honda Accord, Lauren Burn is speeding through San Francisco. It's part of her job. Her trunk's all smashed, tied down with rope. She's been rear-ended twice. The car floor is cluttered with empty Mountain Dew bottles and discarded packs of cigarettes. On the door of the car, a sign's attached, "Lickety-Split Messengers." Whoa, red light. Every car's relationship to me is definitely they don't like me. They hate me because I think they're really scared and paranoid about, like, driving with no hands, talking on my radio, and next, at the same time, trying to write something down, trying to look for an address. And I look at it as a big video game. You have so much time to pick something up and drop something off in this time. And then you have all these obstacles in between, kind of like Paperboy, like the old video game. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I've hit a few fire hydrants and a few people and a few different cars. And you get points taken off for that, I must say. Dude, I totally am going the wrong way. In a year-old Chrysler 300M, Doris Kelly drives from a long day at work downtown, towards church, playing the CD that she plays every night after work on the way home, one her pastor recommended, one they play in church, called Spirit Songs. People don't have peace. People don't have any joy. And they need that. And you see that driving on the expressways and driving on the streets. And people, you know, they're cutting in and out in front of you all the time, and honking horns and yelling at you, cursing and stuff. And if you listen to this kind of tape, you're calm, you're relaxed. You stop. You let people in. To me, it's equal to a martini that someone would go home and have a martini, relax. You look like you need a drink, she said. He sat with his head in his hands, in a pale bleached oak armchair beneath a pastel seascape framed in ash. In a navy blue Toyota Celica, Marlene Harris listens to one of the books on tape that she's in the middle of, a science fiction novel called Darwin's Radio. She loves books on tape. The secondary mucus plug seems to be in position. There was no trauma, no bleeding. The separation was textbook, if anybody has bothered to write a textbook about this sort of thing. The hospital did a quick biopsy. It's definitely a first-stage Shiva rejection. I'm wonder how this is going to come out. I'm thinking that the government's wrong and that Kaye Lang is right, and that her baby's going to be born alive. I do not think it's going to cause massive diseases. But I have a feeling they may start a colony, the mothers and fathers of these children. Let's hope. We'll do more tests in a few months. I'm partly in another world, not the parts that need to be driving a car. But I get very involved in the stories. I often listen to very involved things. I'm in the middle of a 20-book historical fiction series that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, and takes place in the British navy. And I'm about to start book 14. And I talk about going out for a walk with Jack and Steven, who are the two main characters of this series, because by the time it's over I will have spent something like 300 hours with these guys. If you're on the road right now in your car, listening to the radio, take a look inside the cars around you, each one its own little bubble, its own tiny subculture on wheels, glass and steel worlds rolling down the street alongside each other. Today on our radio program, we take you inside those other cars on the road. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, we have lots of tape recorded inside moving vehicles, plus original stories by Nick Hornby and David Sedaris. We have parents and kids. We have longtime buddies drinking beer and cruising the neighborhood on a Sunday morning. We have drivers who save people, and drivers who do not want to be saved. The entire American road system is laid out before us, and let's start right in Chicago, on Chicago Avenue, where the Number 66 bus runs. Come on, boo, come on. How you doing? Come along, now. Hello. See, you made me miss my light. I'm sorry. But that's OK. We want to make sure we OK, though. Let's stay here for a while. Linnel Peterson is 40, outgoing. The route she drives, Chicago Avenue, heads from the point where the City of Chicago touches Lake Michigan on the eastern edge of the city out to the western-most edge of the city, a route that is six miles in each direction, so long and slow to drive that in an eight-hour shift she only drives it back and forth four times. She's been a bus driver for six years. When I was little, I didn't think you could back a bus up. There was a lot of things. I didn't really think about a bus. OK. What's weird is when you're in your car, and you pull up to a bus stop, and you're getting ready to open the door, and you realize you're in your car. I'm serious. Or like, you know, somebody's running across the street, and you're starting to slow down because, mentally, you've got to pick 'em-- and I was like, OK. Ooh, big truck. He has flammables. I mean, he was flying, right behind us. Hi, Mommy. Hi baby! How you doin? All right. And you? Good. That's my mommy. That's my mother, right there. What's happening? Nothing. Yes, ma'am. OK. Bye, Mommy. There are times that I've picked her up, and people get on the bus, and I'm like, that's my mommy, everybody. And they're laughing at me, because I still call her Mommy and I'm 40. Central Park, this is where I grew up at. Two blocks from here. My mom still lives down there. Watch your step. Have a good one. Two, exactly two blocks from here. And this is why I say, this is our bus route, going to school and-- because I went to Orr. And anything that we did, right here in this vicinity. Lydell. The grammar school I went to is a block down there. That's one of the neatest about being in a neighborhood. There are times when I see people who went to school with me, and they'll get on the bus. And I was like, I know you. Didn't you graduate from Orr? Or something like that. Like I'm saying, that's like a 23-year-ago thing. Central is next. Have a good one, baby. You, too. You too, darling. Thank you, baby. Watch your step. It used to be real nice where we grew up at. And it's like really drug-infested now. When we first moved over there, it was like a lot of Polish people that lived in the area. And that was about 30 years ago, when we first moved there, because I was about 10. Now it's only blacks. You might find a few. OK, when we was in high school-- Hey, babe, step on out. Every so often, like when I pass Kostner, we used to stand outside and wait for the bus. And it would be so many of us, and we were kind of rowdy. The bus driver would kind of pass us up. It would be so funny. Not all the time, but-- Thank you, baby. So what happens is, when I get in that area, I kind of just start laughing. People are looking at me, like what's wrong with her? But people will usually ask me, you must be a nut to drive Chicago every day, because it's like a high-traffic area. But then, I think it's the fact that this is where I grew up at and I feel comfortable in it. Linnel Peterson. She says on her days off, she tries to keep away from her route, Chicago Avenue, even though she lives right nearby. I even avoid coming on the street, just the whole street. Because when I used to, I used to come on Chicago and I would be like, oh, there's a bus. Oh, he's out of place. So you just remember so much from the stuff that happens when you drive out here. Four lanes. Across the ocean in England, cars are driving along the wrong side of the road, one of them an emerald green four-door car that we would call a Peugeot, but that they would call a Puh-joh. It's driven by Nick Hornby. So it's a lovely, sunny, crisp London Sunday morning, and I'm in the car with my son, Danny. Danny's six and autistic. And he loves the car. It really is a bubble to him, and nobody can burst it. When he's strapped into the backseat, he's safe. No other kids can get in his face, like they do out in the world where people fly at him like asteroids towards a spacecraft. And nobody will make him eat food he doesn't want to eat, and the side window is a videotape that never needs changing. He like to know where he's going, though, so he's memorized all the significant routes. This is a kid who only occasionally remembers that the sequence beginning ready and steady is completed by the word "go," but somehow-- and these somehows constitute the enduring mystery of autism-- he's managed to construct a mental street map of the entire London metropolitan area. The route to school is OK, because he likes school. The route to grandma's house is OK, too, not only because he likes grandma, but because she lives 50-odd miles from London, so he gets to stay in the car longer. The route that's not OK is the route to the park. The park's too close to home, which means that the journey's over before it's properly begun. And someone, a bad person, his dad, will make him get out of the car. But it's a lovely, sunny, crisp Sunday morning. We're going to the park. He starts to yell at the top of Delancey street in Camden when we don't turn left into Albany Street. That left turn he sees as his last chance. School was ruled out 10 minutes ago when we didn't turn into Liverpool Road after crossing Holloway Road at Drayton Park. See, Albany Street takes you onto Houston Road, and Houston Road leads eventually to the motorway and grandma's house. But from Delancey Street, we go straight across into Regent's Park Road on our way to Primrose Hill. Doesn't that sound nice, Primrose Hill? Not to Danny it doesn't. The yells get louder when we stop, and reach a sweat-inducing pitch when I open his door. Come on, Dan, I say, in my best fun voice. We're going to the park, the swings, the seesaw. He just turns the yellometer up to 11. I try to lead him out by the hand, but he snatches it away and grabs hold of something, the seat belt, anything that will anchor him inside. So we're fighting, the car and I, for custody of this small boy. The car has one end of Danny, and I have the other. The three of us are like a warring family in a TV soap. I end up dragging my son out by his ankles. A couple look at us as they walk past. They don't say anything, but one day I'm sure someone's going to report me and I'll be arrested. There's a certain irony to this. I learned to drive at the age of 41, entirely because of Danny. I didn't really want to learn, and I have a mild phobia about driving. But public transport, which had served me well all my adult London life, was becoming less and less fun. Danny loves going on trains and buses, of course, but sometimes he didn't want to get off when I wanted to get off, and sometimes he wanted to get off before our stop, and sometimes he decided that he didn't want to wear any trousers on the top deck of the number 19. And though I won all these battles of will, because I'm bigger than him, I wasn't always in the mood to fight them in public. They can be Pyrrhic victories anyway, these fights with autistic kids. Danny's best friend and classmate, Toby, once kicked up such a fuss about having his haircut at the hairdresser's that he had to be held down by his mom and his nanny, at which point a woman ran over and started pummeling them both with her fists. Sometimes I silently dare someone to say or do something, just so I can tell them why I'm having to be so cruel, and hopefully make them feel terrible in the process. So anyway, I took driving lessons for 18 months, and slowly, slowly overcame my fear. And nothing, I felt, after every awful, jabbering, fear-filled 60-minute lesson, could've demonstrated more dramatically how much I love my son. I passed my test first time, and I bought a little four-door Peugeot that I thought he'd love, so I could drive him places like the park. And is he grateful? Is he? Hell. He's holding onto his seat belt for dear life and screaming while I try to pull him backwards onto the pavement. Eventually, he can hold on no longer, and I lift him out and put him down. And after a brief pause during which he recovers his composure and stops yelling, he roars off towards the park gates, because another thing Danny's forgotten until this very second is that he loves the park. He loves the swings and the seesaw, and spinning round and round on the grass until he's dizzy. And it's a lovely, sunny, crisp Sunday morning. And hey, there's an empty swing. And literally within 10 seconds, he's full of smiles and happy anticipation. And there's no trace whatsoever in his face of the ankle-pulling trauma to which he was so recently and cruelly subjected. And I want to find the couple who may or may not have had a disapproving look on their faces when they saw me committee awful acts of violence, and show them just how joyful he is now. But of course they're not around, which is maybe just as well, because in a while I'm going to have to find a way to get him out of this swing. Nick Hornby is the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy. Back on this side of the Atlantic again, though not very far inland, on Cape Cod. In a green Volvo sedan, Jay Allison drives his daughter, Lily, to ice skating lessons. She's 12, which means-- surprise!-- in the car they do not agree about what radio station to play. Are we going to be late? Uh, probably. Leigh's going to kill me. She hates me already. Why does she hate you? I don't know. Because we're always late. We're not always late. We usually are. Oh, man. Well, you never let me listen. It's not fair. I always let you listen. Oh my god, are you serious? No, seriously. I've lost so many brain cells in this car thanks to you. Oh, really? See, there go a few. There go a couple more. Really. Really? It's hurting me. It's going into my brain and-- It's going into your brain and hurting you? Yes. Ow. This is Santana. Shouldn't you be gaining? All right, I feel-- Gaining strength from Carlos? Yep. I love [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. OK, make it stop. Make it go away. No, no, no. That's OK. Kill it. Kill it. Thank you. I've always felt so bad with the Rose, like all those other stations, the good stations. What about them? What's so bad about them? There's no intelligent life on them. Oh, geez. I'm going to short-circuit your radio so it will only play public radio. That's sad. I don't know what I'd do. I'd buy a new radio. There are lots of good shows on public radio. OK, whatever. What. Ever. That was cool, Dad. Do that again. Thank you, Lil. What, do we get to talk for a few minutes, and then we have to-- It's like you're going to the surface for oxygen? "Say My Name." OK, make it stop it. It just hurt me. I'll find a good one. Here, more Santana. Are you gaining cells? Santana, Santana's gone over to the dark side a little bit. They did a remix. A remix? They didn't like the first one? It wasn't popular enough. It was number one for, like, two days. What was? This song. It's like another Backstreet Boys song. And did you know that Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys is engaged? Did I know that? Of course I knew that. Really? Oh, sure. His birthday's coming up, isn't it? Kevin's? Oh my god. You're so weird. [SINGING] I want to love you, baby. Oh, god. Please stop, please. Just let me hear this once song, and then you can-- Yeah, no, I love this song. Aren't you embarrassed? [SINGING] Everybody sing with me. Dad, stop. Stop it, Dad. What? So maybe the secret is I should start liking your music. No, that would be really bad. Yes. No, I'll just keep it off. It's OK. Seriously, we're going to listen to public radio in a minute. Are you ready? Here we go. Dad. Here we go, listen. Listen and learn, sweetheart. You're listening to NPR's Weekend Edition. I know. Now, don't you feel better? The Grammy Awards are Wednesday night. Hey, look, the Grammys. Oh, yeah. And if the conventional wisdom is correct, it will be a big night for the oldest and youngest in rock. Weekend Edition Popular Culture commentator, Steven Stark. For you all, the night will feature 52-year-old Carlos Santana, who could walk away with-- Hey, there he is again. He's nominated for, like, so many. And Album of the Year for Supernatural. Equally symbolic will be the New Artist award, where insiders expect Christina Aguilera and, yes, Britney Spears to fight it out for top honors. One shouldn't be too hard on the current teen pop idol. Yeah, Dad. At least she didn't have to make talk on Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? Here's our exit. You missed it? No, here it is. Oh. Almost there. Come on. All right, here we are. There's Pam. So are you going to put your skates on in there? Yep. I guess I'll just come in with you, because of the parent meeting. I'm going to bring the tape recorder, and I'm going to dance and sing. No, leave it here. For the team? I just want to do a little number for them tonight. No, you're going to leave it here. I have a Christina Aguilera impression I want to do. No, no. Coming up, David Sedaris with a special message for young people about what happens when you get high and get into a car with your own mother. And adventures on the way to Hubcap City. That's in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. It's often said that this country was rebuilt in the 20th century to accommodate automobiles. Because of cars, we have the suburbs, the malls, the highway system, much of the physical and commercial structure of this country. And so, if cars are so important, today's program is made up entirely of stories that happen in cars. Outside Washington, DC, a couple times a week, in an '88 Mercury Grand Marquis that he inherited from his mother, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana picks up random passengers from Virginia, drives them into the city during his rush hour commute. Having people in the car means that he can drive in the fast lanes that are set aside for cars that are full. He told me that the conversations also let him know what issues are on people's minds. Politicians, I think, have a big problem. They've never learned the lesson that you can't hear with your mouth open. You know, it's interesting what people talk about, especially-- But they'll always notice, sometimes they notice the Montana plates and they'll say, well, you're from Montana? And I said, yeah, I'm native. They ask what I do. And sometimes I sort of just don't answer or I give them some sort of a nondescript answer. Wait, wait. Is the nondescript answer-- Do you just say, I work in the government, something like that? I work on the Hill. I tell them I'm one of the ants on the Hill. More or less accurate. I would say. In a taxicab in New york City, Jeff Perkins tape-records his passengers on a little cassette machine, just to pass the time. He's collected hundreds of hours of tape. Well, I'm trying to kind of focus on a particular subject which I'd like to ask you about. And the subject is the subject of dreaming. And I'd like to know if you dream vividly, or do you remember your dreams? Sometimes I do remember them. Actually, when I was in my early 20s, I was having a recurrent dream of my family being edible. I had dreamt once that my mother was a Fig Newton and that I was dating Mr. Nabisco. And I also recall dreaming that my father's feet were made of roast beef, and that he would sit in his usual chair and slice off pieces of his roast beef feet to feed us with. On the other side of the country, where dreams come true, Los Angeles. Cars scoot along the 405 and the 10. When Rob Levine first came out west, he got his first Hollywood job in one of those cars, a mid-1980s BMW 5 series, big heavy car. He as the driver for a movie producer named Edgar Sherick, who was the head of ABC back in the '60s, went on to produce lots of films. Heartbreak Kid, The Stepford Wives, Mrs. Soffel, Woody Allen's first movie, Take the Money and Run. Driver, in this world, can be a job where you train to be a movie producer yourself, which Rob Levine wanted. So he not only took care of the car, he read every script, sat in on meetings, learned everything. Part of the idea was that I would shadow him. I was expected to know everything he was reading. I was expected to know who he was calling and why. And he would ask me routinely, why am I calling this person? And not just to test me, because he honestly would slip his mind, and I would have to know. Wait. He would say, dial the phone for me, why am I calling? Yeah, why am I calling this person? And I would have to sort of, because you want to ask him about this project or that project. So if you didn't know, it was, you're in big trouble. Were you a little scared of him? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, completely. I mean, he was a sort of larger-than-life figure. At that point, he smoked big Cuban cigars, which we'd have to get for him. It was sort of contraband, and we had to get them from Cuba. That was part of your job? Oh yeah. Yeah, we had to get them from South Africa, which is like a double no-no. Wait. So because this is during the embargo? It's during Apartheid, yeah. So not only are you getting contraband cigars, you're getting them through a country that you didn't want to be doing business with. Sometimes we would get them through Canada, too. Which brings us to this story. Some people do their socializing in the car, just cruising around, running errands with friends, seeing who's out. In a 1991 Toyota Camry, Ernest Castle, a college student, tools around with his friend, Clarence, in the south Chicago suburb where they both grew up, where they both still live with their parents, Hazel Crest. Sittin' up in here, early Sunday morning. Damn, it must be about 8 o'clock in the morning. Yeah, it's something like that. [INAUDIBLE] 3:30, he's done, mostly. This is about as close as it gets on a Sunday. Kind of one of them slow Sundays, on the way to ABC-- Auto Parts. Yeah, Auto Parts. You know what I'm saying? To go get a hubcap. Oh, now you're going to Hubcap City. That's right across the street-- My friend, Clarence, OK, my boy. What clicks between me and Clarence is we're from the same exact place. We're from the same block. We grew up about 600 steps away from each other. We're brothers. Damn, look at this cat. They gotta be some Mexicans, man. It was. It was. Some kings or something, just with the low-profile tires. Them's about 13s or 12s, so you know he's riding low. The car was, like, about two inches off the ground. And it was just flicking away, painted rims. it was a Neon, but he did the Neon justice, though. He did it justice. I'm going to give him the credit on that one. Clarence and I, we're definitely trying to do two different things. He's definitely the street-savvy, basically hustler. And me? I'm trying to do my thing in other ways. You know what I'm saying? I'm going to school, right? So that basically keeps us apart for most of the week. But when we come together on the weekend, it all comes together basically in the car. We got the radio. We got the tapes. A couple of beers, a couple of drinks. That's basically the quality of life for us, man. Ooh, that's a nice-ass Chevy. You see that Chevy with the gold rims over there? Oh, man. Gold flicks. Damn. Now, that's a black man driving that probably. You know what I'm saying? Everybody representing in their own way. Without a doubt. That's how different this [BLEEP] is. You see what I'm saying? Our Mexican people like they're [BLEEP] low. You know what I'm saying? Brothers like their [BLEEP] high. Mexicans get, like, smaller rims. Brothers get rims that are too damn big for their car. You know what I'm saying? For real. You know what I'm saying? OK, we're rolling along and run into some childhood buddies here. Now, these guys, they're known in the neighborhood. They're known in the neighborhood. You mostly see them all in a group, at least I do. And we roll up on them, and thery see the microphone, and basically everything comes out. [BLEEP] the police. [BLEEP] the DEA. You know, they [BLEEP] with me for no rhyme or reason, you know? I'm tired of this bull [BLEEP]. Now, these guys, they've had their run-ins with the law. They've got their little histories, juvenile cases, whatever, what have you. But these guys, let's just say they tend to exaggerate a little bit. What Marshall was talking about, he was talking about how they was-- Man, he went on into a tangent about getting beat down by the police. But he made it sound like every time he stepped outside the house-- Exactly. I think people that got too wrapped up into the movies, into the tapes they play, and they feel, because of the people on the tapes and in the movies get harassed by the police, that they are really getting harassed. They're not getting harassed, man. Police just came around the corner. Man, we should go around there and see what their business is, yo. Hey, whatever. Oh, they're real. Let's be on some investigative reporter type [BLEEP]. And so me and Clarence, we decide to conduct our own little case study here. Right now we are busting the U-turn, trying to see if the police is really gonna go and hassle them like they said they was. This whole conversation was about police harassment, profiling, this and that, which is definitely, definitely, definitely real. But we about to see. The police roll right by 'em. Zoom. Right by 'em. Zoom. No confrontations, no nothing. Zoom. And this car parked on the wrong side of the street at that, to draw attention. And the police roll right by 'em. Zoom. There he is. There's the policeman right there. I don't know how to call it, man. You know what I'm saying? When the microphone turn on, people got a lot of stuff to say, and a lot to talk about. But once it turn off, the mother [BLEEP] go back to their everyday, dull-ass life. He want to portray some sort of lifestyle, like he's being, I don't know, railroaded into the life that he's living. I just feel that he's not doing what he feels he's capable of doing. And that's all of us out here. I'll be damned, we livin' in the suburbs. You know what I'm saying? I mean, me, myself, and the situation I'm in, is because of the life I have lived since I was a kid, coming up. I really wasn't on my P's and Q's. You know what I'm saying? I've been messing up for a nice long amount of time now, to keep it real. That's just how it is. You know what I'm saying? For the average mainstream person, middle class and up, they're looking at Clarence, and they're like, oh lord, here comes another wild off-the-hook street thug, ready to do whatever he has to do, wreak havoc, kill, shoot, whatever. But that's not the case at all. The way I see it, it's just like the movie, Slackers. Here's the guy who, he has goals, but he's a procrastinator. He'll sit on his butt until the last minute, and try to do something. He's a slacker. Everybody knows what a slacker is. He just does the little things that he has to to keep a little bit of money in his pocket. And we're all slackers. I mean, I can't even say anything because I'm a slacker myself. But from his perspective, where he's coming from, to be a slacker, you're a hustler in the same breath. It's a ditch, man. Oh, shit. See, that's professional driving right there. You've got to know the limitations and the proper mechanical, um-- Ah, the hell with it. It was a nice turn. It was a very nice turn, on my part. I pat myself on the back. We're passing by this junkyard, right? And I see this "Now Hiring" sign posted up on this 13-foot iron gate. Huge sign, with crimson-embroidered letters, "Now Hiring." I look up at Clarence. And I know he's not going to go for this, but I gotta mention it 'cause that's me. And I'm like, you know, how about the "Now Hiring" sign, figuring this is his opportunity to finally get a job with a tax return that'll keep him from a fair amount of trouble, let's just say. They all be hiring. You're going to try to call it out for me. Get a job. Now, see, I ain't say nothin' about you. See, that's you. That's you over there. That's all I'm saying. Look at that big man across the fence, man. I see it, though. Now hiring. I understand that. I understand that, you know what I'm saying? Basically, I think where the fork in the road took place between my life and Clarence's life, it's as simple as he went to public school and I went to a Catholic school outside of my city. Sealed me away up in there, got me in all of these activities. I had no time, basically, in my schedule to get in the streets until the weekend. By the weekend, everybody did their dirt in the week already. Meanwhile, with Clarence, when we were in high school, basically everything opened up. You got your gangs, your different street factions, and it was shiny, like a brand-new golden apple. It was just the street ambrosia. You live forever. I mean, who wouldn't have wanted to be a part of it? I wanted to be a part of it. Neither of us were brains, so I guess he chose an easier route, an easier road. And in the same predicament, to walk a mile in Clarence's shoes, I'd have took it, without a doubt, without a doubt, without a doubt. All right, we here at Hubcap City. This is a big junkyard, basically. Is that a Buick or some [BLEEP]. It's got new tires on it so it must run. That's what they want you to believe. Probably so. Probably so. At any go it is, let's see if I can't get a damn hubcap. Some of the most important moments of people's lives happen in cars, though sometimes we are not aware that these are the most important moments in our lives as they're happening. David Sedaris tells this story. It wasn't anything I'd planned on, but at the age of 22, after dropping out of my second college and traveling back and forth across the country a few times, I found myself back in Raleigh, North Carolina, living in my parents' basement. After I'd spent six months waking at noon, getting high, and listening to the same Joni Mitchell record over and over again, my father called me into his den and told me to get out. He was sitting very formally in a big comfortable chair behind his desk. And I felt as though he was firing me from the job of being his son. I'd seen this coming, and it honestly didn't bother me all that much. The way I saw it, being kicked out of the house was just what I needed if I was ever going to get back on my feet. Fine, I said. I'll go, but one day you'll be sorry. I had no idea what I meant by that. It just seemed like the sort of thing a person should say when they were told to leave. My sister, Lisa, had an apartment over by the university, and said I could come stay with her as long as I didn't bring my Joni Mitchell record. My mother offered to drive me over. And after a few bong hits, I took her up on it. It was a 15-minute ride across town, and on the way my mother and I listened to the rebroadcast of a radio call-in show, in which people phoned the host to describe the various birds gathered around their backyard feeders. Normally, the show came on in the morning, and it seemed strange to listen to it at night. The birds in question had gone to bed hours ago, and probably had no idea they were still being talked about. I thought about this and wondered if anyone back at the house was talking about me. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever tried to describe my voice or the shape of my head. And it depressed me that I went unnoticed while people were willing to drop everything for a cardinal. My mother pulled up in front of my sister's apartment. And when I opened the car door, she started to cry, which worried me because she normally didn't do things like that. It wasn't one of those, I'm going to miss you things, but something deeper and sadder than that. I wouldn't know it until months later, but my father had kicked me out of the house not because I was a bum, but because I was gay. Our little talk was supposed to be one of those defining moments that shape a person's adult life, but he'd been so uncomfortable with the most important word that he'd left it out completely, saying only, I think we both know why I'm doing this. I'd assumed it was because of the drugs, and had left it at that. I guess I could've nailed him down. I just hadn't seen the point. My mother assumed that I knew the truth, and it tore her up. Here was another defining moment, and again I missed it completely. She cried until it sounded as if she were choking. I'm sorry, she said. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I figured that within a few weeks, I'd have a job and some crummy little apartment. It didn't seem insurmountable, but my mother's tears made me worry that finding these things might be a little harder than I thought. Did she honestly think I was that much of a loser? Really, I said. I'll be fine. The car light was on, and I wondered what the passing drivers thought as they watched my mother sob. What kind of people did they think we were? Did they think she was one of those crybaby moms who fell apart every time someone chipped a coffee cup? Did they assume I'd said something to hurt her? Did they see us as just another crying mother and her stoned gay son, sitting in a station wagon and listening to a call-in show about birds? Or did they imagine, for just one moment, that we might be special? Dave Sedaris' latest book is called Me Talk Pretty One Day. There are people out on the road with no other purpose but to help others, as if the streets and highways are like the open sea, dangerous and unpredictable, thousands of motorists stranded at any given moment, needing saviors. And there's a little yellow pickup truck, AAA insignia on the door, tool cases in the back. 370. Yes, 370. Good morning. Good morning. Did you say you had a service call holding? Yeah, we have a T3 on Prospect. Do you want me to send that over? Yeah, 10-4. Prospect, where the [BLEEP] is that? Kelly Keggers wears dark blue pants and a button-down AAA service shirt. The dispatch computer on her dashboard lists AAA members in trouble. Well, all I do all day is go out and help people. It's like community service. People call when they're in need, if their car doesn't start, or if they've got a flat tire, or they run out of gas or something. If their car's not working, they call. It's all day. And everytime I show up, people are like all, oh my god, you're here. It's like I'm all doing them a favor or something. It's a good deed job. Early in the morning, though, it's, like, jump-starts, but pretty much people lock their keys in their car. They're getting ready for work, and they're freaking out and-- Oh, here comes my member. What's happening with your car? It won't start? Battery's dead. I keep switching the lights on because it-- Her horn did-- like, you know, lights are on the blinker of your car, like if you put the blinker up or down? A lot of people complain about the new Hondas. They turn the blinker on during the day, they're coming home from, blah, blah, blah, whatever, and they leave their lights on all night long. And there's no buzzer or anything to tell them that their frickin' lights are on. So she's all pissed off about that. And she was worried about her battery, but it's a brand-new car. It's a 1999. Oh, wait. Let me get these calls. I have three more service calls. Two of them are kind of a ways away, I think. We have this 6 at Third and Cargo. Three at Gillman, and Raymond and Redland. OK, I can do all three of those. That's cool. Go ahead and send them my way. 10-4. Copy that. I love driving around without a boss in the car with me. I don't like to work with-- I'm not really much of a team player, I guess. On West 7th? I don't like to work with people that much. I just like to work by myself and do my own thing. I just get things done faster and better that way. I guess I can just concentrate by myself. I mean, I like helping people, though. I get a kick out of it. It's kind of a good feeling. We've got a cancel on our Hazelwood and Rosewood. The member found her keys. Cops wave at me when I drive by. Buses stop and let me go by them. It's weird. All city workers are always like, hey, how's it going? Oh, AAA. Hi. You know, waving. And people flag me down a lot when I'm driving. Or if they need a jump-start or whatever, they jump in front of your car with jumper cables. I'm going 40. They fly in front of the truck. You're like, [BRAKING SOUNDS], oh crap. But, no, they treat me really good. They're really nice. I don't get treated like a punk kid, like I usually do. I jump-started some guy's car on 21st, oh no, it was 22nd street, and there's a big, huge hill. And it was a stick shift, and I told him to keep his foot on the brake. And he didn't, of course. And he was an older guy. And I mean, right as soon as his car started, he took his foot off the brake to get out of the car, and it stalled because it was a stick shift and all that. And it went sailing down the street. And it slammed into a tree and totalled his car. It almost ran me over. I jumped out of the way. I pulled a total, like, Dukes of Hazard. And of course we had to call a tow truck for that. But it wasn't my fault. It was his fault. I advised him not to take his foot off the brake, and blah, blah, blah. But he was old and he was a little grumpy. He's like, I know what to do. His wife started screaming at him. It was really upsetting. I sat with him for a while. He was shaken up. He was scared. He was still in the car. I mean, he tried to get out but he couldn't. Yeah, that was my big excitement for one day. But everything else is pretty normal. I mean, you get babies locked in cars and stuff. People are freaking out. I try and get there really fast if there's a baby in the car. So I always do that as a priority. It's cool when you pull into a shopping center, a big parking lot, because you'll always get two or three calls. People will flag you down. And usually they have AAA. And you write them up. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] again. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. This parking lot is humongous. Hello. See, you're waiting out front. Well, yeah. Got them locked them inside. You know, on the supervisor side. OK, the supervisor side, all right. I'm totally addicted to that getting paid for job performance. Because that way it doesn't make me resentful of the people I work with if they're not pulling their weight. I just figure, they did 10 calls today, and I did, like, 32 calls. I know that I'm getting paid for all the calls I'm doing. I can't deal with getting pissed off at people I work with. But I like all the guys I work with. They're nice guys. There's one or two other girls that work there. But those guys are cool. And plus, you talk to them. We're all talking about our jobs. And it gives me ideas about-- I like to change jobs a lot. I like to be a total jack of all trades and bounce around. I can only stand a job for, like, a year or two. Like, my next job, I'm going to be a truck driver. I'm going to drive the big rigs. That's my dream, just drive across country completely alone, get my dog and truck, and that's it, just listen to music and just drive. This way, right? Third row? One, two-- he's all running. Poor guy. Well, our program was produced today by Blue Chevigny and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Potoff, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Mary Wiltenburg. Music help from Mr. John Connors. People in cars are recorded by Kerry Campbell, Bob Carlson, Elizabeth Meister, Blue Chevigny, Alex Blumberg, Kenneth Mason, and Piers Wisbey at the BBC. Jay Allison's story with his daughter, Lily, was part of his Life Stories series, which is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you know you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet, at our website, www.thislife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who begins every single broadcast of our program with this checklist: We got the radio, we got the tapes, a couple of beers, a couple of drinks. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Ben has been a construction worker, a public high school teacher, a bike messenger, a laborer, but he says the best job he ever had was as a mover. This was in New York. Part of it, he says, was that the actual work with so straightforward. Part of it was that every day he was entering all these other people's lives, and he never knew where he would end up. It was so personal somehow, especially when the people hired movers to pack everything for them. I mean, you were coming in at a special kind of time for people where they were pretty tense. And you got to see a lot very fast. You know, 9 o'clock in the morning you're bringing all these pads, and boxes, and straps, and everything into somebody's house as quickly as possible and taking a very quick look around their life. You get a very good idea very quickly of who they are. It's like being a spy. It felt a lot like being a spy, yeah. When you're moving people all the time, is the thing that occurs to you how similar people's lives are or how different most of our lives are? Well most things that people move are pretty much the same. Everybody has a bed. Or at least in this part of the country everybody has a bed, and some books, and a lot of kitchenware, and generally a couch, and a few other things. Everyone tends to have a stereo. Everyone tends to have a television. And then somebody will stand out for one reason or another. They'll have a lot of music, like a lot CDs, or they'll have a collection of wines or something that we'll have to be real careful with. But there's not that much of a difference. It's like what it reminds me of is you know when you're reading in People, or US Magazine, or any magazine, like any setting where you see inside the living rooms of the super rich and super famous. And I feel like usually when I see that I just think like that's it? Like that's what they've got? There's a coffee table, and a couple of chairs, and a couch, and a lamp. Like that's the best you can do? Like that's it? But yeah, you'd be moving a couch. And it was sometimes, again, very rich people. And there's only so many configurations for things like couches. One of the moments that was always kind of interesting, he says, was when people's stuff was all loaded into the truck, everything they had accumulated in this world stuffed into this tiny space. It's a humbling thing for a person. It's a humbling thing. And they would get very upset often. And they would be very unsettled by that. And I could sort of understand that. Because, in a sense, everything that you'd worked for and sort of decided defined you was now sitting in this truck. And generally if they were around, they'd look at us and the foremen would say, all right, we're going to go get lunch now because usually it would be in the middle of the day. But they would be staring at the truck. And you'd say, yeah, we're going to go get lunch, and we'll see you in Riverdale, or we'll see you on 89th Street, or whatever. And you'd look at them and they'd pause. Sometimes they'd be cool about it. But sometimes they wouldn't. They'd be like, but you will come there, won't you? They would say those words? Oh sure. People said that all the time. Or they'd say, can I ride with you, or where are you going to have lunch, or do you have to have lunch? From their point of view, what's making them linger at the truck? Like what is it? It is the anchor of home. Even for those few hours, especially for middle class people who have always lived somewhere or had a home, you're suddenly sort of rudderless. And I've seen a lot of that where people are just sort of standing around and they don't know what to do with themselves. We come into this world with nothing. We leave it with nothing. And on moving day we have nothing. It's an oddly naked moment, that day on which we make a transition from our old life and our old location to our new life and our new place, which is just one reason why everybody hates to move. Its freaky. It's freaky to go to something new. It's freaky to leave any place where you've been for a while. And the act of moving itself, it's a hardship. Today on our program, we bring you three stories of people who did not want to move at all, but circumstance forced their hands. In Act One, an act that we call, Sleeping in Mommy and Daddy's Room, a family finds a way to move without moving by simply moving back into the house where the wife in the family grew up. In Act Two, Deal of a Lifetime, a woman buys a house from a man who simply does not move out ever. In Act Three, To a De-luxe Apartment in the Sky, a man makes a move, but it takes him eight years to do it. Stick around. You're listening to This American Life from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One, Sleeping in Mommy and Daddy's Room. This is the story of people wanting to change and not wanting to change at all at the same time, of a house that gets built and a house that gets moved all in pursuit of not making a new home at all. Susan Burton tells the story. I went to Wayzata, Minnesota to meet Mimi Bendickson and watch three men move her childhood home. Wayzata is just west of Minneapolis. It's a wealthy suburb, hedges and horse stables. And as I drive over to Mimi's, I have a hard time imagining that any of the houses I'm passing could be uprooted. They're sewn into groomed lawns, penned in by giant trees. So I'm startled when I near the top of the hill and see an enormous pink brick house in the middle of a pasture, clearly on its way somewhere. And though it's suspended 12 feet above the ground jacked up on wheels, there are still flowers in the fixtures next to the front door. I mean it's a really strange sensation to see a house being supported like this. This is Mimi. I mean, it looks fragile in a way to be up in the air. To me, because the house has personality, it looks kind of lonely and confused. It's not where it should be. I keep adding personality to it, and thinking it must just wonder what in the world are you guys doing to me. But in the long run it will be thankful I hope. It's early in the day, just past 9:00, and Mimi's carrying a bakery box tied with red ribbon. The movers take a break, eat a doughnut, and the house looming over us, I chat with Larry, the head of the crew. We're 40 feet wide. The main part of the house is 60 feet long, and then on one end has a sunroom that extends another 15 feet. And on the back end, a mud room so-called, and that sticks out 24 feet. And how much does the house weigh? We weighed 240 tons here. This house is massive by moving standards. Most houses weight only 100, maybe 130 tons, Larry tells me. The movers finish up breakfast, slip the doughnut box onto a steel beam underneath the front steps, and as their winches begin to whir, Mimi tells me the history of the house, which is stranger than you might think. Mimi's parents first built this house in Southern Illinois. They lived there for several years, and then her father was transferred to Minneapolis. The family bought some land in Wayzata and decided to replicate the Illinois house exactly. It's amazing. There's the same wallpaper in my bedroom, same wallpaper in the kitchen. Everything was the same-- the colors, the carpeting, the paint. It may sound really silly, but we'd only had the house for five years, and we'd loved it so much. And so our neighbors from Illinois would come visit us. They said it was just the oddest thing because you felt like you could walk out the door and walk home. It was identical. So it really was like walking into the same home. The same crew moved us into this house. And they stood at the front door and said, you've got to be kidding. This is Mimi's mother, Adrienne. OK guys, that bedroom goes up on the right, that goes in the living room over here. They knew the house, and it was identical. And luckily we were able to reproduce everything, the wallpaper, the drapes, the carpeting, just about everything. And they lived happily ever after, for 25 years anyway, until certain small things began to bother them, little things about certain rooms. It's as if the house they were living in began to coexist in their minds with the second house, an imaginary house that was just slightly more perfect than the one they actually inhabited. And at some point, they decided they wanted to live in that other house. Here's Truck, Mimi's father. And we really said to the architect, we've lived in the family room for two houses, I suppose a total of 30 years. And if this family room was just a few inches, or feet, or something different, or the fireplace would settle a bit left, or right, or something like that it would be perfect. But they found it would be more expensive to renovate than to tear the house down and build another brand new. What to do? The thought of bulldozing the house was so upsetting that they could hardly talk about it. Mimi's mother, Adrienne. Mimi had the fourth grandchild. Mimi and Mark had the fourth grandchild. And all the others had had a really neat experience, we think, with us in that house on that location. And I really felt badly that Adie would never have an opportunity to know that house like everybody else. And this gave us an opportunity to have her know the house too. Isn't this silly? You don't think of how much is in your home until you lose it. Then Mimi's husband suggested that the family move the house, that he, and Mimi, and their children could live in it. Since the structure was too big to take onto county roads, they would tug it onto an empty field elsewhere on the property, just a five-minute walk away from the original site, the site on which Mimi's parents will rebuild their old house, with subtle changes, this fall. What about a house could mean so much to a family, mean so much that they'd build it three times, scoop it out of the ground, prop it on trailers, drag it through the pasture, carry it with them wherever they go? Architecturally, there isn't anything extraordinary about the house. Adrienne and Truck found the floor plan in a magazine. It's a pretty two-story with four bedrooms, a little formal looking. If, in the 1970s, you spent any time in a country club suburb, you drove your station wagon past a lot of houses like this. Adrienne offers one explanation for her attachment to the house. I don't like to change. And I'm tedious to the point of-- anyway, I'm tedious. But when we come to a conclusion on something we are so married to that idea, and then we don't want to revisit it again. So yeah, people thought we were strange because lots of friends of ours have the ability and the inclination to completely redecorate, and re-carpet, and do all these things about every ten years. We don't feel the need to do that. And I don't know if it's laziness. I think it's we are really happy with what we have. And at some level, the reason this family keeps remaking the same house is as simple as they're happy together in that home. They have fun there. This is not a family for whom Sunday dinner together is an obligation. They like being together. And they like being together around their house. When I suggest to Mimi that for many people, moving back into a childhood home might be painful, bittersweet, it's almost like she doesn't understand what I mean. Well, maybe if someone had died there, she says. And there's one more reason why the house means so much. In the movie of this family's life, in the scene where the dying man says, Rosebud, the name Mimi's family would say is Highcroft. Highcroft. Highcroft. Highcroft. Highcroft. Highcroft. Truck's ancestors include some old money Minnesotans who owned a historic home called well, Highcroft, a 40,000 square foot mansion on Lake Minnetonka. Truck pages through a green leather album showing me photographs. The house had its own power plant, a commercial laundry on the first floor. It was torn down in the 1950s, the land sold off and divided up into separate plots just four miles from where the family lives now. Everyone makes sure that I know about Highcroft, brings it up early in the conversation. The family clearly feels the story explains something about them. Anyway, the last night in early January, 1952, Granddad was leaving for the train station. And the staff of Highcroft, and there was this enormous big house had generally more than one butler, and more than one cook, and upstairs maids, and downstairs maids, and a manager of the house, and everybody else, the chauffeur, they lined up to say goodbye to Granddad. And I will never ever forget how broken up I was to watch this old man who was about 85 years old say goodbye to what was his history. You grow up hearing your family's stories-- This is Mimi again. --and they're all passed on. Stories take on a life of their own. There's always been these stories. And it probably makes this Highcroft house even grander than it was. Who knows? I mean, I don't know. But I think it was kind of weird that they didn't think of a way to save it. So maybe that's like a little voice in the back of my head, that it's pretty hard to lose something because it's gone forever. There was a choice about Highcroft, and the family believes it chose wrong. And this seems to be more painful than the absence itself. And what they fear is forgetting. Mimi tells me that once something is gone it's hard to remember it again, that already it's hard to imagine the big pink brick house on its old site. And building the same thing every time is a way of guarding against forgetting. It's almost as if the family thinks that if they live their lives in different rooms all of their memories would disappear. There's not one single aspect of that house that is that important to me, but it's what happened in that house, which is why we have built it twice, I think. It works well, yes, but it's the things that happened there, the milestones in our lives, the preparations for two weddings, the children being born, the baptism luncheons, the Easter, the Christmases. Those are the things that really, if we were in a different house altogether, that would all be lost. Why shouldn't you be able to hold onto what happens inside a room? Mimi's family simply takes to an extreme a feeling a lot of people have about homes they've lived in and moved away from. A house can inspire a kind of longing. But you can love a house maybe too much, which was something Mimi had to think about. Because she was essentially asking her husband, Mark, to move into her childhood home from his childhood home, which is where they live now. Mimi and I drive out to Maple Plain. It's only 15 minutes from Wayzata, but more rural and more working class, low-slung warehouses, a beer distributor, a sign that says, chainsaw sale on now. We pass Mark's parents house-- the one he actually grew up in-- take a left and we're at Mark and Mimi's house, high on a bluff, looking around at miles of pretty plains and wetlands. From here we can see where Mark's sister lives. She and the rest of his family helped him move this house here, put down the driveway, plant the grass. Mark's so easygoing that if he's upset about leaving this world he's put so much effort into constructing there's no way to tell. Mimi was very open-minded to move out here with me away from civilization, and to move into my home that had my look to it. And history to it. Well, and now I mean the least I can do is cheerfully follow her to our next step. This is as much as I can ever get Mark to say about the move. As the three of us talk he seems reluctant to bring up anything that might upset anyone. He says he's looking forward to being in a better school district, closer to restaurants, to setting up his music studio, but Mimi notices something he's leaving out. You've never once mentioned the house, like how you feel about the house itself. I've never even asked you that. Uh oh. We're going to have to put the house up for sale. But I mean how you feel about the house, not just moving? I love it. I don't think that's an issue. I like this house where we are now. This other one is better. This isn't the answer Mimi's looking for. And they go around on this until finally Mimi points out that Mark would've been happy to stay in their current house. And this has sort of always been a touchy issue. But this was never my house for my life. And I always was looking to the next step. And moving here was always, to me, coming into your world for a lot of reasons. This is where Mark had his single life. This is where Mark dated other people. This is where his whole family was involved. This has always been our house, but it's Mark's house. I'm kind of making it seem like it's black and white. And I will be really sad to leave here too. But I'm so excited for the other. And I've always been dreaming about the next step where Mark saw his dreams for this place. And so that's hard. I mean he's got paths that he made for the kids to walk in. Well that's hard to give up. Mimi starts to cry. And I turn off the tape recorder. And she looks out the window and says, it's hard to see somebody's dreams not be able to happen. There are two parts to a move, what you take with you and what you leave behind. And the hardest thing for Mark isn't coming into Mimi's world, it's what he's giving up. It's hard to imagine moving an entire house, and not many people do it. There aren't firm figures, but by one estimate, 10,000 structures of all kinds are moved each year. The guy moving Mimi's house, Larry Stubbs of Stubbs Building Movers, recently made the Guinness Book of World Records when he moved the Shubert Theatre in Minneapolis. To move Mimi's childhood home, Larry started by digging a moat around the house, inserted jacks at the edges of the building, cracked it off its foundation, pumped it up into the air. Then he stuck a complicated network of support beams and wheeled dollies underneath. It took less than a week to pull the house close to its new site. Then Mark and his father got in excavators and dug a big hole, graded an incline down into it. The house gets rolled into the hole. A foundation is built under it. The support system is taken away. As they pull the house into the hole, you can see the wheels turning under it. But its progress is so incremental, so graceful, that you can't actually perceive the move unless you go away for an hour and return, as Mimi and I do, to see the house turned at an angle rounding a bend, the doughnut box from this morning still sitting upon a beam Mimi gets out her cell phone and calls friends and family, tells them to come over. It looks like today's the day Larry's going to finish, fix the house in its final spot. I climb up in a truck cab with a mover named Dave, who's winching a cable attached to the house around a giant spool. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE], Dave. All right, did you hear what he said? What did he say? Go easy on that one. We might be done. That might be it here. What makes you think that? Well we're both letting our cables down. So let's go find out. And all of a sudden it's in place, and we're not on a job site zigzagged by bulldozer tracks but in a front yard. Mimi's mother, Adrienne, arrives and stands before the house, right where the circular driveway will be, holding her granddaughter, Adie. It's just a little emotional. It's all of a sudden not our house anymore. Now it's this generation's house, and it's wonderful. Yeah. This is not Grandpa's house anymore or Grandma's house. This is your house. It's in a new spot. Yes. Here we walk in and it's kind of a mess. And aqua from 20 years ago. But this is the kitchen. Mimi and I climb up a ladder and through a hole poked into the floor of the mud room. I feel as if we're entering an exhibit, something mounted, a museum piece. The interior of the house is so vintage 70s that it's a little spooky. I half expect one of the girls from the movie The Virgin Suicides to lean over the banister in a gauzy prom dress. We stand in the wood paneled family room talking about Mimi's plans to redecorate and her memories of the place. This is the room where the picture was taken when Mark proposed to me. We came over and woke my mom up and took pictures in here. It was like 1:00 in the morning. But this is the room that, for me, has caused the most agonizing over how to make it special and us in a new feel but not too different. To Mimi, this is the central tension of the project. She's trying to preserve something, but change it at the same time. We finish the tour of the first floor and head upstairs. You know when you walk up the stairs in your house and just sort of know exactly how long it's going to take. Do you have that feeling like when you walk up the stairs? Yeah, and what's funny is I always walk up and go this way because that's my old room. I never ever would take somebody to the master bedroom first because I've never done that, which I guess I hadn't thought about until now. Anyway, this is my brother and mine, this is the bathroom we shared growing up. I tried to figure out a polite way to ask Mimi, won't it be a little odd to be sleeping with your husband in your parents bedroom? When I finally do, Mimi is surprisingly unfazed by the notion. It simply doesn't bother her that much. In fact, she said, she and Mark have a four poster bed just like her parents. Mark comes inside with Adie and Mimi takes him to see the view from the kitchen windows. It's the moment in the move when a house officially changes hands and the new owners walk around whispering, exploring. And what's amazing is that Mimi can actually have this experience in this house, given the fact that she lived here for 18 years. She tours the rooms looking for little reassurances, that it will feel normal here, that it wasn't a mistake to move the house. And what's most comforting to Mimi is that it feels a lot like what it was. It doesn't feel weird anymore. Looking out the windows, it doesn't feel odd anymore. I don't know. Doesn't it kind of look like it's the same view? Well it's a nice view. But doesn't it just feel like it did because you're facing the same direction and you're looking at the same green and the same trees in the back? Later in the evening, I sit in the yard and think about how F. Scott Fitzgerald set some of his short stories here, in the wealthy corners of Minnesota, amidst lake houses and broad lawns. The story Mimi's dad told me about his grandfather's last night at Highcroft has a plot that's pure Fitzgerald, someone riding away on a snowy night in a Pullman car taking a last look at the fine old mansion, the receding past. In an actual Fitzgerald story, say Winter Dreams, that past would be lost forever. And at some point the protagonist, in that one a Minnesota golf caddy, would rub his eyes in a panic trying to conjure it up again, reinhabit that world, and be devastated by his inability to summon it back. But Fitzgerald would have had to write Mimi's story as a fairy tale. She's done the thing that's impossible, packed the one thing you can't take with you. She's kept the past accessible for her whole family. They have all of the rooms, all of the years of their lives. They can literally step back into something a lot of people strain to recapture. And she's been able to do this because, unlike Fitzgerald's characters, unlike so many of us, she's never left home. Susan Burton. Coming up, how to sell your home, make thousands and thousands of dollars, and never move out. That's right, a case study. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different stories on that theme. Today's program, how to move without really moving, stories of people who do not want change in their lives, but then events force them to change and how they try to hold onto what they already know and love despite that. We've arrived at Act Two of our program, Act Two, Deal of a Lifetime. The typical way that it goes when somebody moves is that they move into the new house or apartment and the old occupant moves out. Sarah Koenig has this story of a situation where the new mover moved in, but at that point the process came to a dead halt. My stepsister, Rue, wanted a house in Sag Harbor, New York badly. But the former fishing village is now the artsiest of the tourist towns that make up the Hamptons, and she couldn't really afford it. Then one day she found out about a lovely house on Main Street listed for two prices. The more expensive listing included a house, a shed, and a little garden. The cheaper listing included a house, a shed, a little garden, and Ned. Well, the way I identify Ned is my man. People laugh at this, but he really is mine. He's the man that came with the house. The deal was this. Rue moved into her dream house at $110,000 discount. The catch was Ned, an elderly, sick man who sold the house cheap on one condition, that he never have to move out. Rue lives in the upstairs apartment. Ned lives in the more spacious downstairs, where he will stay until he dies. While Ned is working in his little downtown shop, which sells classical music CDs, Rue gives us a tour. We're coming into Ned's portion of the house, which is where he's lived for I think maybe 20 years, I'm not sure, and which is good for him too because he's older. It's all on street level. He doesn't have to climb any stairs. And also he's lost a lot of his sight, which is one reason why he really didn't want to leave this house. Unlike the mansions across the street, this house isn't big or fancy. It was built perhaps 100 years ago for the workers in the local watchcase factory. When she bought it, Rue was 36 and single. The idea that she could inhabit only two rooms of her new house didn't seem problematic. What she did not foresee was that in the space of a year, she would acquire a puppy, a husband and a baby. She tries to focus on the deal's advantages. The cramped quarters have taught her to resolve fights with her husband rather than flee them, she says. And Rue, extravagantly messy in her youth, has now taken to watching Martha Stewart's TV show at 9:00 AM, and has learned helpful tips for maximizing space. Still, she can't deny that the population boom in her apartment has made Ned's downstairs look especially attractive. And this is the living room. Is this where you would have the bedroom if you were down here? Would you use that as the master bedroom? Well, actually I think I would change the whole back of the house if I were down here. As you might guess, I've had a few imaginings of what I'd like to do with the space down here, but not too many. I don't like to get carried away with myself prematurely. These are all terrible things to think of. Why are they terrible things to think of? Well, I don't know. There's this vulture-like aspect of it when you start talking about what you'd like to do. I mean there's no getting around that. How can I talk about what I'd like to do? I'd never get to do it until he's moved on from this world. Well, we are now standing in the second parlor of this house on Main Street in Sag Harbor. And I've lived here since 1985. I sold it to Rue, I think, in '95. And I never expected to be alive this long. Poor Rue. To Ned, who is 78, selling his house from under himself was an ingenious way to stay in a place he considers home. A pianist who made his living as an editor, Ned has spent his life getting money and then spending it all. By the time he put his house on the market he was sick and broke. He didn't have the will to move. The Main Street house is the only one he's ever owned. It's crammed with antiques, and oriental rugs, and reminders of his elegant New Orleans upbringing. A large romantic portrait of him from 1951 hangs in the parlor. In the kitchen is a framed photograph of Stillwood, his grandmother's plantation house. And the little silver coffee set, this set right here, a little coffee pot, a cream pitcher, and a sugar pitcher, and a tray, my mother said was from the Civil War down in New Orleans. And it's been buried in the garden to keep General Butler, Spoon Butler they called him, to keep it from him. And I said, oh mother, on the bottom of each piece in here it says 1893. And she said, well that's a stock number. In reality, my mother was not to be moved by this. And when I took the tray to a silversmith in New York to have it redone, he said, has this tray ever been buried in the ground? Because there are all sorts of minerals in it that you only find in the ground. And I told him the story. He said, well I bet your mother was right. Besides the house and its occasional ailments-- a leaky skylight and overflowing garbage can-- what unites these two households is the anticipation of Ned's death. Back when they first negotiated the deal nobody thought he would still be alive today. He had had a heart attack and he had had a history of heart disease, I don't know how long a history. He had had bypass surgery, and then right after the closing, two weeks after the closing, he had another heart attack. And I talked to him from the hospital. And he sounded quite authentically sick I have to say. And that was six years ago. The trouble is I, all of a sudden, began to get better and was going around full of energy. And I feel perfectly good most of the time. I wake up and I embrace the day so to speak, well not the early day. The contract that binds Ned and Rue has led them to live together separately. They don't consider each other family or even friends. They don't invite each other over for dinner or drop by each other's apartment for a chat. When they do talk, their conversation is almost exclusively about the house. Like considerate roommates, they try not to offend each other with their habits. I try to figure out when maybe nobody's upstairs and that's when I play. But sometimes I realize they are upstairs, but then I go ahead and play anyhow. I'm sure it must bother them. It would bother me. I've played the piano ever since I was nine years old. And I'm very sad by the fact that I can no longer read music because I've forgotten all those pieces that I learned all those years ago. But I now can sit down and simply play what comes out. And oddly enough, sometimes what comes out is very, very nice. It's always very sad. Oh there have been moving evenings here, let me tell you, not a dry handkerchief in the house. In fact, Rue likes his playing. She's never told him so, but she finds it soothing when the music drifts into her bedroom when she and the baby are taking a nap. And he has never told her that he finds her presence upstairs comforting. Still there are complicated feelings on both sides. I do like Ned and I do feel kind of benevolent towards him like I'm taking care of him sometimes. He just inspires that in people. But then I'm not going to be terribly, terribly sorry when he dies. I'm going to be sorry, but I'm also going to feel some relief. It's very strange. Every time I ask him how are you doing or take care, I always get this little twinge. There is a twinge. Of? A twinge of like how are things going or how are you doing, and just this wicked twinge comes over me because I think that I'd a little bit like to hear not so great. Do you think that he's keyed in to this other conversation in your head? Well as I said, Ned's no fool. I'm aware that the other side can't be all that thrilled that I'm still there. But she's been very nice to me. And I think I've been very nice to her I think. Well she obviously likes you. Well I hope so because I like her. But she's also waiting for your demise. Oh I'm sure. Does it make you feel guilty that you got better? I don't think I feel guilty. Maybe I do. I'm just sorry that there is Rue sitting up there. She can't help but wait, biting her fingernails probably. It ultimately won't matter to me even now. It's a done deal what Rue feels about it. I don't blame Rue or anybody for the fact that I spent all my money. And I don't, in a way, think that I should be blamed because she spent hers. It sounds heartless put this way, and I guess it is. When one begins picking it apart this way it sounds really quite awful, as though I'm just squelching the life of a young couple and now a brand new life. A lot of people would say that Rue looks like the heartless one in this arrangement. There she is waiting for a gentleman to die. That's why I think this kind of speculation, there's a certain falseness about it. Yes, these thoughts flicker across every mind, mine as well as hers I'm sure, but we're civilized beings. I did what I thought I had to do. And I also think that she did what she felt she maybe not had to do, but she did what she wanted to do. To maintain their relationship, Ned and Rue have developed a careful communication devoid of jokes about arsenic, for example, at least to each other. The result is a textbook defense of civil society, a housebound version of Robert's Rules of Order. It's been very civilized I think. Rue and I are polite to each other. She doesn't inquire into my problem, and I don't inquire into hers. We don't let our feelings carry us into territory that is uncharted and really will always be uncharted. What territory is that? The territory that she resents the fact that I'm still alive and I resent the fact that she wants me to die. It's supposed to be a total honesty in examining every scrap of the brain, our emotions and whatnot are supposed advance something. But it usually depresses rather than advances I think. I think that we have these rules of society and whatnot for kind of good reasons. It's better to be on the surface than not because it's unanswerable, and it's territory that I'm unable to explore. And I don't think Rue is able to explore it to any benefit either. Because of his upbringing, Ned comes to this position naturally. But it's remarkable to me that my stepsister, a 70s wild child still known to say things like virtue is a load of crap, has come to understand the power of polite restraint. In private, of course, away from Ned, she's unapologetic about what lurks beneath their relationship. I don't feel so very guilty about it because I don't feel anything that anybody else wouldn't feel. I know how people are. I'm no worse than anybody. Mother Teresa could be living in this apartment, if she were young with a baby and a husband, and not have those thoughts. OK? I know that. It seems to me that people waste an awful lot of time having pretenses about what they're supposed to feel when what they really feel is what they really feel. You can't tell life to be something that it's not going to be, that it isn't. You can't argue with it. I don't mind being just a human being. That's fine. Both Rue and Ned moved into this house hoping it would be the last place where they'd ever unpack. Ned got his wish. But if he survives for more than another year, a strong possibility, Rue will have to move out. Her two small rooms will become too small once her baby starts to crawl. For now though, Rue's proud that the five souls living under her roof are getting along so well. And when Ned finally does die, she says she'll be sad. Along with twinges of wickedness, it's a sadness she bought along with the house. There you have my Rachmanioff period. Well not really. Sarah Koenig. Act Three, To a De-luxe Apartment in the Sky. One of the producers of This American Life, Blue Chevigny, used to have a job that was all about moving day and people who did not want to face that day. She worked for an agency in New York called Project Reachout, part of Goddard Riverside Community Center. They moved homeless mentally ill people into their own homes. With most of her clients it took years. In April, she went back to New York to watch one of the guys who she knew and liked finally get into his own room. Back at my old job, George stood out from a lot of the other clients. He was immediately easy to relate to. He was more talkative, more expressive, more open with people. One of my old coworkers, Dave Dean, remembers being an intern seven years ago, walking into the basement where all the clients were hanging out, playing cards, not talking much, especially to him. He remembers meeting George. He was very charming. And so the director was introducing me to the clients, introduced me to George. And George asked if I wanted to play pool, and so we played pool. And he was very friendly, very engaged, was going out of his way to make me feel at home as the new intern at the day program. Other clients were capable of that kind of warmth after you knew them for a little while. But very few were so friendly from the start. At that time George was living on the street. Eight years went by before he was ready to move into his own place again. What took so long? For one thing, like a lot of mentally ill people, he didn't really mind living outside ever since the day he first became homeless two decades ago. One day I just got up and just left the place. I just closed the door and broke the key off in the lock, and I just took off to the streets. Now that I think about now, to just leave it the way I did leave it, it shows there are signs of a very sick man, no plans, nothing, closed it, locked the door, and broke the key off, and just leave. I left clothes, rugs on the floor, furniture, everything. I just left it. And you never went back and got that stuff? No, I never went back. I was free. I felt like I was free as a bird. I was free, no responsibilities, nothing. I don't have to pay rent. I don't have to pay gas and light. I go over here and eat what I want when I want it. I go over here and sleep there. I was flying around like a mad man I was so free listening to my Walkman do do do do do do do do do do. Dave would see him in the park looking as out there as anyone you ever see on the streets of New York, in a white unitard, white shirt, white turban, and with gold chains around his neck. Dave and other workers would give him sandwiches, try to lure him back to Project Reachout where he had come for help in the past. It took a long, long time. And I kept talking with him in the park and saying George, come back. We did it before. We can do it again. Take care of yourself. Come back. Dave said, I understand you're free. But life is more than just being free. You can be just as free and more comfortable than sleeping on park benches, hanging out on the subway. And so he talked to me. And he was like, I'm not ready, I'm not ready. We went on like that for a while in the park. And then for whatever reason George was ready. And he decided OK, he'll do it. And then he came back one winter. What makes George's case different than a lot of the other people at Project Reachout is that he happens to respond really well to medication. Without it, he says, he's angry all the time. Anger was built up like I was going to explode all the time. All you had to do was say something, I'd explode on you. Boom. Before my thoughts were all over the place. You could ask me a question then, and 20 minutes later I'd ask you if you asked me a question. Now if you ask me a question I try to answer it if I have an answer. We could sit down, we could talk. I can concentrate on what's going on. But I was a real grouch. These days if you meet George he looks completely normal and great. He smiles all the time. He looks as if he takes time to put himself together every day. Dave says he looks like a college professor, a 48-year-old African American man with salt and pepper hair, dressing in nice suits or jackets, and looking all studious in eyeglasses. And today he's moving 40 blocks north to his own place. I bet you're not going to miss that dog. No, you're right. Dave helps George moved his stuff into a van along with Christina Caine, who coordinates housing for Project Reachout and moves everyone. Moving a homeless person usually means carrying a few garbage bags of stuff. For George, it means the van is jam-packed. He has a portable stereo, a TV, and a VCR, things he's bought with disability checks. But the real reason we have to make seven trips up and down the stairs, three people carrying stuff, is his clothes. George, your room's got a big closet? Yeah, a big walk-in closet. You're going to need it. That's the first thing I spotted. I said, oh wow. Look, there's a big walk-in closet. For the last year George has been living in a shelter where he doesn't have his own room, a place designed as transitional housing. At some point all of these clients have to move to permanent homes, and it's one of the trickiest parts of my old job. Moving day is what they're all working towards, but in many cases when that day comes, it's been like pulling teeth to get there. Most schizophrenics share this quality with some homeowners, they don't like change. They've barely gotten used to the transitional shelter, and now they have to move. One of the guys I was closest to got so mad at me about moving that I gave him a little pep talk about it every day for months, while he just scowled at me, before he'd agree to go. He stayed in the shelter for two years. Christina is the one who now finds housing for these guys. Some feel like we don't want them anymore, and we want to make room for new people and just get them out. And they have made deep connections with a lot of the workers. And they feel hurt when that relationship changes. It doesn't necessarily end or have to end, although some of them do end it. There was a client who did move, and he never came back. And he won't see me for follow-ups. They do feel abandoned. For a lot of these people, it's their first relationship that was consistent and nonjudgmental, and they don't want to lose that. Because of this, during the move the three of us keep up an ongoing patter of encouragement and positive reinforcement. We open the door to his new place. This is is so nice. Home sweet home. Welcome. Thank You. George, you have air conditioning in here. We do? Look at this closet. Yeah. The things that are important to, I guess you would say, the average person like having a clean place to stay, I try to stress that. Look how clean it is. And a lot of them are like, so? They lived outside. It's OK if it's not clean to them. So that's a hard selling point to get them out of the shelter. We want them somewhere clean and safe. And to them cleanliness isn't really a priority. If they feel comfortable somewhere, that's the priority. Even though we all know this, in our need to go on and on about how great the new place is, at some point we run low on material and find ourselves saying-- George, look at this bathroom. It's so clean. And as we ride up in the elevator, George pines for his old room in the shelter. But I loved my little room over there, Dave. You had to pry me out of it. It will take a little while, but you'll love this one soon, you know? It'll take a while. You probably won't sleep well the first few nights. It's always difficult to sleep in a new place. And that's natural. So that's going to happen. But I think, after a while, you'll like this place better. You'll appreciate it. And then when you go back to visit [UNINTELLIGIBLE], you'll be like, dang, I'm glad I got out of here. I don't know. I remember the first day I moved in there. I looked at those yellow walls. I said, oh drab, yellow walls. Then you couldn't tear me out of it. Once people have moved inside they sometimes really struggle. And it's all a bit unpredictable who'll do well and who won't. One guy we moved took six months to figure out how to ride the simple subway commute back and forth to his place each day. But George seems happy with his new room once everything's in it. And the facility is designed for people like him, homeless and mentally ill. The rent is a fixed percentage of his disability check-- about a third. There are staff people there to help him if he needs it. But it's really his own place. Two weeks later I go back to visit George to see how he's doing. He goes back every day to Project Reachout to visit Dave, and get his meds, and to go to his day program. I have it down to a basic science of six minutes, six minutes traveling time from here to Reachout. And I get up in the morning, and I do my thing. I wash my face, brush my teeth, comb my hair, slide into my clothes. I look at the time. I see the train is coming. So I press the elevator. That's how cool it is. I walk real cool and calm to the elevator. It goes ding. And then I go downstairs and I walk around the corner. And then I get to the train station and I hear the train coming, and I have to start flying. Boogidy boogidy boogy boogy. I shoot the metro card through the machine and get on the train. And six minutes later I'm at the corner of Amsterdam and 96th Street on my way into Reachout. He talks at length about the unlimited metro card pass that he pays for once a month, the pass that lets him ride around the city on the subway and buses as much as he wants and visit his old buddies in the shelter, which he does nearly every day. The city seems full of possibilities. After we finish talking, George walks me to the bus I'm taking to the airport. He says he's never flown in an airplane anywhere, but now that he knows what bus goes out there he thinks he'll go out and watch some planes take off some time. He asks me how I'm doing off in Chicago, a whole new city. I tell him things are good in some ways, not so good in others. I tell him I miss New York. He pats me on the arm. He says it takes some time to get used to things. Blue Chevigny. I go over here and I sleep there. I was flying around like a mad mad I was so free listening to my Walkman, do do do do do do do do do do. And producer Blue Chevigny spent a while trying to figure out what song it might be that he's singing so she could play it right after. And she came up with many possibilities. Here are just a few. Do do do do do do do do. This is Earth, Wind, & Fire's Got To Get You Into My Life. Or is it from Jesus Christ Superstar. Do do do do do do do do. Or perhaps Simon and Garfunkel? Do do do do do do do do. Or maybe Crosby, Stills & Nash? Lou Reed. And of course our final pick, George Clinton. Do do do do do do do do. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who, you know, has his own radio show that he does back in his living room about which he says-- There have been moving evenings here let me tell you. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI Public Radio International.
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Monica Childs worked her way up on the police force in Detroit, from patrol to the vice squad to homicide. She was part of an elite team of investigators. But why'd she become a police officer? I became the police because I didn't like the police. During the time I grew up, the police officers I always saw in my community were always male and white, over six feet tall. It was rare that a police officer talked to you like you were a human being. Everything was always confrontational. And I always saw police officers as the biggest gang in town. It's just a gang, a band of hoodlums with badges. And I always wondered, did they go around recruiting them like this or putting ads in the paper that you must have a bad attitude and misuse and abuse the citizens? Where did these people come from? So I thought, well, OK, all police officers aren't bad. There's got to be some good ones somewhere. And so she joined the force to try to change the system from inside. And on the job, she saw how police get to be the way they are, how police band together. When they make mistakes, they never admit it, she says. They cover up each other's mistakes, almost from the time they come onto the force. These people would come on with their own ideas and opinions. And then, they would adapt these other people's attitudes. Everybody became one, like a marriage, because police organizations reward people for what? They reward everybody for being the same. If you're different, you're ostracized or you have problems. Banding together, there's nothing wrong with banding together. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's not the problem. The problem is when you band together, and you all act in concert to lie, perpetuate a scenario that didn't happen. That's where the problem lies. And you got that one little meek person that doesn't want to go along, but goes along because, "We're all police, and we got to stick together. It's us against them." Where else do you hear that? Gangs-- us against them. And that "them" that you're referring to, "us against them," I like those people out there. I like the public at large. So whenever Monica Childs started on a new job at the force, she would let everybody know how she felt about things. And it was always interesting because I'd tell them, I say, "You know, I don't lie and cover up for anybody. Whatever you do, if it's wrong, and I'm asked about it, I will tell. I'm not covering for you. I'm not going to lie for you. I won't even say I didn't see it or didn't hear. But I don't want you to lie for me. And I don't want you to cover up for me, either." And that approach worked for Monica Childs for years, until finally, in 1996, it stopped working. And her life as a cop became very difficult. Today on our program, Can You Fight City Hall If You Are City Hall? We bring you two stories, each about somebody trying to change the system from within, trying to be principled while working in government. This is, of course, the July 4 holiday weekend. And it's a holiday about a moment of idealism that created the American government. Our show today is about what happens to people trying to sustain that kind of idealism today. In each story, public-minded public servants end up fighting their colleagues. It takes a toll on their lives. They get harassed. They lose their jobs. Act One, Take That, Copper, in which an honest cop tries to do the right thing, and a suspected murderer walks free as a result. Act Two, Man Versus Money, a small-town mayor tries to keep a developer from building in his town. And it results in the kind of snowballing fiasco by the end of which, the town literally does not exist anymore. Alix Spiegel tells that story. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Act One: Take That, Copper. So Monica Child's troubles began on August 20, 1996. An 11-year-old boy was murdered the night before. And when she got to work, her commanding officer had a suspect in the crime sitting there in the office. She orders me to take his statement. I said, "Take his statement?" I say, "No." I try to get other people on the squad to do it. Nobody else would do it. Because what she did was illegal, and she was trying to involve me in an illegal action. It was illegal because her superior had made an improper promise to the suspect. She told him that if he confessed, he would be sent home, which of course was untrue. If he confessed, he would be thrown in jail and put on trial. Monica Childs finally agreed to take his statement and the statement of another witness. But as their day in court approached, her boss kept coming into her office, asking what she was going to say in the hearing. She came in this office. I was sitting there. She'd come in, and she says, "I need to know what you're going to say at the [? Walken ?] hearing." I said, "I'm going to tell the truth." "I need to know exactly what you're going to say." I said, "Well, the truth of what I'm going to say, I went in saying I told you to straighten this mess up. I'm not lying for you. I told you I wasn't going to lie for you. I'm going to tell the truth." Finally, Monica Childs called the prosecuting attorney and told him what was going on, and the suspect's statement was thrown out. He not only went free, he sued the police department over the way they treated him and won a settlement of $15,000. This man, Reginald Vines, says that he is innocent of all charges. Meanwhile, Monica Childs's boss had her transferred to a job where she had no specific duties at all. Friends on the force stopped speaking to her, people she'd known for years. Police work is the kind of job where you work closely with other people, spending hours together tracking down leads, going over the case, just in each other's company. Now this was gone. They were afraid to talk to me. They'd say, "Monica, wait 'til we get outside. I'll talk to you outside because I don't want to get in the middle of this. I don't wan to be seen talking to you." I said, "Oh. OK. All right." So I wasn't angry with them. I wish I could've gotten the National Enquirer to come, because I've never seen people walk without a spine. And that definitely would've been an Enquirer or a Globe story. Retaliation against whistleblowers is so common that a Washington, DC group that tries to help government employees in this situation, the Government Accountability Project, put out a handbook warning potential whistleblowers that typically they can expect any and all of the following-- character attacks, threats, isolation, public humiliation, prosecution on trumped-up charges, the elimination of their jobs, blacklisting, even physical assaults. Childs sued the police department. The local press picked up the story. And in the midst of all this, she got a phone call. "Hey, Miss Childs, how are you doing?" I said, "Who is this?" "Oh, this is Eric. You don't remember me?" "No." The guy turned out to be a murderer who Monica Childs had caught. I go "OK." I said, "Well, where are you?" "I'm in prison. Remember, I got life." I said, "Oh. OK. What you want?" He says, "We've been reading about all this trouble and all these problems that this police department trying to cause you. Me and some friends up here in prison that know you, you were their detective, too." I said, "I was their detective? I thought you were entitled to have your own lawyer. I didn't know you had your own detective." "Oh, yeah, yeah. It's about 12 or 13 of us. We was sitting around. And if you need us to come and be character witnesses for you, you let us out, and we'll come down there because you was cool with us. When we went to trial, you didn't lie on us. You didn't add nothing to it. Most of us doing life, we got big time. But we was wrong. But I just appreciated the way you get me. And you didn't lie." And I'm like, OK. I'm already depressed. I'm already feeling bad. When I got off the phone, I was crying. I felt so bad. I'm like, "This is my help? 13 killers, people with no credibility, they're going to help me?" In the end, Monica Childs won her suit against the police department. And finally, sick of the whole thing, she retired from the force. The trouble with doing the right thing, of course, is that often, it is not clear what the right thing is. And just as often, doing the right thing has unintended consequences. Monica Childs worries sometimes about the testimony that got thrown out because she put her foot down. It turns out that that testimony might have cleared another suspect in the crime, a man named Eddie James, who eventually was sentenced to 70 to 150 years for the murder. And it just bothers me. And it will probably bother me 'til I die to know that one innocent man is in prison. And it was like, "Damn. How could this happen?" And I almost wish I hadn't said anything. But then, it would've been remiss of me to know the truth and not tell it. I did the right thing, but he still got hurt. Monica Childs. She spoke with reporter John Bowe, who interviewed her for a book called Gig about people in all sorts of jobs. Act Two-- Money Versus Man. Let's move now from big-city Detroit to small-town Texas for a story where the bad guys aren't murderers. They're real estate developers, and maybe not so bad. They are just doing what God intended for real estate developers to do, which is, of course, come into town, throw around a lot of money, get people all excited. In this case, it caused a series of events which cascaded out of control, one after another, until by the end, even the people involved all seemed sort of amazed at how far it went. And in the midst of this, it was yet another person, a government official, trying to do the right thing as he saw it, no matter what. Alix Spiegel tells the story. When Scott Bradley moved to Westlake, there were fewer than 10 roads, and several of those were unpaved. This was the '70s. And at the time, this level of development wasn't unusual for the area. It was country, low hills and long grass and not much else, which is why Scott Bradley moved to Westlake. Which is why most people moved to Westlake, they wanted a rural life in a rural place a short commute from the city. Fort Worth, Texas, was only 30 minutes away. But then the city grew. By the mid-'80s, suburban sprawl had overtaken most of Westlake's neighbors. There were 7-11s, Home Depots, miles of subdivisions, and all the other clutter you find in any town in any place in America, but not in Westlake. The people in Westlake wanted something different. By 1994, when Scott Bradley became mayor, there was still no real commercial development in town. The town government wouldn't permit it. They knew they couldn't stave off suburban sprawl forever. But everyone, the townspeople, the town council, and especially Mayor Bradley agreed, the at least wanted to try. This story begins in 1993, when one of the properties in Westlake, a 2,500-acre ranch called the Circle T, appears on the auction block. This property, which, by the way, was the single largest piece of land in town, and probably the most beautiful undeveloped stretch of real estate within a half-hour commute of the Fort Worth metroplex, then attracts the attention of Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate, a high-powered real estate developer, who is quoted in the papers saying that for him, business was about more than win or lose. It was about win or die. So Ross Jr. buys the Circle T ranch. And then a couple years later, after a lot of thought and planning, and minimal contact with Westlake's town government, he and his company, the Hillwood corporation, finally present their plans for the development of the Circle T to the citizens of Westlake, all 250 of them. David Brown is a Westlake resident who attended the meeting. Hillwood Development, which is Mr. Perot's company, had a meeting over here in Solana, at a big meeting hall. And they had pictures, drawings, of a beautiful little town that they were going to build. It showed little two-story buildings in the downtown area, and it showed a very pleasant and not too crowded place. And we were all delighted by what we saw in the drawings. But when you read the accompanying 300-page document, you found that it looked like there was going to be 50,000 people crammed in here. The accompanying 300-page document, written in convoluted legal speak, basically gave Perot and his company, the Hillwood corporation, infinite flexibility to do with the town of Westlake as they pleased. The fine print included plans for a regional shopping mall, upscale home apartments, an office park, a golf course, zoning for a sports arena, and more-- $3 billion worth of commercial and residential development with enough room for an additional 50,000 to 80,000 people. Now keep, in mind that this is the kind of community where a visiting reporter, me, for instance, could sit through a city council meeting where a full 40 minutes of heated debate centered on the question of whether the new town sidewalks should be raised half an inch or feathered to the ground so as not to disturb the natural line of the landscape. So predictably, once the residents of Westlake learned the details, they were profoundly disturbed and alarmed. The meeting room was hot, some say close to 100 degrees. But every townsperson stayed to the bitter end. And according to Don Redding, another Westlake resident who attended the presentation, they were all mad as hell about what Perot and the Hillwood Corporation wanted to do. In essence, we would have turned over the community to the developer. In other words, that was the tone of it, is, "All right. I'll take it from here. You people have been in charge, or run the town, up to this point. But from now on, we'll take care of it. We'll make your decisions for you." And that was the whole tone of it. And people didn't like that. No, they didn't care for that too much. Now at the time Ross Jr. brought his plans for development of the Circle T to the citizens of Westlake, the town was run by six men-- the mayor, Scott Bradley, and five aldermen. Mayor Bradley was a soft-spoken but very successful lawyer with a reputation for staking out the ethical high ground. Meticulous, detail-oriented, Scott liked to stand at city council meetings. Three different people told me that, that Scott Bradley liked to stand at city council meetings. I think the reason they mention it is because the formality of that act, standing up, stood in such sharp contrast to the rest of the city government. The other people on the city council, the aldermen, were not formal people. Al Oien was a retired airplane pilot who wore his overalls to meetings. Fred Held was a third-generation hardware man. There was Caroll Huntress, a former assistant football coach who later got into oil exploration, and Howard Dudley, who was in the chemical business, and Jerry Moore, who owned a tile and carpet company. I should mention here that being an alderman in Westlake, Texas, was not what you would call a full-time job. For years, the city council meetings were held in the aldermen's living rooms. Even when the city government moved into an official town hall in the early '90s, the meetings retained their living room feeling. It was comfortable. It was casual. There was not, in truth, all that much to discuss. Now in light of later events, it's important to be clear on one point. At the time of the Perot presentation, all five of Westlake's aldermen were opposed to the Perot development plan. Then something happened, and this consensus came to an end. Ross Jr. made another land purchase in the town of Westlake, 500 acres of Texas prairie on which one of the aldermen, a man named Carroll Huntress, rented a home. It was after this land purchase that suddenly and inexplicably, four of the five aldermen, Al Oien, Jerry Moore, Howard Dudley, and Perot's new tenant, Carroll Huntress, started questioning the town's traditional anti-growth stance. There were a series of uncomfortable town meetings where the four aldermen publicly challenged the mayor, and some statements were made to the local press. Miles Moffeit is a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who covered what became the Westlake story. Perot purchased the land Huntress lived on. And almost within weeks, Huntress and these other aldermen were releasing signals that they were tired of the fighting, that it was time for the town to come around to Perot's views. I got an interview with him, and he began explaining that Perot basically can't lose. And Perot is going to have this way eventually anyway, so the town should come around and just start appeasing him. This turn was hard to explain. These men, after all, had helped to build the town. For years, they turned away developers with plans much more modest than Perot's. Why would they reverse their decades-long anti-growth stance in a matter of weeks? Rumors circulated around town, theories about payoffs, none of which could be substantiated, none of which satisfied. Meanwhile, Mayor Bradley refused to support the Perot plan, and relations between the four aldermen and the mayor became strained, and then positively hostile. There was a fight over where the town boundaries fell, in which each side accused the other of manipulation and deception. There was an ugly incident between one of the aldermen's wives and some townspeople, and the general sense that things were quickly falling apart. David Brown. There was a great deal of acrimony between the citizens and the council, and between Bradley and the council. And the citizens, it was even harsher than Bradley. People were calling these guys all kinds of names. Who do you work for? Who's paying your salary? Who have you sold out to? This sort of thing. And it was pretty hot. Reporter Miles Moffeit. From that point on, it was just pure bedlam. These guys were calling their own meetings. Scott was vetoing every action that they took. It went back and forth and back and forth for weeks, until these former aldermen decided to just put him on trial and remove him from office. They announced they were going to impeach Mr. Bradley. And I, for one, thought it was a bluff. The legal basis for it was a law passed back in the 1870s that had only been used once or twice, and never since the early 1900s. And I thought, "They'll be laughed out of court." Yeah, it was like a 100-year-old statute. And it says that a small town board of aldermen can convene a trial, act as judge, jury, and witness, and remove a colleague from office, be it a mayor or a fellow alderman. There were four counts brought against the mayor, two of them so inconsequential that neither the accused mayor nor the prosecuting aldermen can remember what they were. One count charged the mayor with removing a meeting notice which had been posted on the town hall door. The only substantive charge accused him of tricking the aldermen into endorsing a map which expanded the town's boundaries. But most Westlake residents believed that the aldermen wanted to impeach Mayor Bradley for a different reason. The mayor was the most outspoken and intractable opponent of the Perot plan. As mayor, with veto power, it would be impossible for Perot and his company, the Hillwood Corporation, to proceed with development with Bradley standing in the way. When the issue was raised in the local press, Perot denied influencing the aldermen in any way. But a series of actions taken by the aldermen only compounded this view. David Brown. The next thing they did, they fired the city attorney, who'd been city attorney for 20 or 25 years. They fired the town planner. And they said, "We've made a deal with Hillwood that we're going to use their lawyer and their town planner." Well, you know. And, "The town will get their services for free, and Hillwood will pay for it all." And the new law firm came in, the new lawyer from a law firm up in Denton came in. And he immediately began to orchestrate Bradley's trial. David Brown presented the aldermen with a petition signed by 125 Westlake residents, half the town's population, which condemned their move to oust Mayor Bradley. As the aldermen's lawyers prepared to put the mayor on trial, Scott Bradley and his supporters began to meet regularly to strategize about how to counteract the actions of the aldermen. They would gather in their own homes, in their living rooms or private offices. And as they did this, they started noticing a strange thing was happening. This is Don Redding. All I can tell you is in meetings that were held where there might be three or four or five people in attendance, that I was quoted from that meeting the next day from somebody that had no way of knowing what went on, in the exact words and in the exact sequence that were made in that meeting. Ruby Held, wife of Alderman Fred Held, the only alderman who continued to support Mayor Bradley. Whatever we planned, they beat us to whatever we planned. So we know we were being watched. We were being listened to. Somehow, they were monitoring our phone calls. This is Mayor Scott Bradley. Well, we all started, number one, nobody would talk on a hard telephone. We would go to other telephones to talk. Or we would talk on the digital cell phones. I myself would take my digital phone out by the fountain. Reporter Miles Moffeit. They held secret meetings out in the woods. And they would pass around notes. And they couldn't carry on a conversation with the blinds open. Don Redding. We'd even drive as far as a quarter of a mile away from my home and meet with them on the side of a road. Did that on several occasions. And this is really interesting when you understand that in the early '70s, I worked in the Soviet Union for IBM. And that was one of the most closed societies in the world. The KGB was with us always. And I frankly felt more threatened here than I did when I worked in the Soviet Union. You felt more threatened here than you did-- you felt like you were being watched more? Absolutely, no question about it in my mind. You can call that as paranoid, but it's only paranoid when it's not happening. And in this case, I was convinced it was. Ruby Held was out in her yard one day. She was birdwatching, she says, to calm her nerves. She was tracking a bird with her binoculars. It flew across the street. And as she turned to follow it, she noticed there was a van driving slowly back and forth in front of her home. The van had two people in it, and they too had binoculars. They were looking right back at her. Miles Moffeit. Well, she got the tag number. And we ran a check and discovered that this van belonged to a private investigation service in Irving. And their names were Jerry and Cherry Davis. I got on the phone with one of the detectives, and he acknowledged having worked for Perot's law firm at one point, then kept the conversation really short. So the depositions later on reflect that there were indeed investigators hired to track Bradley. But it's just real difficult to tell who hired them. Perot denies hiring private detectives to track his opponents in Westlake. He and his development company, the Hillwood Corporation, declined to be interviewed for this story. But Miles Moffeit, who has covered Perot Jr.'s business dealings, both inside and outside Westlake for a number of years, says the notion that Perot would have his opponent tailed is not completely outlandish. Perot's-- the way he goes about his business is generally very stealthy. And he acknowledges that, to him, business is war. And in order to understand this perspective, you have to understand that stealth and aggressiveness are just two very important factors in going to war. A town of 250 people just had a very difficult time keeping up. Then there was another thing which fanned the flames of the town's fear of Ross Perot Jr.-- a book called Citizen Perot written by journalist Gerald Posner. Now, this book is not about Ross Perot Jr. It's about his father, the former presidential candidate. It's an unauthorized biography which includes a chapter called "I'm not an investigative personality," about Ross Sr.'s now-famous obsession with security, and his use of private investigators and security teams in his business dealings. Ruby Held. There was some chapters I went for three weeks. I couldn't even read between-- I couldn't pick it up again. I thought, "I can't believe what this man has done." And because, I think, I had read that book, it gave us-- something would come up in city council. Or they'd come in, and everything they did was, I'd say, "That's chapter six," or "This is chapter two." Every single home I visited in Westlake had a copy of Citizen Perot, well-worn, full of underlining and scribbled notes in the margins, whole passages outlined in yellow highlight. The more they read, the more worried and hysterical they became. It is in this climate of paranoia that the aldermen put Mayor Scott Bradley on trial. It was held on a Tuesday in the cafeteria of the Solana office complex, which housed the town hall. The mayor's supporters plastered the walls with posters of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. David Brown. I guess the whole town was there, plus maybe 200 or 300 other people. It was a big crowd that came out, even though it was 10 o'clock on a weekday. And Mr. Huntress was chairman of the court. The town council, the aldermen, sat as the court, all five of them, even though they had brought the charges. And even though one or two of them testified against Bradley at the trial, they were still allowed to vote as judges. Miles Moffeit. The aldermen had set themselves up along this long table. And in the middle was an attorney named Bill Wood, who had done some work for Perot. Don Redding. And it was kind of curious because when something would be posed that Huntress didn't know how to handle, which was most of it, he would look to this attorney. And the attorney would try to advise him. It was such a ludicrous thing. And it was such a staged thing that there was no question about what was going to happen. Ruby Held. I'm sitting there thinking, "I must be in Russia." I cannot believe they're sitting up and testifying against him and judging him and being the jury, all in one fell swoop. I thought, "This must be the way they railroad somebody in Russia and put them in prison, because this is the biggest trumped-up farce I've ever seen in my whole life." My whole insides felt like they were boiling. After a 15-minute break for deliberation, the board, in a four to one vote, with Fred Held dissenting, found Scott Bradley guilty as charged and dismissed him as mayor of the city of Westlake. The crowd booed. Scott Bradley. When the verdict was read, my lawyer stood up and said, "Is that your verdict?" And they said, "Yes, it is." And he said, "When are you going to put it into effect?" And they said, "Right now." And my lawyer says, "Right now?" And Carroll Huntress said, "Right now," and proceeded to sign the papers that Bill Wood furnished him. And I can't remember exactly how it happened. But there was a defining moment, where it was just a spontaneous applause, essentially aimed at my lawyer and me for having gone through this terrible situation. And I was so moved that I stood up, and I applauded the audience for having gone through this whole thing. Immediately after the trial, Bradley got in the car and drove to the district courthouse to file an appeal. But en route, he got a call on his cell phone. It was from one of the townspeople, a woman staked out at the town hall who told Bradley that the aldermen had posted another notice which announced yet another meeting. Scott Bradley. She had copied enough of it that she was able to read it to us. And it became very apparent then what was happening. They were going to blow the town up. The aldermen's notice, posted three hours after the impeachment of Mayor Scott Bradley, proposed the disannexation of 90% of the town of Westlake. 90% of the city's property would be transferred to neighboring communities, and the town would essentially be disbanded, simply given away. Included in the disannexation ordinance were all lands belonging to Ross Perot Jr., and the three properties owned by the aldermen. Reporter Miles Moffeit. Everybody was like, "OK, they're just going to blow up the town." On paper, it would look as though the town was blown up. There's just pieces, far-flung pieces attached by very thin strips of land. Word of the posting spread quickly. And within half an hour, a small army of citizens had gathered at the town hall, most too stunned to observe what was happening. The properties belonging to the aldermen and Perot were eventually released to the city of Fort Worth, in exchange for a promise that they would pay no property taxes for a minimum of 15 years. Here's David Brown, Don Redding, and Scott Bradley. I was incredulous. I said, "They can't be doing-- this is not sane." You had no idea that anybody would have been considered something like this. It's like, this is unbelievable. Really, you're just astounded. I really couldn't make any sense of it. I wasn't there, but it had to be very much akin to the feeling of people observing the Oklahoma City bombing. It was a senseless act. It brought only harm and devastation. And this is the same feeling I had, that it just seemed to be the work of madmen. Coming up, are madmen actually smarter than the rest of us? Are people with money? Or do they just plan things out better? Alix Spiegel's story from Westlake, Texas, continues in a minute from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you various stories on that theme. Today's program, for the July 4 holiday, stories of idealists in American government two centuries after the first independence day, and answers to this question. Can you fight city hall if you are city hall? We're in the middle of Alix Spiegel's story from Westlake, Texas. The mayor has been thrown out of office. A notice is posted calling for a meeting in which the town would give away most of its land to other towns. At this point, Mayor Scott Bradley went to district court to have them issue an order so his impeachment would not take effect right away. At the district court, the judge suspended a murder trial for an entire day to issue a ruling favorable to Mayor Bradley, a temporary restraining order which prevented the aldermen from enforcing Bradley's impeachment. The aldermen's lawyers were also present, and they indicated to the district judge that they wanted to appeal his decision to the Fort Worth Court of Appeals in the morning. Mayor Scott Bradley. The judge says, "Fine. I'll order my clerks to stay here, prepare the record. You can come by at," I think he said, "a quarter of eight and pick it up." So as far as we knew, we were going to the court of appeals the next morning. That night, Carroll Huntress and these lawyers get into a car. They drive to one of the justices' homes. They sit in his living room while he talks to two other justices, and comes out and announces that he's going to stay the orders of the district court. And so in a late-night hearing in a judge's living room, the impeachment of Scott Bradley was reinstated. David Brown. It happened very quickly. The district court order came out about 5 o'clock. And by 11 o'clock that night, it had been overturned by the court of appeals. Again, this made us feel we are really up against it. If people have that much clout, they can go to an appeals court in the middle of the night. If I were a private citizen, and I wanted to get a district court order overturned, I could not go knock on an appeals court judge's door at 9 o'clock at night and say, "Would you please overturn this decision? I know you haven't had time to hear the opponent's side to it, but please overturn it anyway." I couldn't do that. I doubt anybody in the state could. Or very few people, obviously somebody could, because they did. Scott Bradley appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, saying the court of appeals was wrong to make this decision in the middle of the night without hearing his side of the case. And as other lawsuits involving Westlake worked their way to the court of appeals, Mayor Bradley filed another motion. This one said that the court of appeals judges shouldn't be hearing another case involving him, given how they'd handled the impeachment decision and given the fact that he was arguing to the supreme court that they had acted improperly. This so infuriated the court that they again, without inviting me to be present or giving me any notice they were doing so, convened the entire Fort Worth Court of Appeals and issued a 21-page opinion in which they essentially call my lawyers liars and unfit for the practice of law for filing this motion, and referred them to the General Counsel of the State Bar of Texas to have their license removed. And it had personal repercussions for me, because immediately Cantey and Hanger, the law firm I was working for, call me in. And they said, "We have this $204 million judgment that we're afraid that the same panel that you've said may be biased is going to decide our appeal unfavorably in retribution. So we want you to resign from the law firm." And that's how Scott Bradley lost his job. Publicly, Perot continued to deny any involvement in the disintegration of Westlake and portrayed the affair as a local power struggle, a personality conflict between Scott Bradley and the Board of Aldermen. Three days after the impeachment, on Friday, May 2, one evening before the town elections were scheduled, town elections which could change the balance of power on the board, the citizens of Westlake once again gathered in Town Hall, this time to witness the dismantling of their community. With Bradley removed from office, there was no mayor to preside, so prior to the meeting, the aldermen appointed their own mayor, one of the oldest citizens in town. Again, reporter Miles Moffeit. His name was Dale White. And he was almost like a hermit. You didn't see him around town. But suddenly, here he was, the mayor of Westlake. Once again, the aldermen took their place at the table in front of the room. The meeting was, by all accounts, a very efficient, no-frills process. Most of the actual legal documentation for the disannexations were provided by a lawyer who was working with Perot and the Hillwood Corporation. The aldermen and the new mayor, Dale White, said very little. Much of what they did say, they read from index cards, which had been prepared in advance. Don Redding. Through the whole thing, people are trying to object, trying to get them to listen to them. And it's like you might as well not have been in the room. They won't look at you. They won't look at you. They won't look at you? No. Scott Bradley. That was probably the lowest point, emotionally, in my life, sitting through that meeting, watching these aldermen. And they literally dismantled the town in about a two-and-a-half-hour period, using documents that Perot's lawyers had prepared. When the last paper was signed, and the town of Westlake officially dismantled, the newly appointed mayor, Dale White, mayor of a town that now did not include the property where he himself lived, in other words, mayor of a town in which he did not hold residence, sat at the table in the front of the room and made the statement which would appear in every newspaper article which covered the story. Scott Bradley. There were some maps displayed. And several citizens gathered around Dale, upset, and were asking him, "Was this tract in, or is this tract out? Is my property in or is it out?" And somebody said, "What do you call this now?" And it seemed like, without thinking, he said, "Perot Town." It was in response to somebody's comment. And he said, "This is Perotville now." And people looked very shocked at him. And he realized that he had made a very unpolitical statement. And you could see by his actions that he thought, "Oh, man. I've screwed this up to a fare-thee-well." David Brown. I went to bed that night thinking, "Man, the town's destroyed." And the next morning at 6:00 AM, on a Saturday morning, when the Fort Worth City Council meets, an emergency session, and claims all the land that had been disannexed from Westlake-- now you don't get the Fort Worth City Council out of bed at 6 o'clock on a Saturday morning unless you have some clout. And yeah, we were mad. We were confused. And we were afraid we might have lost the whole ballgame at that point. The aldermen, naturally, have a very different version of these events, a version they shared with me in a hotel conference room several miles outside of Westlake. It was the first time they'd collected to speak publicly about what had happened. And they insisted that they all be interviewed together. According to the aldermen, they are the true victims of this story, people unjustly accused of selling out the town, when in fact, they were simply trying to protect Westlake from a corrupt and power-hungry mayor, someone so narrow-minded and fanatical about preserving the rural integrity of his community that he rejected a proposal which was in step with the overall goals of Westlake and its citizens. Former Alderman Al Oien. Our attitude, everyone except one Alderman and this phony mayor we had said, "It's going to change. The best we can hope for is a reasonable change, some input into the change, rather than let them go crazy." And Perot's proposition, it's magnificent. We were really fortunate to have someone with integrity that would develop a town in a reasonable manner, rather than just go in and destroy the thing like most towns develop. They say they took no bribes from Perot, were never in any way influenced by Perot, but reached their decision to impeach Mayor Bradley after it became clear that he would do anything, including impeding the legal workings of the board, to stop a legitimate businessman with legitimate rights from developing a property which was his own. They described in great detail a series of small battles between themselves and the mayor which led to their decision to impeach him. And listening to them, it does seem possible that what happened in Westlake is that there were some relatively modest misunderstandings and disagreements between the council and Bradley, problems they might have ironed out in normal times. But with the question of Perot's development plan hanging over their heads, these disputes simply spiraled out of control, as each side dug in its heels. The aldermen had run the town for years, and they weren't used to anyone disagreeing with them so persistently and effectively. It was no wonder they came to hate Bradley. As for the disannexation of Westlake's land, the aldermen say the hostilities from Westlake's citizens was so great after the trial, they simply felt they had no alternative. They had an opportunity to release themselves from a bad situation, to release the Perot property from unreasonable governance, and they took it. But they don't agree that it was their fault that Westlake was destroyed. Alderman Carroll Huntress. In essence, they've destroyed the town, when they more or less changed allegiances and had no concern for us whatsoever. They did after the trial. They scorned at you and made harsh remarks at you and treat you like dogs, really. Whatever the aldermen's motivations, the people of Westlake clearly disapproved of their actions. The aldermen had scheduled the disannexation meeting for one night before the regular town elections, presumably because they understood that after the impeachment trial, there was very little chance they would continue in office. They were right. Of the two aldermen eligible for reelection, one withdrew from the race. The other was turned out of office in a landslide vote. Initially, the anti-Perot forces assumed the election, which gave them a majority voting bloc on the Board of Aldermen, would end the political troubles in Westlake. But two days after the election, the old Board of Aldermen posted yet another notice, this one stating that according to their interpretation of Texas election law, the new council was prohibited from assuming office for an additional five business days. During that time, the old board held a series of meetings in which they confirmed the property disannexations, passed an indemnity ordinance to protect themselves from any litigation relating to town matters, and as a final act, disannexed the property which housed Town Hall. Meanwhile Bradley, who refused to recognize the validity of his ouster, met regularly with the new board and systematically reversed every action taken by the old board. David Brown. We had the old Board of Aldermen refusing to give up their seats, and the new Board of Aldermen a meeting separately and claiming they were the legal board. We had Mayor Bradley claiming he'd been removed from office illegally, and therefore, he was still the legal mayor. And we had the old council and Dale White claiming that Dale White was mayor, because he'd been appointed by the council to replace Mr. Bradley. So anyway, we had two mayors, two councils, and a town that effectively had been destroyed. And it was a mess right at that point. Two mayors, two boards, and all for a town which technically didn't exist. Naturally, it got worse. Alderman Carroll Huntress, who didn't have the legal authority to sign city checks greater than $1,000, used a loophole in city policy and wrote 67 $1,000 checks to pay off the legal bills associated with the mayor's impeachment, forcing the town to freeze its bank accounts and declare temporary bankruptcy. Dale White, who continued to claim that he was the rightful mayor of Westlake, changed the locks on the City Hall to keep Bradley and his supporters out. And Bradley, who also continued to claim that he was the rightful mayor of Westlake, changed the locks back. In the end, the question of whether or not Westlake would continue to exist was settled in a way that no one could have ever predicted. In the summer of 1998, rumors started circulating around town that a Fortune 500 company was interested in buying a portion of Perot's land in Westlake. They wanted to build a corporate campus and were willing to pay big, but only if certain conditions were met. The company wanted the dispute between Perot and the town resolved. They didn't want the land they bought to fall within the jurisdiction of the city of Fort Worth, one of the land dispute cases then in front of the courts. And there was one other thing. The land they were most interested in buying merged with Mayor Scott Bradley's property. And they wouldn't buy any land unless Bradley also agreed to sell. Perot badly wanted the money. And this put Bradley in the curious position of being able to dictate to his former enemy the terms of the town's restoration. He did. In December of 1998, 314 acres of ranch land was sold to the Fidelity Corporation. And in exchange, Perot abandoned all legal action against the town of Westlake. The town was restored. After two years of struggle, Westlake was saved by the very thing its citizens were trying to avoid in the first place-- development. This did not diminish in any way the sweetness of the Supreme Court ruling which reinstated Scott Bradley as mayor, which was delivered to Scott by his state representative, Vicki Truitt, on April 9, 1999. They had declared that I was, and still am, the mayor of the town of Westlake. And it was just total screaming. Vicki was screaming and crying. We were screaming and crying. And then the news just spread like wildfire. The news must've been around the town in half an hour. I think, as Americans, that a lot of people out there that have assumed that money and power will carry the day, that our experience teaches us that most of the times, money and power does win. And therefore, there's more of a resignation to that fact and a willingness to succumb because we know, or we think, that's going to be the ultimate result anyway. And I think it's almost shocking to us when we find out that, if people will stand up, and if you will fight for what I keep calling the right thing, that ultimately it can win out even over money and power. The people of Westlake had always assumed that the aldermen had sold the town out to Perot for money. But in the end, there's no evidence to support this theory. Only one of the aldermen, Jerry Moore, sold his property to Perot directly, for a price reasonably within market range. And no other evidence of quid pro quo has surfaced. In the meantime, almost all of the aldermen have moved away from Westlake. They say it's just too hard after all that's happened, and the town has changed. Al Oien is the only one who continues to own property in town, but says he mostly keeps to himself. After two years, the people of Westlake had their town back. And though many seemed to believe with Scott Bradley that the moral of this story is very clear, that right will in the end trump might, that money doesn't always win, a funny thing happened on the way to victory. The people of Westlake seemed to lose sight of their original goal of keeping the town rural. Talk to Don or Ruby or David or Scott today, and they will speak enthusiastically about the new Fidelity campus. They even seem reconciled to the idea of more building. People now accept that there is development, that there will be more development. And in this sense, Perot may have lost the battle, but has managed to lay the groundwork to win the war. Before I left Westlake, I went to visit Perot's company, the Hillwood Corporation. They wouldn't speak about the past, but they were happy to talk about the future. David Pelletier, a spokesman for the company, brought out a big, color-coded map and showed me their plans. We've already sold this property to Texas Health Systems for a hospital campus. That's already been approved by the town. This right here, we were working with General Growth Properties, one of the largest mall developers and mall management companies in the country, to come in. And it's going to be a high-level, upscale shopping resort. He pointed out the industrial office complex, the luxury hotel, multi-family housing projects, and finally, the Texas town that Hillwood had first proposed back in 1996. They're still planning to build it. Construction will soon be underway. Alix Spiegel. She produced her story with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, and Blue Chevigny, contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updie, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Mary Wiltenburg. To buy a cassette of this program call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. You know, you can listen to our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. Thanks to Joanne, Dale, and Rob, of The Cola Mail System, for hosting our weekly email Listserv news update. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who declares after every episode of our program, I can't believe what this man has done. I'm sitting there, thinking, "I must be in Russia." I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Hi there, everybody. Ira Glass here. Today's program is a rerun, but from a long time ago, the year 2000. So forgive any anachronisms you hear. That's a word a person doesn't get to say very often outside of the SATs. Forgive any anachronisms. It's back when the person at the center of the story still smoked, back before Notre Dame started burning. Anyway, it's a great show. We haven't aired it in forever. A total favorite. In honor of Bastille Day this month, here we go. It's a grey, rainy day in Paris. A silky line of tourists waits on the grounds of an old medieval palace, now one of the most famous museums in the world. I'm with David Sedaris who lives nearby. So, David, explain where we are. We're at the Louvre. And this is the closest I've ever come. I've never set foot inside the Louvre. So you've lived in Paris for how long? Two years. But I still haven't visited. I didn't see the point. Why come to Paris and go to the one place where you're not allowed to smoke? As a matter of fact, it's my goal to be the only person who's come to Paris and has never set foot in the Louvre. You live how far from here? I'm probably about a 12-minute walk, 15-minute walk from the Louvre. I'm close to Notre Dame, too, but I've never gone in there either. It just doesn't interest me. I mean, I think so many people come here and they feel like they have to do certain things because somebody told them to do it, or they're going to go home and people will say, what do you mean you didn't see the Pantheon? What do you mean you didn't go into the Louvre? So I'm guessing that a good number of these people are just standing here because somebody told them that they should do it. I don't think that they're all museum-goers at home. I don't know. Do people look back and remember the experience of standing in front of a painting? I might remember eating something, or buying something, or seeing something, like an accident, or somebody who's really twisted up in some way, but not looking at a painting. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, for them, it doesn't get any better than this. But I don't know. Just from people that I know that have come here, they go to the Louvre because somebody told them that they have to. Today on our radio program, where you might go in Paris instead of the Louvre. I spent three days with David Sedaris, who writes a lot about what it's like to live in France. He never saw the Eiffel Tower, or the Rodin Museum, or the famous cemetery where Marcel Proust and Jim Morrison are buried. No historical sites. Nothing having to do with the culture or language of the people of France. But if you want to know the best place to buy a model of a rotten tooth, or a collection of leeches, or a life-sized replica of a human head with the top cut off so you can see what's inside, David did show me that. This is a pretty good medical supply store. These body parts that they have here, they're handmade and hand-painted. And they're not nearly as expensive as you would think that they would be. I think I got my sister Gretchen a stomach-- or a backbone. I got her a backbone made out of papier-mache for Christmas. And I think it probably cost about $60, which is a great price for a backbone. Today in our program, Americans in Paris and how our Paris sometimes has very little to do with the one familiar to the locals. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. The French government says that three and a half million Americans visited Paris last year. The US government says it was more like two and a half million. Either way, it is a lot more than the actual population of Paris, which is 2.1 million. Americans have dreamy and romantic ideas about Paris, more than other places, I think. In 1944, at the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, EB White wrote, "Probably one of the dullest stretches of prose in any man's library is the article in Paris in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet when we heard the news of liberation, being unable to think of anything else to do, we sat down and read it straight through, from beginning to end. Paris, we began, capital of France and of the Department of San, situated on the Ile de la Cite, the Ile St. Louis, and the Ile Louvier in the Seine, as well as on both banks of the Seine. The words seemed like the beginning of a great poem. A feeling of simple awe overtook us as we slowly turned the page and settled down to a study of the city's weather graph and the view of the Seine looking east from Notre Dame. The rainfall is rather evenly distributed, continued the encyclopedist. Evenly distributed, we thought to ourselves, like the tears of those who love Paris." But what is it actually like in Paris, really, without the rose-colored glasses, if you're American? Well, our This American Life team headed overseas to find out. And let's just pause for a moment. What exactly does that sound like, you wonder? Well, here's a recording. Well, in act one of our program today, "Him Talk Pretty Three Days," David Sedaris gives me and you a walking tour of his favorite places in the city that he calls home. Act two, "Ca Vie Americaine," in which we try to answer the question, what is it that some Americans see in Paris anyway? What is the draw? Act three, "Notes of a Native Daughter--" why it helps sometimes to pretend your French accent is worse than it really is, and why it's harder to cut into a movie line in Paris than in New York, and whether it is the same for African-Americans these days in Paris as it was in the heyday of James Baldwin and Sidney Bechet. Answers. Stay with us. Act one, "Him Talk Pretty Three Days." Two years ago, at the age of 41, barely speaking French, David Sedaris moved to Paris. He had no special feelings about France, no particular interest in the French. It would be the same if it's Korea, he said to me, a sentence that, I think, if the French ever heard that he said it, they would deport him. He moved for two reasons-- one, his boyfriend Hugh had a rundown house in Normandy, and, two, why not? And over the course of two years, he has written extensively about his experience in stories for the radio, for magazines, and for his newest book. In his stories, David portrays life in Paris as a series of humiliations and near-humiliations. And if you hang out with him for a few days, you realize he is not exaggerating much. This is my worst nightmare right here. We'd barely gone three blocks from his apartment on our walking tour Paris when he stopped on the sidewalk. OK, my lighter has run out of fluid, which would mean that I would have to ask somebody for a match. And so what I would say is, hello, do you have some fire? And I so hate saying that that I usually carry four lighters on me so I always have a backup. So you're just digging into your bag here. Extra cigarettes. I know I must have a lighter in here. I will not spend the afternoon asking people if they have fire. I was curious about David's thoughts about Paris, precisely because he was never somebody who had any special feelings for the place. He didn't move here with his head full of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Sartre, and Proust. He was a blank slate. And so for several hours every day I was in Paris, David would walk me to the places he finds most interesting. And the first thing I learned was this. It is so traumatic to learn a new language that a lot of David's experience of the city, a lot of his personal geography of Paris, has to do simply with where people are cruel to him when he speaks and where they aren't. This is a hardware store where the owner and the people who work there are really, really nice to me. I buy things here all the time. And I buy things that I don't even need just because they're so kind. And they generally just start laughing right when I walk in the door. And then the owner will call his assistants out of the back room and say, he's back, he's back! And I buy things like-- I bought a heating element so I could make tea in my hotel room, because I had to go to Germany. So I could go in and say, hello, I am looking for a stick that make the water hot, hot today. So I say really stupid things when I go in there. But I only say it in French. But they're incredibly good sports. And I bought an ironing board. And I was able to say, hello, it has been three weeks. I bought an iron. Now, today, I look for a table that might work with my iron. Have you such a table? And he said, ah, an ironing board, and went and got one out of the back. But he's really, really nice. And it's a place I can always count on where somebody is going to be good to me. Do we want to walk in the hardware store? Do we need anything? Do they sell batteries? Yeah. Could you get me some AA batteries for the camera? Sure. We need four. I'll pay. It's a tiny store, just enough room for a few customers to stand, a store that's taller than it is wide, with shelves full of merchandise running up to the ceiling, plus brooms, feather dusters, baskets simply hanging over our heads to be retrieved by a hook on the end of a stick. This is my boyfriend, David says, trying to say, this is my friend. He is making a documentary of my life. He tapes everything. We pay, there's small talk, and we're back on the street in less than a minute and a half. See, that's what's so nice about that guy. I went in and he said, I haven't seen you for a long time. Have you been on vacation? And that's just worth the world to me. That is so incredibly nice, for somebody to notice your absence. Some shopkeepers don't notice him. He'd been buying his newspaper from the same woman in his neighborhood seven days a week for over a year. And recently she said to him out of the blue, are you a tourist here on vacation? And I said, I've been coming here and buying my newspaper every day for the last 19 months. No, I'm not on vacation. I have an apartment around the corner. But it took that long for her even to acknowledge that she had seen me before. But that's why I go there everyday. I was waiting for that moment, for her to recognize me. We go into a chocolate shop and a bookstore and a cafe. And each place we go, if there's a little conversation, just normal small talk, and it goes OK, he's really delighted and can recite it all for me afterwards, line by line. When he first moved here, when his French class wasn't going so well, he was constantly being scolded by people for not understanding the simplest things-- directions, prices, the proper change. People here are crazy about exact change, he swears to me. He realized at some point that he could make it all feel better if he transformed himself from the inept foreigner to the inept foreigner with a charge card. People will be really nice to you if you spend a lot of money. So then I just started going out and buying things. I could have a bad day in school. I'd go out after school and buy a desk, or pricey lamps. Because people were unfailingly nice while I was writing out that check. And I would say the most screwed up thing, and they would say, oh, you speak so well. And they would compliment me. And I would feel so good. And then I would leave, and I would think, wait a minute. And it took a while to get that under control. So just observing your day, as an outsider, I feel like you've put yourself into this position where the smallest human acts of kindness have turned out to mean so much. They have, whereas before, they were things that I didn't really think about. It doesn't take much to make me happy now. Whereas before, I feel like it took quite a bit. Is your experience here more of a feeling of adventure or more a feeling of humiliation? It's more a feeling of humiliation. It would be a feeling of adventure if I were a different type of person, if I were a more adventurous person. But for me to get on a train and go to Switzerland, I don't think, oh, good, I get to have an adventure. I think, oh, great, I get to make an ass out of myself in two different languages. Because that's what I wind up doing. In Germany, they always include breakfast with your hotel. I'm not a breakfast eater. But I want a cup of coffee or something. And I stayed at a hotel in Germany-- I don't remember the town-- the last time I was there. And so I go downstairs to have my breakfast, and there's six people seated at a table. And usually they've got lots of tables. But here, there's only one table. And I'm thinking, well, I don't really want to sit with six people. But if I turn around and leave, then they'll think that I'm being rude. So I've gotten this far. So I have to sit down at the table with these six people. So I pull out a chair. And the man says something to me in German. And I say, oh, no, just coffee for me. I'm fine with that. And what he was trying to tell me was that I was in his kitchen. This was the kitchen of the owner. And this was the owner of the hotel and his family sitting down to breakfast. I just saw this door and I opened it, and I was in their quarters. And then he had to go and wake up his nine-year-old so his nine-year-old could come and explain to me in English that, in fact, the dining room was downstairs. And so I didn't see it as an adventure. It just happened. David moved here at a particular moment in his life. After years of making his living cleaning apartments and carrying furniture, he finally had published books, made the bestseller list, was on the radio, went on tours, and filled 2,000 and 5,000-seat halls with people who wanted to hear him read. And I think most people are built to take only so much of that, to have people think that we're somebody. I think, for most people, for people who are not hopeless egomaniacs, there is a normal balancing that has to happen, of believing that they're a somebody to believing that they're a nobody. There's a ratio, a balance that has to happen in most people's heads. I've known David for 10 years. And I think that what happened to him is that the somebody side of that equation got crazily inflated, fantastically inflated. And so the nobody side had to hyper-inflate to catch up. They had to balance out. If a nation of book-buying adults was going to tell him how great he was back home, he needed an entire second nation of adults reminding him that, really, how important was he? Yeah, that's exactly the case. When I do go back, it's not like going from-- I don't know-- having an audience to being anonymous. It's "Beneath the Planet of the Apes." It's going from having an audience to being a foreigner, which is the lowest lifeform, to be a foreigner. When you were a kid, were you feeling humiliated a lot? Yeah. I mean, I always had. I didn't want to open my mouth, because I lisped and I sounded like a girl. So it's a feeling that I'm used to. Really, the feeling that I get here is more comfortable to me. One day, David takes me to a cafe that he goes to all the time, often alone. And I'm surprised when he tells me that he is somebody who, until recently, had trouble going to a restaurant or cafe by himself just to get a cup of coffee. Because I'm always afraid that they're not going to see me there. And then I'll just be stuck there. And other people will say, look, no one's waited on that guy, and he's been there for half an hour, and he doesn't know what to do with himself. I get terribly self-conscious in those situations. I mean, do you? I'm not scared that, if I'm sitting in a restaurant alone, they won't see me. I assume that they'll see me and that they'll wait on me. Do you know what I mean? It's a business. And they need the money. And so they'll usually wait on you. No, but I'm always convinced that they don't see me and that they're not going to wait on me. And it just seemed to happen to me so many times in my life, that I would go into a place, and then you have to pretend like you're leaving of your own volition, like you've been waiting for somebody. And then you look at your watch, like, darn, well, I guess they're not going to show. I'm not going to sit around here and wait any longer. And you make this whole little play that you do. But really, nobody's watching it. But it's very elaborate. And then you can get up and leave. The thing is, what you're describing is, you're sitting there, and you think that other people are watching in such a way that they will think, oh, that guy hasn't gotten waited on? Because that's what I do. I look at people like that. And I notice when it happens to other people. And it's because I look at things like that that I imagine that everybody else is. This turns out to be quite a burden to carry into a foreign country. If somebody does something stupid in front of him, David says, he goes home, writes it down, tells his friends, sometimes turns it into a story that he reads in front of thousands or tens of thousands of strangers. And so when he says something stupid in French, which he does daily, he believes that it is possible the shopkeepers or waiters just shrug it off and never think about it again. But it seems just as possible that they go, tell their friends, and laugh at him. That's why I get so embarrassed of the way that I speak. It's because I go home and I write everything down. That's the way I am. I assume that everybody else is that way as well. We walk to the places that David likes best in Paris. And it's like hopping from one discreet island that David had already explored and found to be safe for human habitation to the next discreet island. I think this is the way that anybody gets to know any new city, especially a city where you do not speak the language. You try one place, and then you try a second place. And you return to those places over and over, slowly expanding your territory to gradually include more little spots that you return to. The places David takes me to usually had one of these characteristics. There were fantastically unusual and interesting things to buy. They were places of a type which simply do not exist in the United States. And they were places where the French was usually very simple. Often, this meant the presence of children. At the Luxembourg Gardens, there's an old puppet theater where we see Treasure of the Sultans. It's like watching an art form as sturdy and indestructible as the cockroach-- the slapstick, the menacing character sneaking up behind our heroes' backs so everybody yells in warning. And there always comes a point where he hits somebody over the head with a stick. And the kids just eat it up. When he starts hitting people with the stick, they go bananas. This is the fourth time I've seen The Treasure of the Sultans. I just like coming because it just makes me so happy to be around people who are so happy. After the princess is safe from the pirates and the friendly tiger is rescued from the savage jungle to come live in Paris, we head outside to the carousel, where six-year-olds are strapped onto wooden horses and handed little wooden sticks, play a game that dates to 16th century Europe, or possibly earlier, a jousting game where they tried to spear a dangling ring while speeding by on horseback. David also takes me to one of the tiny mom-and-pop theaters in his neighborhood. The whole culture of movies is different in Paris, with hundreds of theaters showing all sorts of movies, new and old. (SUBJECT) MOVIE CHARACTER 1: Nice little place you have here, Lydecker. (SUBJECT) MOVIE CHARACTER 2: It's lavish, but I call it home. David sees a movie everyday in Paris. He also takes me to the flea market that's open every weekend on the outskirts of the city. It's a sprawling warren of booths selling old paintings, watches, and what amount to five centuries of coffee table decorations. We find a device in one store from the early days of telephones. It's just a paper cone, really, designed to be attached to a telephone inside a theater so your family at home could supposedly listen in on the concert or play over the telephone, in defiance, I might add, of all the principles of proper microphone placement. But that wasn't the highlight of our flea market trip. Whereas most places here, people have their booth-- I was here the last shopping day before Christmas. Oh, my god. That's Judge Judy. That's Judge Judy with that white parka on. I love Judge Judy! And that was her right there! Should we say something? No. If you watch her show, you get the idea that saying something-- bothering somebody like that is so inappropriate. And that's what she does for a living, is tell people that they're acting inappropriately. I can't believe that we saw her. I love Judge Judy so much. I wish that she would run for mayor of New York. Wow, Judge Judy. Is that your biggest celebrity sighting in a while in Paris? I saw Catherine Deneuve. But Judge Judy is bigger than Catherine Deneuve, as far as I'm concerned. This square up here, this is the Pantheon. And again, I've never been inside of it. But I know that all kinds of famous French people are entombed here. I don't know. I think Balzac's here or people like that, really super famous writers. But I've never set foot inside. But I like the frozen grocery store that's across the street from it. This store is part of a chain that's all over France called Picard. Everything they sell is frozen. And they've got this method for freezing that I don't think we have in the United States. They could freeze lettuce. And they've got everything in there, from meat to frozen soups and spices. But it's not like TV dinners. You can buy a little packet of ostrich chops, or of horse meat, or duck legs stuffed with prunes and sausage. And they're sold just in plastic bags. So they've taken the stigma out of frozen food. And every French person I've talked to swears by this store, especially people who have kids. Because the food is really, really good. And if you opened one of these in the United States, you would just be minting money. You wouldn't be able to count the money fast enough. I guarantee you. It would be such a huge success. Inside, it is exactly what you want when you're traveling in a foreign country. Every object is familiar, but packaged and presented in a way that is pleasingly new and exotic. So it's all comprehensible but, at the same time, palpably foreign. And the foods walk that disturbing but fascinating line that foreign foods can have between looking delicious and looking frightening-- snails packed in green stuff in their shells of many different sizes, coolers full of massive frozen crayfish that look like they're about to come back to life, pre-made shish kabobs, osso buco. We pick up a few things. And then down the hill, we stop at the regular supermarket for a quick run to the dairy case. Hugh screamed at me last night, he was so ashamed of the butter that we served during dinner. And he held this brand of butter right up to my face and told me I'm never, ever, ever allowed to buy it again. So I'm here to replace that butter. Wait, what kind of butter did you buy? It was this, but it's Grand Jury brand, a butter of Brittany. And I'm not allowed to buy that anymore. Why? Because Hugh's really picky about things like that. He said, I saw Ira putting that butter on bread, and he had four pieces of bread. I'm so embarrassed. That butter was awful. And I said, I don't really think that Ira's going to go home and write in his little notebook, dinner at Hugh and David's, butter was terrible. That's where you're wrong, my friend. Note to listeners-- if you eat at Hugh and David's, avoid the butter. At 31 Rue du Bac, we climb a wooden spiral staircase to a store that's been in operation since 1831, Deyrolle, which David calls the Noah's ark of taxidermy. There's a kangaroo. There's a moose. There's two wild boars. There's about five different varieties of monkeys, a hyena, a pair of zebras, a polar bear, and a beautiful oak case containing different reptiles-- snakes and lizards. And there's an ostrich. And that ostrich is-- what-- nine feet tall. It's really magnificent. We walk through room after room filled with pigs and lions, cats and dogs. The dogs are especially real looking. Some of them, according to the woman who runs the place, were stuffed by their owners, but they never had the heart to pick them up. The price to buy an ostrich or a lion or gorilla is nearly $10,000. To rent them for two days is 420 bucks, American. Most of the business is rental. David buys a magpie, black and powerful and sleek-looking, and we had down to the street. So did you have things like this when you were a kid? My mother had a great aunt who was the only person in our family who really had any money. And she was married to a man who was a big game hunter. And she would come to our house to visit when we were young. But I only went to her house once. And it was right before she died. And she had a trophy room. And there were all kinds of animals in there, extinct animals. There were snow leopards in there. There were white tigers in there. And you would walk into this perfect room, and there were thousands of eyes staring at you. And I just thought, this is what I want. And that's the thing that I loved. And that's the feeling you get when you go into Deyolle, that all of these creatures that are stuffed and poised to pounce are all staring at you. It's the same feeling you get from being in front of an audience. It's the same feeling you get in front of an audience? Yeah, that people are looking at you. But these are creatures that are looking at you. Wow. You know that feeling, that feeling when somebody is watching you. David, of course, thinks about that feeling a lot, especially here in France, where he wonders what Parisians think as they watch him speaking so badly. But it's not entirely so hard, that daily stage fright, worrying about how to say every little thing, anxious and straining to understand all the words around him. It's that thinking that makes me feel alive and that makes me notice everything around me. When I become complacent, like I was in the United States, you just get used to things, so you don't think about them. You think, I'll get a cab. I'll go to the airport. I'll have a patty melt. And you don't think about it. Whereas now, with me, the anxiety starts early on. And I'm always afraid that someone's going to throw me a curveball and ask me a question, like, what sign are you? They'll just ask me a question like that out of nowhere, and I'll appear foolish. So it keeps me on edge. But really, that edginess has always made me feel alive. Someday, David says, he'll be more comfortable in French. His accent will improve and that daily anxiety will be removed from his life. But when it is removed from me, then I probably won't be interested in living here anymore. I'll probably leave. Because it'll be just like living back home. Plus the more you learn, the more disappointed you wind up being. It's easy to like somebody when you don't know what they're saying. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, that not understanding somebody makes them seem more interesting than they really are. I just assume that everyone talked about books and movies all the time. That's all they talked about, as far as I was concerned. And then I learned a little bit more and I realized that they're no different than the people anywhere else, that they talk about the same banal things that we all talk about everywhere. At one point, at the cafe David goes to all the time, we sit and watch a waiter that David likes to watch, though he barely dares to say a word to him. The waiter's in his mid-40's with a kind, baggy face. Picture the actor who played the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, Ray Bolger. And this waiter's kind of a cut-up. He hangs out with the regulars, making them laugh at this and that. That's what makes him fun to watch. You wonder, though, where that guy lives, or how much money he makes, or if he's married. You know, you don't wonder about everybody. But I've always wondered about that guy. Do you think he makes his bed? For now, things are good for David in Paris. He still feels curious about everything, about figuring out what it all means. And that makes everything so interesting all the time. The mystery has not ebbed from everyday life. Ray Bolger takes a sip of wine. I always like it, too, when people drink on the job. He's behind a bar, he's drinking wine, he's smoking a cigarette, and he's picking his nose, which are three good reasons to live in France, I think. David Sedaris. His book about Paris is called "Me Talk Pretty One Day." His latest book is "Calypso." Coming up, a public radio host who does not speak French mangles more foreign words in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. I'm Ira Glass. It's This American Life, the radio program that dares to ask the question-- (SUBJECT) CHOIR: (SINGING) Parlez-vous francais? No, after you, madame. If I can lay my cards on the table at this point in the program, I have never understood why anybody cares so much about France. I mean, it's fine. It's lovely. But there is just this thing that some Americans have for Paris. Though, as they are the first to admit, it can be kind of ridiculous. Well, when people ask me where I live, I sometimes say Paris. And they say, well, you live in Paris? But that's my dream. Kristin Hohenadel has lived in Paris for five years. Why do you live in Paris? And I say, well, I just sort of wanted to. All the reasons that you would give sound really embarrassing, cliche, and ridiculous at this point. Paris is a stale dream. And it's kind of like falling in love with the most obviously cute boy in the class, or a movie star. It's like being a groupie. And then you try to convince the other 25 women who he slept with last week, well, I really love him, and I think he loves me too. There are some people who come here and they sort of get off on that feeling of being-- they think they're unusual because they put themselves in this position. And to me, that's really kind of awful and embarrassing. They think they're really special. Yeah. They think it makes them special to live here, A, as if it's original. And B, part of the horrifying thing about moving here is it's a sort of disappointing experience to realize that your dream is so banal. This is a dream I had my whole life. And it seems ridiculous to me now that it meant so much to me. It was so important. The thing about loving a city, Kristin says, is that a city doesn't really love you back. Whenever I asked Americans who love France what it was about France that just got to them so much-- when did it begin for them, their feeling about France-- they all talked about scraps of French culture that made it to them when they were very young-- the Madeline books, The Red Balloon, French films, Montessori French class in grade school. I think there is still a part of America where the idea of Paris-- Paris, not the space program, or the internet, or moving to New York City-- Paris represents reaching a world outside oneself. Richard Klein first started coming here as a teenager from a small town in Pennsylvania and has essentially constructed an entire life around the feeling that he got in Paris. He went on to become a scholar and director of the Romance Studies department at Cornell University and author of several books, Eat Fat and Cigarettes Are Sublime, which are deeply suffused with a sensibility that is partly just un-American or, anyway, semi-Parisian, a sensibility that is all about the small pleasures of everyday life. You know, the French have a much more uncomplicated and much less guilty relationship to their body, beginning with eating, not only the way they eat, the pleasure that they take in eating. The American notion that food is medicine, for example, is totally repulsive to the French. And yet increasingly, in America, that's all you hear. People eat only as a function of what they think is good for them. And nobody in France would eat strictly as a function of what's good for them. I'll tell you, I think really the heart of it, for me, when I came here in 1958 for the first time, was Les Halles. Les Halles was the central marketplace right in the heart of Paris, not far from where we are. And I remember I used to go there not every night but frequently. And then, at around 2:00 in the morning, you would go out in the streets in Les Halles, which was the central marketplace. And they used to bring all the food every night. Trucks would bring the produce and food from all over France to the center of Paris, to the heart of Paris, and display it in the stalls all around the streets. Butchers were there with their blood-splattered coats. And people made gorgeous piles of artichokes and carrots and cabbages. And it was 2:00 in the morning and it was like life was just beginning at that hour. And people were there sort of buying and selling. And then right next to Les Halles was La Rue Saint-Denis. And La Rue Saint-Denis was the center of prostitution in Paris. And the people who worked there would work until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, and then they would visit the prostitutes who were there all night. But this world of-- I don't know-- this incredible life, and food, and sex, and beauty in the middle of one of the most beautiful parts and oldest parts of the past-- it used to be until the 19th century that the biggest cemetery was right there in Paris. If you walk around Paris with Richard, he's constantly pointing out spots that had special meaning to Louis XIV. Or there's a restaurant that happened to be one of the first restaurants ever built in France, just after they began the idea of restaurants, or the shops where the notion of putting big, huge windows on the front of stores probably began so people could window shop. The fact is, a lot of what is so pleasing about being in Paris is simple. It's a really interesting, pleasing place just to walk around. When Kristin Hohenadel tried last year to live back in the States again, she found she missed living in Paris. She missed all that. It'd be kind of hard to get ordinary things done in France. You're always kind of an outsider here, even after years in the country. But she just feels better here. You know, you walk down the street in Los Angeles-- and it's a terrible example, because it's Los Angeles-- but you feel kind of dwarfed. And here, I just think, yes, this is exactly it. This is how life should be-- the pace, the scale, the way it looks. Act three, "Notes of a Native Daughter." Janet McDonald had already learned the language. She'd already learned the culture, had French friends and a French apartment, when something happened that made her realize how much she hadn't figured out. I was going to the movies with a friend of mine from Yale who is black also. And there was a long line. And we were like, let's jump the line. These white people, they're going to be scared of us. We'll just go and jump the line. We'll get to the front of the line. So of course, we walked up to the front of the line, like, yeah, you want to try me? I'm black. That usually works in New York. These people were ready to rip our hair out. And they were white. I couldn't believe it. And they were like, in French, what are you doing? The line starts back there! You can't just walk to the front of the line! They were ready to kick our butts. I was shocked. I'm like, these are white people and they're not scared of us? [LAUGHS] That's when I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. And I liked it. Of course, it was kind of humiliating, because we're supposed to be the intimidating, scary ones. And then all these like French bitches in high heels are threatening us, and they were in our faces. [LAUGHS] And it made me realize that whole black-white game just doesn't work outside of the United States. Because white people aren't afraid of you here. And at the same time, they don't hate you. Because that sort of goes together. So I'll take it. I'll wait on line. Now I don't dare jump lines. [LAUGHS] So that opened my eyes. Janet and I are sitting in the Cafe Flore, one of those famous and corniest and most pretentious settings in which to meet, because it and the Deux Magots cafe next door were home to Sartre, and Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, and, when he first arrived in Paris in 1946, Richard Wright, who was well known by them as the author of Black Boy and Native Son. Now it's sort of a gathering place for tourists, and wannabes, and nostalgic fake French people such as myself. It's classic old cafe on a corner with aging fixtures and plate glass windows onto the street. Lovely, but not ornate. By the time Richard Wright arrived here, Josephine Baker had come, seen, and conquered. Black GIs had come and conquered. Jazz had simply conquered. Wright wrote in a letter, "There's such an absence of race hatred. It seems a little unreal." I wanted to talk to Janet, because I wanted to find out if it was still that way for blacks in Paris. It didn't seem possible, really. In the half-century since those days, there's been an influx of black Africans to France. And they are not beloved. National Front party, with the slogan "France is for the French," wins 15% of the vote in national elections. Could it be possible that African-Americans still get a warm reception here? Janet said yes. I'm not sure what it is. All I know is that it feels very different to be around French white people than American white people. Different how? I feel much more comfortable. I feel that I'm not a black object. Richard Wright, after arriving here in the mid-1940s, said that he felt that, all of his life, he'd been carrying a corpse with him. And when he came to Paris, he felt it slip off his back. Did you have that kind of feeling? Yeah. I really have to say that I have felt that way ever since I got here. And a lot of my friends say, why are you living there? In fact, a friend of mine I went to law school with, he said, what is it about speaking French that makes white people not racist? He was very skeptical. But really, it goes beyond that. And it's not just that we feel free of the burden of race. Because we're still black. I still experience myself as black. It's just that that's not the center of my identity. It's not the first thing people relate to when I meet them here. Janet first came to Paris in 1975 and moved here in '95. She's a lawyer in the French office of a big American company. She grew up in the public housing projects in Brooklyn, worked her way into Vassar College and onto graduate school and law school. And like a lot of people who make the jump from very poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods into the college-educated upper middle class, she felt like she didn't really fit in anywhere, not with family and friends in the projects who were shooting heroin, barely surviving, not with the black students she met in college. I thought they were Bourgeois southern belles. I didn't want to be anything like them. And they didn't want to be like me either. They thought I was trash. I was project trash. I thought they put the B in bougie. And so I grappled a lot with the racial identity. What will my posture be? I'm from the projects, but people say I talk like a white girl. And then the white girls are like, oh, you're so project. And then when I got here, none of it mattered. Because if I spoke three words of French that made sense, people liked me and they celebrated me. So I didn't have to worry about talking like a white girl, or a project girl, or anything. It was an incredible relief. The central conflict of her life suddenly vanished. In Paris, all the distinctions about what kind of black person she should be, they were all moot. In fact, the most distinguishing fact about Janet was not that she was black. It was that she was an American, which surprised her. I associated the word American with white guys with flags on their lawns who didn't particularly like me. And people would call me American. And I'd say, I'm not American. I'm black. And these were black French people. And they were like, you are so American. And I remember these French West Indian friends of mine-- this one in particular from Martinique-- saying, you even walk like an American. I'm like, what do you mean? What does an American walk like? And she said, they kick their legs when they walk. They kick their legs forward. I don't know. Because I was in Brooklyn just a few weeks ago. And this woman who'd never been to Europe was saying, so what's it like in France? What are the people like? Are they prejudiced? I said, no, they like us. It's incredible-- a country full of white people and they like us. But it's a difficult thing, because they like us, but they don't like other people who look like us. And that's sort of the French paradox. Paris, of course, has its own housing projects in the suburbs that surround the city. Now, with generations of Africans who were born on French soil, they face job discrimination, housing discrimination. And they're not well received. They're not welcomed. And they are French. And so in a way, for African-Americans, we're in a very bizarre position. It's almost like being an honorary white in apartheid South Africa. And I noticed that, as my French got better and better, sometimes I wasn't as well received as I would be if I played up my American accent. If I walked into a shop, and people would think I was just basically-- what I say-- just another [BLEEP], just like one of their own, like from Martinique or Guadalupe, it wouldn't be the same reception if I came on with a very heavy American accent or even spoke English. Why? How would they treat you if they thought you were an African black? A little bit of a chill in the air, like, yes, may I help you? Not so much, oh, vous etes Americaine! Oh, I love New York! I love to speak English! So it's very bizarre. It's a hard thing to reconcile. Because good feeling is good feeling. And when someone receives you and makes you feel good, it's a positive experience. When you're in a shop, and you can feel that there's a chill in the air, and that they think of you as an African, will you actually play up your American accent? Well, what happened was I started experiencing that. And so I actually adjusted my speech so that at least I would get the benefit of-- I mean, I'm here in this country. I want to get the benefit of being an African-American. So instead of walking in-- oui, madame, [SPEAKING FRENCH], I'd say, oui, [SPEAKING FRENCH]. [LAUGHS] Maybe I shouldn't do that. And it works? Yeah, and it works. A friend of Janet's suggested to her that maybe Parisians prefer black people from America because only a certain class of black Americans usually comes to France-- educated, cultured, interested in France. When Janet asked the writer Cornel West about this at a speech he gave this summer in Paris, that was his argument. Basically, he suggested it was a class thing. And he said, well, look at you. You're professional. You're articulate. Maybe if you brought 15 of your cousins, it would be a whole different thing. So basically he was saying, if I brought all my homegirls from the hood who didn't go to Vassar, and who weren't lawyers, and who didn't speak French, the reception might be a little chillier, even though they also are black American. But I think, if that's true, that is not about racism. Then that's about class. Before I met Janet, I read the book that she wrote about what it was like for her growing up. It's called Project Girl. And what's remarkable about it is how frank she is about all of the compulsive things that she found herself doing during the years that she was regularly traveling between the projects and the world of the aspiring upper middle class. It was a struggle. In her first year at Vassar, for instance, she felt so out of place that she started taking the train down to New York City to score heroin, a thing she'd never even done when she lived in the projects, until she got kicked out of school for that. It was as if the further that she traveled into the world of college, the more the project side of her personality was compelled to express itself somehow. She depicts herself as somebody who was depressed and embattled and sort of lost for years. And the most striking thing about meeting her, if you've read the book, is how completely happy she seems today. She's one of the happiest-seeming people I've ever met, just relaxed, and funny, and at ease. And her feeling about France, the country with this transformation took place, it can be sort of shocking to actual French people. When we just won the Euro 2000, I came to work and I was telling the Moroccan secretary, we won! [SPEAKING FRENCH] And she just glares at me. Because she was born here. And she says, I'm not French. I'm Moroccan. It's just like black Americans. I'm not American, I'm black. And I was like, we won, we won! And she was like, what are you talking about? You're not even French. What do you mean, we won? I'm like, I'm French in my heart. [LAUGHS] And this black friend of mine was saying, you're the only person I know who could sing "The Marseillaise." That shows how extreme you are. Do you know why? It's because I say to them, I never had a country. I never had a country. I had a hood. I had Brooklyn. But I never felt like I had a country. So now I have a country. It's a little one. We always come in third or fourth place in the Olympics. But it's France. Here's something else. There are certain things about French culture, Janet says, that just make life here very pleasant. For one thing, people don't ask you personal questions-- where you grew up, where you work, what's your family like, what's your story? You're not constantly explaining yourself. She says she has one friend who she knew for five years before she knew this woman had a grown son. Also, there isn't the same striving, the same ambition to be number one as in the States, especially compared with the corporate law job she used to have where everybody was expected to put in 60 and 70 and 80 hours a week. Here, that would be seen as very strange. Work just is not that important to most people. I'll get tears in my eyes. Sometimes I look around the subway, and I look at all these French people, and I'm like, thank you for letting me live here in your country. We head outside. But you feel like it's your country, but your identity here isn't that of a French person. It's that of an outsider. I know. And I think that's what it is to be Project Girl. I was always an outsider. And I feel most inside right now where I'm most outside. Go figure. [LAUGHS] That's what freedom is, though. It's not about nothing left to lose. It's about nothing left to be. You don't have to be anything. I was just thinking about it this morning. It's like, I'm an outsider. I will always be a foreigner, no matter how good my French gets. I will never really be French, no matter how much of a wannabe I am. And yet I feel that I'm home. I'm just home. Around the corner from the Cafe Flore is where the author James Baldwin lived for a while. Janet says she feels like she understands a little of how he must have felt, coming from Harlem, from a family that was always struggling, and then arriving here. Everything is so pretty and so much easier than home. Here we are. This is where James Baldwin lived, with that painter, 56 Rue Jacob. But see, he lived way up in the top, on the top floor. [INAUDIBLE]. One, two, three, four, fifth floor. It's obviously a walk-up. The cheapest apartments are always on the top because you have to walk farther. And that's where he was. Wow. He probably even mailed letters at that post office down there. He mailed letters back to Harlem. Hey, and here we are. Baldwin, of course, decided to settle in France permanently. And when Janet first moved Paris, she thought it would just be for a few years. And now, every time she goes home, she sees too much about the United States that she just does not want to deal with anymore. And she's realizing she may never move back. Our program was produced today by Susan Burton and myself, avec Julie Snyder, Blue Chevigny, and Alex Blumberg. Contributing editors for today's program, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Powell. Additional production on our rerun from Aviva DeKornfeld, Jessica Lussenhop, Katharine Raimondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Today's program was first broadcast in the year 2000. You can no longer smoke indoors all over Paris. And I hate the fact that I have to say this. Janet McDonald, the writer of Project Girl, who is so wonderful in the third act of the show, and who I kept in touch with after the program, she died in 2007 at the age of 53. Her book is still available. Eric Satie music was played for us on the accordion by Dean Olsher. Jad Abumrad recorded him. Other musical help today came from the amazing John Connors, Nikki Rinkus, and Kathie Berquist. Special thanks today to Steven Barclay, author of the book A Place in the World Called Paris, and to James Campbell, whose book Exiled in Paris, was a useful summary of all the facts surrounding Richard Wright and James Baldwin's years in Paris. Also, thanks to Sandrine Rastello and [? Catherine ?] Johnstone. Our website is ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can hear our archive of nearly 700 episodes for absolutely free. Or download our app. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who reminds you, don't forget, please, learn from the experiences of others. Dinner at Hugh and David's. The butter was terrible. That's right. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And I hold in my hands a children's book called Nobody's Family is Going to Change, published in the 1970s by the same writer who did Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh. It is, I have to say, an oddly menacing title, Nobody's Family is Going to Change. Various contributors to our show have joked that it's part of a series for kids, with The Little Princess Who Got Sick and Never Woke Up, Daddy Drinks Because You Cry, God Made the Pretty Girls Pretty Because He Loved Them More, and Sharing is for Sissies. But in fact, it's a serious and really good and rather brave little book, Nobody's Family is Going to Change. There's a family, as you might expect, the Sheridans, with a mean, disapproving dad; a mom who tries to smooth things over; a son who wants to dance in a show but is told he can't by his father; a daughter Emma, who is accused of daydreaming too much. She wishes that her family could be different. Over the course of the book, Emma tries to get her dad to change, to listen to them, to be kind. She joins something called the Children's Army, which agitates for the notion that is a child's right to change his or her family. And then, finally towards the end of the book, sitting at dinner, as her father and brother rehash the same fight that they always have, Emma realizes that her parents will never change. Her dad will always be harsh, will never treat her or her brother like he cares about them, and that she can't change him and shouldn't try. And the best she can do is change herself. So she goes and tells her friends, who have trouble understanding it. There's a scene. "What about my father?" asked Golden. "Your father," said Saunders, "is a lost cause. He thinks boys are great, and he's never going to think you're anything because you're a girl." "Well," says Golden, "I can't change that." "No, but you could stop wanting him to change," said Saunders. Emma felt like the top of her head would fly off. Saunders got it, the whole thing. "That's what I mean," said Emma loudly. "That's just what I'm talking about. We have to stop waiting around for them to love us." Because it's the '70s, one of the kids suggested they form a consciousness-raising group. The fact is, even those of us who are adults, who know better, who accept our parents and siblings as we hope that they accept us, even we hope, somehow, that maybe it'll change a little, this way or that. It's hard not to hope. And the question's on the table. Is nobody's family going to change? Today, three stories that explore whether that might be true. Act One, So a Jew, a Christian, and a Recording Crew Walk Into This Bar. In that act, a woman travels to Alaska, thinking that maybe her brother might change a little, as he hopes that she'll change a little, too. Act Two, Matching Outfits Not Included. The story of two sisters, now in their 70s, who have preserved the same relationship they had as girls, for better or worse. Act Three, The Artist Formerly Known as Dr. Sarkin. What happens when you want your dad to change, and he wants to change, but there is literally nothing that can be done to change him? Stay with us. Act One. Julia Pimsleur's brother, Marc, went through a dramatic change, years ago now. And I think it's not exaggerating to say that she wanted him to change back, at least a little, back to the way he was when they were young. And so she set out on a little mission to see him and talk and get his side of things. And experiment to see if anybody would change. Marc and I were very close when we were small. We traveled a lot, so we really only had each other for many months at a time. We went to Ghana and we went to Switzerland, we went to Germany, sometimes for many months at a time when my dad was teaching. So my earliest memories are just of this little family unit-- my dad, my mother, my brother, and me. Julia and I were always together. She and I, we had each other. We'd play and talk and stuff. I don't even remember fighting at all until the year my dad died. Then we moved to New York. That year was when everything changed for all of us. We just became very isolated into our separate worlds at that point. My brother and I no longer shared a room from that point on. And I don't think we were much of a family unit ever again after that. Somehow, the three of us couldn't make it a family unit again. I would like to talk with Marc about my father, but it's too late now because he has decided that everything that came before he was born again doesn't really matter. I was at home and I was in one of my states where I was just totally depressed and confused. So I opened the Bible. And I don't remember what the scripture was. It was something like, why are you stressed out? Today is a day of joy. I read that and all of a sudden, I realized God loved me, right there. And it just hit me like an atom bomb. I just felt it so powerfully. I was like, "God loves me." And it just went like, [BOMB SOUND] inside. And it just kept going on-- I guess, starting chronologically, my brother went to UC Berkeley and dropped out and became a born-again Christian and moved to a small island in Alaska to join a separatist community. I mean, I was like, on fire, physically. I mean, in a good way. it was like this, just blinding light, the whole thing. There was no way I could dispute that something was happening. Something big was happening. And-- He called home and said that he had moved to a place called The Farm. And we asked where that was, and he said it was on a small island near Juneau and that he was living with 75 people in a self-sufficient farming community, and they considered themselves born-again Christians. --I went outside and I was like, I felt like a newborn baby. And I looked up at the sky and it was just getting to be evening and I could see the stars and I was like, wow. It was like I was seeing everything for the first time. And-- At first, when he joined The Farm, it almost made us closer because he had been out of the house for several years. I spent my last years of high school with him away. So we didn't talk then and he was traveling a lot. And then he was at Berkeley and I didn't hear from him much. And then, when he came home one year, it was when he had started to have these religious experiences and he confided in me. He didn't tell my mother because he knew she would be very freaked out, and he told me. And so I remember, initially, feeling really close to him again and very special and happy that he had chose to confide in me. And I kept his secret and we talked about it-- long talks about it, and I think he was very relieved that I didn't seem terrified at what he was telling me. But then, over the next few years, as he got more and more involved with The Farm, I felt like he was part of their world and not part of our world. And his language changed and he was talking about Jesus all the time in terms that didn't make any sense to us. And then about five years ago, he came to visit me in France where I was living with my girlfriend. And I was very happy and in love and actually, very excited to share that with him and show him this wonderful life I had now. And he was incredibly judgmental and said, well, the Bible does not abide by people of the same sex living with each other or loving each other. And he didn't actually want to stay with us. We went and stayed somewhere else and left him the apartment because that's the only way it would work. So I think I cut him out of my life at that point, I just tried to forget that he was ever part of my life. So then he was gone again. I mean, very simply, I missed my brother. At some point, I realized I had a brother once, and I no longer do. I just started to feel like this is really sad and maybe it doesn't have to be like this. Now that he's born-again Christian, there will always be a huge divide between us. But the question became, even with that divide, did I want to try to have some kind of relationship? And I guess the answer was yes, or at least yes, I want to try, even though it might not work. I decided to go visit Marc in Alaska. What happens is, you fly for a good 20, 25 minutes and you don't see anything, you're just in the hinterland of Alaska where nobody lives. And then, all of a sudden, there's a few little cabins down below. And you land on this airport that's basically just one landing strip. It's about as long as your average suburban mall parking lot. And then you're there. Oh, that so smooth! You look familiar. Hi. Have we met? Some time a long time ago. This other plane pulled up just two seconds ago and everybody gets out. I'm like, "Hmm, I wonder." Oh, no. She missed the flight. For many years, I lied about what Marc was doing in Alaska. I used to say that he was a scientist or that he was studying fish farming. I made up a whole bunch of weird things just because I didn't really understand why he was there myself. And I couldn't explain it to other people. And whenever I did say he was part of a born-again Christian community, people would say, "Oh, it's cult." And I didn't know what to say, so I just didn't tell people for a long time. And many people didn't even know I had a brother. I had a lot of friends I'd had for many years who would say, "Oh my God, you have a brother? I had no idea." So I think what I'd come to try to find out in visiting Marc after all those years was how he'd gone from being my brother, who I went to Hebrew school with and watched him prepare for his bar mitzvah, and how he had made this incredible transformation. What is he doing there and how can I try to understand it better? And would he still feel like my brother? There we go. Luke 18:30. When do you like to read the Bible? Before you go to sleep? Yeah. That's what I usually do. Unfortunately, it doesn't last too long because I usually fall asleep within 10 seconds, but-- Do you like to talk about the scripture and try to figure out what they meant by stuff? Is it also an intellectual activity for you? Oh, no. Not really. I was always jealous of Marc because he was very naturally talented. He was very creative and read a lot and was very intellectually engaged from an early age. Went to see old movies and that's just not interesting to him anymore. Well, what would heaven be like? Because I have no concept of that. I have tried to imagine that because when Dad died, I definitely tried to think about where is he? And that's probably the last time I thought about there maybe being a God. Yeah, right. Well, I really don't know what to answer. Let's just see when we look up about heaven, paradise. Well, I want to know what you think. Well, what I think is-- if I have anything to say, it's going to be based on what the Bible says anyway, because there isn't really any other way to know except what's written in the Bible. Well, no. You think plenty of things that aren't exactly what's written in the Bible. Well, yeah, I know. But where am I going to get an idea of what heaven is like? I mean, I've never been there. I don't really know. Yeah, but you can imagine. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, what I would have to say would hopefully be based on what the Bible has to say. And if what I'm saying is my imagination, then it's kind of irrelevant anyway. Does that make sense? Yeah, but it feels more irrelevant to me if you just look up something and read it to me out of a book than if you tell me how you feel about it. But how I feel about it is based on what's in the book and I'm not sure exactly-- I haven't memorized the book, so I need to just look it up and see what it says. But it does seem like heaven is one of those things where-- I mean, what's it going to say? It's going to say there is a heaven and you all get to go there. But it's not going to tell you what it looks like. It's not going to say-- Well, it doesn't tell you what it looks like. Well, exactly. So why look it up? I want to see if it says anything that might be relevant. You can't look it up! We're talking about heaven. If we read scriptures about heaven, it might give us more things to talk about. I know, but asking you what you think of heaven was not connected to looking at scripture because those are two different things. Well, for me, it's connected to looking up scripture. Fine, look it up! No, now I don't want to. How would you feel, though, if you asked me something and I said, "I don't know. I have to go look it up." That wouldn't bother me in the least. In The Feminist Guidebook. In The Lesbian Love Handbook of Life. But really, you've read it at some point, so something made an impression on you. And then you made a decision about which part you think is what you believe. I mean, some people believe in rapture. You don't believe in rapture. No. So all I'm saying is, no matter what it says in here, you must have your own opinion. Yes, I do. And that's what I'm interested in. But I'm going to say exactly the same thing I just said five minutes ago. My opinion is based on this, and so that's why I want to look it up because it'll refresh my memory and give me some more ideas instead of just saying something off the top of my head about what little bit I remember. Yeah, I guess I just think it's a personal thing. It is a personal thing, but that's fine. That doesn't make any-- But do you have any personal zone left that's not the Bible? I think you're getting off track. It's a question. No, I really do. I really do. I'm not sure why we're-- Well, I guess I just feel like-- You're losing your objective-- I'm not objective. I know. Well, you're losing your-- what's your job is called? Documenting? Yes, totally. You really are. You're not working with me. OK. OK, let's look it up. OK. I really thought there's really nothing wrong with looking it up. No, there's nothing wrong with looking it up. OK, totally nothing wrong with this. I'm going to look it up. OK, heaven. We are now looking up heaven in the Bible. Exactly, just to see what it has to say. Not because I can't think for myself, but because [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I think the most surprising thing to me was how much, even with his new views and how different he was, how the same he was also. I mean, we went running together around The Farm and we picked blueberries and then I made blueberry pancakes for everybody on The Farm. He played guitar and sang. I got to listen to him. In a way, sometimes, I felt like he'd drawn this shade down over a window. But the window was still there and the shade was Christianity. But it was still him underneath. He was still sarcastic and he had a sense of humor. He was very caustic and self-deprecating. In a way, he really stood out on The Farm because he was the only one like that. I think that's the main thing that I found, is that we could still tease each other and be close. I took a mean kick in the stomach for you. Did you really? Don't you remember that? The bully who was twisting your nose? No, I don't remember that. Because all the kids were so mean at the French school and you defended me. Yeah, that's true. We were, definitely, in a place where we needed to stick together. I remember beating up Jeanne for you. I remember that too. No, I do. I remember. She was-- Yeah, well, she was about as big as me, too. But I whooped her. I think, for so many years, my mother and maybe, to a degree, even I, felt responsible, in a way, for him having gone off to The Farm. And maybe that's why we didn't talk about it with other people and why I lied about it, is that, in some way, we felt it reflected badly on us as a family or somehow we had done something wrong, that he should want to trade in our family for this new spiritual family. But I think the irony is that, only in researching what happened to him and really, finally confronting the fact that he's there and trying to understand it, I think we've now realized that there's a lot that we didn't have anything to do with that has to do with Marc and his life and his demons that he's fighting. I mean, it was only in researching what had brought him to The Farm that I found out things about him that I had no idea, especially about the time that he was in college in Berkeley. This is something I very rarely talk about because who wants to dredge up this kind of stuff? But really, over about six months-- I didn't get the time period right. It was more like a year. That whole year, I just went totally downhill. I remember taking a class in biology, your basic Bio 101, and I just couldn't hack it. I don't know what happened exactly-- I mean, I can tell you what happened. I don't know why. Or I can't explain it. I'll tell you what happened, is I took the class and got the book. It's like this. And I opened the book and I just couldn't do it. And that had never happened before, that I would set myself to something and not be able to do it. It was like something up here was going wrong, like some wires were getting crossed or something. It was very scary, actually. Very scary, I remember now. I'd really lost my mind. I mean, I can say it straight out. I had lost it completely. And the person I probably talked to the most during all this time about what was going on was Donna Austin. Oh, he would call and we'd spend two or three hours on the phone. That was the year that everything really fell apart for him emotionally, and mentally too, I think. Donna Austin is sort of my brother's surrogate mother on The Farm. She is the first person he had contact with there and who is one of the people who convinced him to move there and to stay. We had given him a Bible and he was reading his Bible. And it was soon after that that he had this very unusual experience in the way that The Holy Ghost filled him and gave him the baptism of The Holy Ghost. He had gotten involved with a Church of Christ group there, and they were telling that he wasn't saved and that because of this and that and his doctrines-- which he didn't even know about, anyway-- and because of his experiences, he just really wasn't saved. So he was in conflict with those that were Christians that were guiding him. And then he also just had thoughts that he was a complete failure and he couldn't make it with God and so he said, "God, you've got to meet me or I'm just not going to go on. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. So one night, he went over to a park of some kind. There was like some hills right around Berkeley, just walking distance. So I just walked up to the top of this hill. And it was evening. It was starting to get dark. And I just knew that I was going to be there until I had my answer. I knew I had to have the answer. He had been on his knees, I think, most of the night, in the dark, at the top of some kind of a hill. And I don't know what his thinking was, but he took some rocks and hit himself on the head, thinking, "I'm either going to knock some sense into myself or kill myself, one or the other." Hit himself with rocks. Basically, I threw myself off the edge of this cliff. Not a big cliff, but I was to the point where I was either going to die or find God trying. It was a real confused state of mind, but essentially, I did. I threw myself off the edge and wound up at the bottom of this precipice-- minor, slight precipice. I was a little bit worse for wear, but I wasn't in too bad shape. And I just kept praying. I said, "God, I don't know the answer. You've got to show me." And I stayed there pretty much until, I don't know, it was like 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning. And at one point, I was just on my knees and I was just waiting. And I was just waiting, not expecting anything in particular. But all of a sudden, something inside me just started welling up. And it was kind of like a joyful feeling, but really joyful. Something was-- I don't know-- a kind of warm feeling, and I started speaking in tongues, just like that. It just came out. And I was like, "Whoa, this must be speaking in tongues." And I just, once again, felt the presence of God and I was just so happy. I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit in a way that was like the way we're sitting here, like you're here. And I knew what he was saying. He was saying, "Don't worry. Everything's going to be all right." I was really shocked to hear how depressed and desperate he was in Berkeley. I had never known that he was that bad off. And I try not to spend too much time thinking about how it all could have turned out differently, but I think, after hearing about how in distress he was at Berkeley, I realized that The Farm saved his life in some ways. And I think some of the resentment I felt about him being there got replaced with a kind of gratitude that people took him in and took care of him at a time when he didn't or couldn't or wouldn't turn to us. So I think that changed my attitude towards The Farm. Sometimes, it seems like you worked out your issues through religion and I worked out my issues through therapy. Right. I guess one thing that I was thinking about that we talked about yesterday is I guess I felt it was important to me that you still have respect for my system of belief and that if I were to seek psychological counsel or have problems that I thought were due to psychological factors, whatever they may be, that I wasn't sure how you would see that. Like, if you see all work as the work of evil spirits trying to pull you down or if you think that people really can have psychological problems. Well, there's a natural realm of just the things that God's created. And within that natural realm, there are laws and so things are going to work for people, and working on dealing with your emotions and so on. But the spiritual realm, it's really above all that. But if I were really depressed, would you be thinking it was spirits or what would you think? You're really stuck on this spirit thing. Yeah, because I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't believe in them. And I was wondering if you're-- OK, you know what else I'm thinking of? I'm thinking of the fact that I did feel like, in high school, like you always felt very superior and was looking down on what I was doing. And the irony of this whole conversation is that part of me is this big flashback to high school. That you're like, "Well, you can do whatever you want down there--" On that lower realm, yeah. --in the natural realm because we're up here in the spiritual realm. Yeah, right. Well, that's always my hesitation about talking about any of this because I just don't know how to relate it to you without it being something that you're going to say, "This is weird," or "I can't deal with this," or "I can't understand this." It's not that this is weird, it's the "I know better." Yeah, OK. Well, unfortunately, it can come off extremely arrogant to say, well, this is the way, the truth, and the life. And that's what Jesus said. "I am the way, the truth, and the life." And you can't water it down and you can't make it acceptable. And it divides people. But you see that I'm struggling to accept that your way is a valid way that's just different from my way. And I want to feel like you also feel that my way is a valid way. It's just different from your way. I know you don't think that. Well, there just isn't room for that. We can't really-- Communicate. Not really. In our day-to-day relationship, sometimes, we can actually forget that he's born again and I'm a secular Jew. But then we stumble on these land mines that really explode into conflict between us. I would never be able to say, "Yes, I'm happy that you're having this lesbian lifestyle." I could never say that. But that still doesn't change that you are my sister and I care about you just as much as I always have and still consider you my sister. Those two things are both true. It's going to be a brick wall because there's no way. There's no middle ground. There just isn't. Part of me didn't even buy that he felt that way because he had had plenty of friends who were gay and bisexual. And I'm not sure if he experimented or not in that vein, but he certainly was not someone who was homophobic or concerned about people's sexual orientation. So the idea that he adopted this set of values that included homophobia when he wasn't homophobic himself was just very irritating. It did feel like he was spouting something that had been fed to him. Well, the Bible says God's put His laws in our hearts. And maybe that's why, because what you're doing is against the law of God, as it's written in the Bible, flat out, and it's in my heart. And so it goes against what's in my heart. And that's why, maybe it's something that I can feel. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it was-- When I came to this thing of accepting Christianity, it wasn't that I read the Bible and decided, OK, I agree that a man is made a man and a woman is made a woman and they're made that way by God and anything else is a perversion. It's not like I read that and I read some of the other doctrines and said, "This is what I want. I agree with this. This is right." I accepted Jesus and what comes along with that is what's written in His word. I don't know what would happen if I was with a woman and we want to come visit you. I mean, I can't say it's right, it's fine, no big deal. Because it is a big deal. These are the things that no longer freak me out when I think about Marc, that he talks in tongues, that he has to check with God before he makes any move at all, that he believes that there's a destiny and that God has his all planned out and he just has to live according to what it is. You would naturally think I'd be praying for their salvation and be praying for God to touch them the way he touched me and want them to be Christian. And a few years ago, I was thinking, "Wouldn't it be neat if Julia was Christian and lived on The Farm and I had my sister here and my family here and my mom and wouldn't that be wonderful if we all agreed and they were on my side?" And then, at other times, I've thought, "What, really, do I have to offer? Julia's a wonderful person and has wonderful friends and has a life that she's, I believe, fulfilled with and does good things for people. And what's the point of praying for them? What does God have to offer them? Or not, what does God have to offer them, but I don't see the need there. I don't see that they'd be any happier if they became Christian. And that's actually ironic, that all these years, he's taken us on our own terms and hasn't preached and we really didn't take him on his terms until very recently. And I think one of the hardest things I had to do was accept that Marc would never be the brother I grew up with. He would never be the same as he was before. And I had to relearn to love him, in a way. He was a whole different person now. Julia Pimsleur and her brother, Marc Pimsleur. The audio recordings in our story are from a film documentary that she made about her visit to see Marc in Alaska called Brother Born Again. It's available on the internet at artsengine.net. In the eight years since we first put this story of the air, Marc has left Alaska to medical school in Texas. He's now in his first year of residency. He is still a Christian. He is still affiliated with The Farm. In the eight years since Julia made her film, she's gotten married-- to a man, a rabbi, in fact. The have two kids. Coming up, matching light blue easy chairs with matching teddy bears sitting on them and what else can happen if your relationship with your brothers and sisters does stay the same as it was when you were kids. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Nobody's Family is Going to Change. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Matching Outfits Not Included. In this act, we consider the question, what if your relationships with your loved ones, your brothers and sisters, never changes? Hillary Frank has this story of two sisters-- grown women-- who go by the nicknames that they were given as little girls, Dusty and Honey. Back when Dusty and Honey were in their early 20s, not long after World War II, they were shopping in a store called Lerner's. They were looking for clothes on opposite sides of a circular rack and found that they both picked the same outfit, a green corduroy two-piece sports suit. They left the store dressed identically and have been dressing alike ever since. Right now, I've got on what I call my fatigue outfits. I did my exercise. I've got a pair of brown shorts and a white-- where'd I get this? Someone sent this-- oh, from Cape Cod. And Honey, what are you wearing? I'm wearing the same thing Dusty is-- the brown shorts and the Cape Cod T-shirt. People say, "Why do you--" Well, we have the same taste in clothes. So if I like the same thing she has, I want it. So we both wear it. And wearing the same clothes alike all the time, well, I can't say well, she's wearing my skirt or she's wearing my blouse because it'll be the same thing. We're happy dressing alike. Dusty and Honey are sisters in their early 70s. They've lived together all their lives, mostly in Westport, Connecticut. They have the same wigs, the same eyeglasses, the same jewelry and purses. But Dusty and Honey aren't twins. Dusty is three years older than Honey. Their bedroom has two twin beds, piled with matching stuffed animals. Above each bed is a crucifix, and above those, centered in the middle, staring down, is a framed picture of Frank Sinatra. Not only do Dusty and Honey eat the same food, but they make sure that one never has a larger portion than the other. And one will only have a treat if the other is there to share it with her. And if I'm out to the store, you know how sometime at a deli, they'll have samples, if she's not there with me to have a sample, I won't take it. I have to have her with me. I'll go get a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] there's a sample there, but I won't take it and not let her have it. That sounds strange to some people, but that's the way we are and you just can't change us. But it works out fine. And as long as we like, we say we're not hurting anybody. Some people go, "Oh, it's--" We're not hurting anyone. We're not breaking a commandment. And that's the main thing. There's a kind of closeness between little girls who are best friends where it makes you feel secure and safe to think that there's someone who shares all the same likes and dislikes. All you want is to do everything together. Dusty and Honey have somehow managed to carry that kind of friendship into adulthood. They're like the girls who write "best friends forever" on the bathroom wall, except for them, the forever part is real. It can feel sort of strange visiting them in their house. Two matching women sitting on matching easy chairs in their living room, completing each other's sentences. Even in their jobs they've been together. First a sweatshop, then an elderly home. For 30 years, they worked as housekeepers for a local priest. Is it ever hard to feel like you're a separate person? A separate person? Yeah, I mean, you do everything together, right? And you dress the same and do you ever feel like you want to feel like just an individual? A different person? If I do that, I think I'm hurting her. It's like I don't love her anymore. I don't want to do anything with her. I couldn't do that. They say, "Why don't you dress differently than your sister?" No, then I'll hurt her. I feel like I don't love her anymore and I couldn't do that to her. That would be like betraying her. They know their relationship is unusual. But when I asked them why it turned out this way, they just say over and over that this is what was meant to be, and this is what makes them happy. They learned to depend on each other as little girls growing up during The Depression, the youngest of six children, often going to bed hungry and cold. Their father died when Honey was two and Dusty was five. Dusty was always sort of fragile. For a long time, whenever Dusty and Honey went out, Honey found herself doing everything for Dusty because Dusty was too shy to do things herself. Dusty and Honey lived at home through their early 30s and cared for their ailing mother. They watched their older siblings get married, one by one. And every time they got married, there was the living room, and they had a door that went right out to the hallway. And they used to go out there with their gowns. So after they got married, my mother sealed that door up. I said, "Ma, you're trying to tell us we're never getting married and going out that door?" But she sealed that door up after Louise got married." Do you think your mother wanted you to get married? No. No, I can't say, like some mothers, when you go to get married, she never pressured us into that. Never, never. No. I guess she knew we were meant to stay with one another. It was just something, I guess, that's in the books. Nothing you could do about that. Do you think in some ways that this relationship is less complicated than married couples? Yeah, I think so. I think so. Because we understand one another and one doesn't try to hurt the other one or lie or cheat. That's a pretty bleak view of marriage. It turns out that much of Dusty and Honey's information about marriage comes from soap operas. For as long as they can remember, they've been either listening to soaps on the radio or watching them on television. People say they're silly, but we enjoy them. Like I say, thank God I don't live half of the lives they live. It's interesting because your lives seem to be very controlled and common. On the soap operas, they're very turbulent. That's what I mean. You watch all that, thinking you're so quiet. Well, that's how we get our kicks out of life, watching does everyone know the facts of life when we see TV. Because my mother didn't tell us anything. You bought a baby. You didn't have a baby, you bought a baby. They describe themselves as young at heart, and I think that's a fair description. Their nieces have helped them keep up with teenybopper culture, Britney Spears and 'N SYNC and all the others. I like the way Ricky Martin moves. I wouldn't mind going out with him, we'd always say. If I was only 20 years younger. Dusty puts her hands up mambo style and does a little shake for me, a la Ricky Martin. Every night, Dusty and Honey lay in their twin beds and talk before they fall asleep about what they're going to do the next day and what they'll wear and whether it'll be too cold for their Bermudas, like best friends on a sleepover that never ends. Hillary Frank is the author of the novels Better Than Running at Night and I Can't Tell You. Act Three, The Artist Formerly Known as Doctor Sarkin. Sometime in 1999, I'm not exactly sure when, I got in the mail a drawing of a head with six eyeballs, bared teeth, and in a word balloon above it, seven pairs of words, each of them anagrams of the letters of my own name. Ail Grass. Liars Sag. Sail Rags. Alas Rigs. Over time, I received a stack of artwork half a foot high, including a guitar-shaped wooden cutting board that somebody simply drew on, fixed some stamps to, and threw in the mail, plus a full canvas painting, plus dozens of pages of stream-of-consciousness poetry, all the work of one Jon Sarkin. He seemed sort of crazy, but not so crazy that he didn't provide perfectly organized press clippings about himself and his phone number and his web address. We talked a few times on the phone. I thought of Jon Sarkin when the idea for this week's show came up because his family had gone through a change-- a dramatic change-- but they'd stayed together. And now they all yearn for another change. Back in 1988, Jon was, as he puts it-- this is his phrase-- your classic, suburban, college-educated, professional, upper-middle-class Jew. Chiropractor with workaholic tendencies. And on the golf course one day, something went wrong in his brain, which led to a stroke, and surgery where they removed part of the cerebellum, which unhinged something in his life. He wasn't able to do a normal job, and he started doing art, an obsessive, primitive sort of art that he did in an obsessive, primitive sort of way. Jon Sarkin sees double, the left side of his body's weak, he walks with a cane, he's deaf in the left ear. But he's also lost a certain kind of everyday reasoning and thinking in a way that, as you might imagine, affects his family life. For instance, how he gets along with his son, Curtis, age 12. The thing that just happened yesterday. We're going to the beach, and all the beach toys are in this big basket. So I take the basket out and Curtis says, "Put the basket back in the garage and we'll wait for mom." I'm like, OK. So I take the basket and I dump all the beach toys out and I put the basket back in the garage, just like he asked me to. And he's like, "Dad, what are you doing?" I said, "You asked me to put the basket back in the garage, Curtis." "Dad, with the beach toys." I'm so literal. Being highly literal gets you into trouble. The world Jon's created for himself, a studio where he does his artwork in the seaside town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is just a dirty little room with dingy junk everywhere. The world his wife has created for their family is a pretty, suburban-style house that's so immaculate, it's like a critique of where he works. At 12, Curtis is the oldest child, Robin's almost 9, and Caroline just turned 6. After family dinner one night, Jon's wife, Kim, and I sat on the front steps under the trees for an interview. Curtis comes out and they tell me how there are so many funny family stories about their dad. We could go way back. How far back do you want to go? Mom, can I tell the French fry story? Yeah. All right, back-- It's a story of how Jon insisted that they bring their leftover French fries home from Disney World in Florida so they could recycle them in the compost pile. Or the story about Jon trying to help unpack the kitchen when they moved to the house, but doing it in a completely random way, the way a toddler might. Or the story about Jon not noticing the Caroline got locked outside for a few cold minutes one winter. Each story takes such a disturbing turn that at one point, Kim says, "Let's say some positive things about Dad." Take this story. Tell about-- what was I going to say? When he first came home from the hospital, wasn't he laughing like crazy over Mickey Mouse cartoons? I had a moments where Curtis was sitting on the couch watching cartoons. And he was about two. Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse. And Jon was sitting on the floor and he was roaring with laughter over these Mickey Mouse cartoons. I mean roaring. And I thought to myself, "Oh, God. What have I brought home?" Because he was like a little kid. And living with Jon at that time was like living with a teenager, the way teenagers are explosive and irrational and moody. He was all those things and I was the mom. So that was a tough time, but he did continue to get better. Do you feel like, in some ways, though, he still is like a teenager and you're still like-- Yeah. Yeah. Curtis says he was seven or eight when he understood the extent to which his dad wasn't like the other dads. And when he'd complain about his father, Robin, the middle child, would defend Dad. And Robin would get mad at me or Curtis for seeming to be so impatient with Dad. And Curtis and I would sort of look at each other and roll our eyes and think, "Well, you'll know soon enough why we're so impatient." And now Robin is to the age where she's feeling impatient with Jon. And Caroline is very defensive and runs to his defense. And I know that within a couple of years, she'll be more aware of it. At this point, Kim says, the six-year-old is just realizing that dad isn't "Wonder Dad." She gets mad when he scribbles a phone number on her drawings, or when he invited a TV crew to come and film in their house on her birthday. He just is not aware of other people's feelings in any normal sort of way. When he does play with the kids, or draw with them, or just goof around with them, it's easy for him to go too far, get too loud. Sometimes he comes out when kids are in the middle of a game and he starts making up rules for them to follow when they're in the middle of their game. Like he says, "Here's the rule. You have to go down the skateboard sitting down and you can't get up until you're to the bottom of the hill." And he just makes up rules and it doesn't even occur to him that the kids don't want him to be doing the rules. He just thinks he's having fun and stuff. And then he asks for a turn on the skateboard. It doesn't occur to him that it's kids being with kids and that they don't really want an adult around. He is a kid. He is one of the kids. Does he embarrass you? Yeah, in lots of different ways. What makes it all so tricky is that Jon Sarkin has better days and worse days. It is possible for him to focus and act more normal and be a bit more clear-headed. But he says this gets exhausting after half an hour, and sometimes, even when he tries to do the right thing, he guesses wrong. I should point out here that when Jon had his stroke, Kim and he had only been married for two years. Curtis was just a baby. Robin and Caroline hadn't been born. And Kim decided not only to remain with him but to have more children. She did it, she says because at first, the doctors predicted a full recovery. And then, every year, he did get better for a long time. And she loves kids, wanted more kids. And so I thought to myself, well, if Jon gets better, it'll be nice for us to have another baby because it's sort of a new hope. And I didn't want the kids spaced too far apart. And I thought if he doesn't get better, it would be easier on Curtis to have a sibling to share that with, I would think. So I thought, we're just going to go for it. And we decided to have Robin and his family was really happy about that because it sort of showed that I was committed and that we were committed and that we were still a family. When you promise to stay together in sickness and in health, you do wonder, what if something happens, an accident, something disabling? But you don't think, what if your partner just suddenly changes into someone else, someone very irritating? Kim says that she can still confide in Jon, lean on him in certain ways, but there are plenty of ways in which she can't, which he understands. Were the two of you very close before all this happened? I would have to say closer than most couples. And now? Less close. And do you think your kids yearn for you to change? Or do they understand that you're not going to change? Both. I still do. I still yearn for it to change, even though I know it's not going to. Curtis, is there a part of you where you feel like, well, he should know better? Yeah, I feel that a lot. But I know that he really can't help it and I just try very hard to remember that. And I do feel, sometimes, that he should know better or he should think first, but I know he really can't help it. It's very frustrating. Do you think he might change sometime? No, I don't. He's been acting this way for a long time and I don't think he'll change. I have to say, it doesn't seem he's getting any better. It seems like he's getting worse. Does it? Yeah. Like at Caroline's birthday, he just sat around and did nothing. And then he went and took a nap. And he just sat around and did nothing. Didn't even join the party. And then, after we'd already done presents and practically anything, he says to me, "Curtis, what are we doing first, cake or presents?" And we'd already done presents and we were just about to start cake. So it's hard. After the party, when everybody was cleaning up, Jon took the special bouquet of helium birthday balloons and was about to pop them. He thought he was helping. And what happens in the Sarkin family is what happens in any family. It is hard for the rest of them not to think, despite themselves, "Well, doesn't he love us? Doesn't he love us enough to act differently?" And that's where we get upset with him is, he should know that the helium balloons are important to me. He should know that that drawing I made is too important to draw on. He should know that stuff. And he says, "No, I don't." And I say, "Well, I think that sometimes you use the stroke a little bit." And it is hard to distinguish when he's using it and when it's really a perceptual problem. My wife is like, "Well, Jon, I think you're lazy because you use the stroke as an excuse. And I can't tell if you're really just being lazy." And sometimes, she's right. Sometimes I am lazy. Sometimes, I actually can't do it. Just like I can't remember where the light switch is, even though I've turned the lights on a thousand times. And I tell her, "I really can't." And she says, "Yes you can." "No, I can't." "Yes, you can." "No, I can't." And I'm like, "Well, guess what. I'm not going to do it because I know I can't, so end of conversation." "I want him to care more. I would think that no matter how bad your situation is, you've got these three marvelous children and a nice wife and a nice home. And things aren't that bad for us. And I know that life is really hard for Jon, but I would like it if we were more of an inspiration for him, to him. That part, I can't let go of hoping will change. And so this is where they stand. During my brief visit with the Sarkins, Jon was, everybody says, on his best behavior. If anything, he tiptoed around, worried that he'd mess things up as everybody set the table or cleaned the kitchen. When Curtis's little sisters needed help fixing the TV, it was Curtis they came to, not their dad. Interestingly, Kim says that some of the nicest times for her are when they visit with his family-- his mom, his brother, his sister. Family roles are so powerful, something kicks in with Jon. I love just sitting around and listening to him talking to his brother and his sister because the old Jon seems to come back. But he's also exhausted after those trips because-- and it's not like he's deceiving them or anything. He longs to be the old Jon too, but he can only be for so long. When we called the Sarkins this week, we found out that the family is still together. He's still married. The girls are teenagers. Curtis is a freshman in college. And Jon continues to create art. Our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton and Blue Chevigny. Contributing editors for this show, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help comes from Seth Lind and Emily Youssef. [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS] Our website, where you can get our free, weekly podcast, or you can listen to any of our shows for absolutely free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia. Whenever I go up to him to talk about the budget or advertising or marketing for the radio show, he responds by saying, I don't know. I have to go look it up in The Lesbian Love Handbook of Life. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Back toward the end of the 20th century, in the last few months, there was a flurry of last minute scrambling. People trying, for some reason, to document what the 20th century was all about before it ended, as if human civilization was suddenly on a global term paper deadline. We had to get everything down before the semester that was the last century ended. Or there would be points taken off our papers. And during this odd period of human beings thinking about the past, and the present, and the future, The New York Times Magazine decided to do a special issue summarizing who we were at the turn of the millennium which it was going to bury in a time capsule for the people of the year 3000. And among the dozens of people who they invited to take part in this, they caught a guy who I know named Bennett Miller, who makes films. The New York Times could include films in the capsule and stills from the films of the frames in the magazine. And they asked if he had any interest in documenting something for the people of the future. As it turns out, just the night before, Bennett had been at a party where he had met this guy who he just adored, really funny, smart guy who was a professional actor and a dwarf, as I understand it, very tiny man. And Bennett suggested to The New York Times that he would make a very brief movie, where he would take this guy on the street somewhere and film him alone. And the guy would look directly into the camera and say something along the lines of, "Hello, people of the future. Scientists tell us that by the time that you're seeing this, humankind will have made unimaginable advances. Gone will be the problems that plague us today, disease, inequality, pollution, war. Why, I am told that 1,000 years from now, human beings may grow to be as large as five or perhaps even six feet tall. People of the future, I salute you." And that would be it. And presumably, the people of the future would at some point look at the other pages in the magazine buried in this time capsule and realize that 20th century humans had already reached five or six feet in height, many of them. And hopefully, they would understand the whole thing was a joke, a joke launched deep into the future, which The New York Times did not go for this. But I have to say, I love this idea. Can you imagine what it would be like to get a message like that from 1,000 years back? If we would find little pranks left for us in the ruins of Egypt, or Rome, or Pompeii, we would love those people. Anyway, around this time, when people I actually knew and loved were worrying about the civilization of the future and what it would think of us, there came a point where I realized, I hate the people of the future. I don't care what they think of us. Picture them. There they are, 1,000 years from now, the people of the future. Not only are we dust, but our children are gone, our children's children. Everything we ever believed or cared about, it is long, long forgotten, all of it. And there they are, the people of the future, busy with their busy lives, driving to work, making plans for the weekend, getting together. To hell with them. I hate them. I mean, I don't hate them, but they can fend for themselves. And they don't care what we were like, not in a big way. Who do we remember? Name 10 people from the 15th century. Lots of people, of course, think differently than I do when it comes to the people of the future. And they have their work cut out for them, worried about their legacy, what will people think of them. And they're trying to set the record straight. They are the subject of today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, preparing for the people of the future. We bring you three stories in three separate acts. Act One, Dewey Decimal Beats Truman. Bill Clinton is building a presidential library to memorialize himself for the people of the you-know-when. Our own contributing editor Sarah Vowell tours the libraries of four dead presidents to come up with suggestions and tips for how he should handle the job. Act Two, One And One Don't Make Two in which we hear the story of somebody who, through an accident of history, became obsessed with how the future would view her, Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. We have rare audio recordings of her from the 1960s that have never been played publicly. Act Three, You Don't Have To Be An Einstein. Mike Paterniti weighs in with this story that begins with Einstein's brain preserved for the people of the future and ends in a karaoke bar. Stay with us. Act One. If somebody is straight up a hero, the question of his legacy is just not that interesting. It's the flawed people, the imperfect, who have to think hard about how to best present themselves, which is why the question of a Clinton presidential library is such an interesting one. Sarah Vowell has taken it upon herself to offer some advice to the president on how to handle the job. Memo, To President William Jefferson Clinton, From Citizen Sarah Jane Vowell, RE Presidential Libraries Fact-Finding Tour. Mr. President, I'm tired. Who wouldn't be after eight long years of sticking up for you? 60% of the American public still likes the way you do your job, but somehow, I never seem to run into any of these people. So I'm excited about your impending presidential library in Little Rock. No longer will I be responsible for defending your honor to friends, family, and the occasional cab driver. What a relief to turn over what's left of my faith in you to some building in Arkansas. But before I relinquish my duties as your crabby, little cheerleader, I scoped out four presidential libraries to help you figure out how to do the job right. Not that you asked me. I just don't want you to mess this up. We'll begin our tour at the John F. Kennedy Library overlooking Boston Harbor, partly because your youth and flash have been described as Kennedy-esque and partly because you, yourself, have often invoked the comparison, most notably by trotting out that film of you shaking JFK's hand as a teenager, an image of eerie destiny. I talked to the Kennedy Library's curator, Frank Rigg. We agreed that the plainest pleasure of visiting presidential libraries is getting close to the actual stuff of history. We have on display in one of the cases in that room the little card in which he's written, "Ich bin ein Berliner," spelled out phonetically so he would-- and if you watch the film, you can see just before he gets to that line, he looks down at the paper and then looks up and says, "Ich bin ein Berliner." And I love those little correspondences between an artifact and a piece of film. And the most beautiful one comes towards the end of the museum where we have a video of his tour of Ireland in 1963. And as he was leaving, he quoted a piece of poetry that Mrs. de Valera, the wife of the president of Ireland, had recited to him the night before at dinner. And he'd written them down on the back of his itinerary. And she immediately quoted this poem. And I wrote down the words because I thought they're beautiful. And you see him in the film pick up a piece of paper that he has under a silver jug. It's windy, that's why he has it under the-- and it's blowing around in the wind. And he picks it up, and then he recites. There's these very beautiful lines. Thus returns from travels long, years of exile, years of pain, to see old Shannon's face again, over the waters glancing. Well, I'm going to come back and see old Shannon's face again. At the end of the recitation, he folds it up. And you can see the crease. And again, it's one of those things where you feel as if you're there at that moment in time. In this I.M. Pei-designed white box, JFK's life and death unfold primarily on television monitors and video screens. I walk in suspicious. I've never particularly worshipped Jack Kennedy. He didn't really do anything except talk. He spoke of civil rights, but it was Lyndon Johnson who got actual laws passed. And then there's the minor matter of the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the scariest single week in the history of the world. And yet, at JFK's Library, I found myself hoodwinked by pretty words. No other free nation has demanded so much of itself. Through hot wars and cold, through recession and prosperity, through the ages of the atom and outer space, the American people have neither faltered, nor has their faith flagged. If at times our actions seem to make life difficult for others, it is only because history has made life difficult for us all. As you may have noticed, there are no narrators to our films and our videos. The principle voice is that of John F. Kennedy himself. And we did that very consciously. There are also a lot of pretty pictures-- home movies of JFK handing a dandelion to John-John, one weirdly evocative film strip of the president in which all he does is carry a briefcase and walk to a car. I watch this wondering, why is it so riveting? He's taking work home. But I can't resist him. The man is Medusa. Don't look in his eyes. President Clinton, you should milk this in your library. Where the legislative record is perhaps ambiguous or downright shabby, go for the flashy soundbites. You're such a sweet talker, the Charlie Parker of the press conference Q&A, riffing rhythmically about everything from interest rates to Greece versus Turkey with regards to Cyprus. Get a couple of great quotes, throw a little music under them, and listen to what a great president you were. America is far more than a place. It is an idea, the most powerful idea in the history of nations. And all of us in this chamber, we are now the bearers of that idea. When we get this all worked out, we're all living to be 150, young people will still fall in love. Old people will still fight about things that should have been resolved 50 years ago. We will all on occasion do stupid things. And we will all see the unbelievable capacity of humanity to be noble. This is a great day. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a military meteor on the rise. President Clinton, I wanted to go to the Dwight David Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, to see how they handle something your library will have to tackle. Which is, if one of the achievements of a presidency is economic prosperity, how do you display that without putting out a bunch of toasters and hula hoops, without making people seem dumb and materialistic? How do you convey the decency of making people's lives better? Unfortunately for our project, the way the Eisenhower Library deals with this challenge is they basically ignore it. In fact, you'd barely know the man was president. The exhibit devoted to his White House years is mostly heaps of weird, but swanky gifts he got, like a mosaic desk from the Shah of Iran. What the museum's great at is Eisenhower's military career. As I walk around with its director, Dan Holt, I think, who cares if he accomplished anything after V-J Day? And this is some early World War II-- the original note that Roosevelt and Churchill signed appointing Eisenhower the Supreme Commander. It's funny, at this point in the museum, I forgot he was president. Yeah, right. Yeah. President Clinton, there is a lesson to be learned here after all. Which is, play to your strength. Eisenhower's greatest achievement was liberating Europe. Your greatest achievement? Balancing the budget. Not as dramatic, I know. They're probably not going to make a Tom Hanks movie about fiscal policy, no matter how inspired that fiscal policy might be. But still, as the White House web page cheerfully points out, your money wrangling did create the longest economic expansion in US history and the most new jobs ever created in a single administration. In the Eisenhower Library, the climax of the visit is D-Day in which you turn a sharp corner, and suddenly, you're standing like a soldier on a ship's ramp facing a Normandy beach. And then you walk through a small mock-up of an LCI, Landing Craft Infantry, and then the photograph that's been called The Jaws of Death, which is the landings on Omaha Beach. As you trudge across the ramp, you glimpse your buddies ahead of you slogging through the bloody wet, and the beach so far away. In short, this is very effective theater, which leads me to my next recommendation, Mr. Clinton. What about a similar stage set? Only in your library, instead of being a soldier leaving the boat for Omaha Beach, the visitor could walk in the shoes of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan as he steps out of a Lincoln Town Car and into the Dirksen Senate Office Building to endorse the Clinton deficit-reduction strategy before the Senate Banking Committee. A word on the people who run these libraries, Mr. President. Fortunately for you guys, they are very attached to their subjects, very loyal. Their president becomes a kind of mental roommate, someone they live with. And each of the library directors I interviewed spoke of their president with affection, like moms almost. Dan Holt praises Ike's correspondence skill. Eisenhower was a wonderful letter writer. Talks up up his private sector prowess. He was an outstanding business man. His book learning. His grammar is very good. As a matter of fact, when you read his diaries and letters, even the diaries, you can hardly ever find a misspelled word. And his looks. Oh, he was a very handsome man. All the loyalty you would want while you're in office you finally get after you quit. None of the library directors have written kiss-and-tell memoirs and gone on to work for ABC. If you were involved in the planning for this new presidential library in Little Rock, is there any advice you could give to those people based on your experience? Bigger restrooms and more drinking fountains. But I think you have to have fun in it. I'm a true believer of that, that there has to be bells and whistles. The first thing I think we'll take a look at is called an animatron. It is a figure of LBJ. It has sound with it. And it tells some of Johnson's stories. I'm with library director Harry Middleton in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. We're looking at a robot of LBJ, a robot who wears cowboy garb and tells folksy stories. Have you heard the one about the man who goes to a doctor because he's hard of hearing? The doctor advises the man to quit drinking and sends him home. A few days later, the man returns to the doctor's office. He hasn't stopped his drinking. The doctor scolds him. He said, didn't I tell you when you were here that you should cut out your drinking if you wanted to improve your hearing? He said, yes. Well, he said, why didn't you do it? Well, he said, doctor, he said, I got home, and I considered it. And I just decided that I like what I drinks much better than what I heard. And as we move into this area, we show some of the correspondence that President Johnson got, some of it quite critical, some of it supportive. There's a letter on the wall addressed to Lyndon Johnson from one Francis Mercer of Beverly Hills, California. "Mr. President, you have engaged this country in an active war without the consent of Congress. I consider having worked for your campaign one of the most tragic mistakes of my life." President Clinton, I'm going to hazard a guess that you, yourself, have received one or two angry letters. Which brings us to the question what are you going to do about all the people who hate your guts? Not to put too fine a point on it. What are you going to do about all the aspects of your presidency you'd rather forget about? Tell me if this rumor is true that, in the initial exhibitions, there was little or no representation of Vietnam, and that the President himself came to the library and insisted that that part of the exhibition be beefed up. To a certain extent, that's true. There was a representation of Vietnam, but nothing that showed the controversy of Vietnam. And when President Johnson walked through the library just a few weeks before the library was to open, one of the things that he commented on was that the library did not indicate how contentious that time was. And he said to me, that was a very controversial period, and we've got to make sure that people know that we understand that. And he said to me, I don't want another damn credibility gap. And do you think the people who are in charge of a president's legacy are more apt to protect him than the president himself would be of his own legacy? Yeah, I think that's probably true. I think unless you get a clear direction from the president that he wants it all laid out-- in the case of Johnson, I've been director here from the beginning. And on one occasion when he was concerned that we might be too protective, he said to me, good men have been trying to protect my reputation for 40 years, and not a damn one has succeeded. Now what makes you think you can? So we've not tried to do that since. Mr. Clinton, here's a list of things you should not whitewash. Before we even discuss the scandals, let's talk about the ordinary failures. What about one of your key campaign promises, to reform health care? A fiasco. Ditto Waco. Or the 1994 Congressional elections in which the voting public punched Republican names on their ballots with one hand while using their other hands to give you the finger. I'm not even mentioning all the half-assed policies, like Don't Ask, Don't Tell, or Bosnia, or Somalia. Finally, you did have sexual relations with that woman. You have to confront this. Again, LBJ Library director Harry Middleton. I think that a library should not proselytize and should not sugarcoat, and should not in any way distort the facts or the truth in order to hide a controversy surrounding the president. Otherwise, it's just unfair to the public. Meanwhile, in Yorba Linda, California. Well, first of all, I don't think a presidential library should necessarily bend over backwards to be objective and fair and inclusive of every important and telling fact on all sides of the argument. This is John Taylor, director of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace. It's about a 15-minute drive from Disneyland. Just as Harry Middleton of the LBJ Library is doing his job according to LBJ's wishes, John Taylor is doing his job the way Nixon would want. I think people expect presidential libraries to reflect the point of view of the president, the president's family, and the president's institutional advocates. I'm ambling through the museum, past pictures of Nixon, all smiles in China. And one of the other visitors asks the guard, "Where's Watergate?" The guard tells him, "Keep going straight. It's a dark room." And it is, a very dimly lit tunnel chronicling the break-in at the Watergate Hotel through President Nixon's resignation and farewell. There are stations in the Watergate Gallery where one may listen to the famous tapes. And there are intricate text panels with labels like, "What did the president do, and when did he do it?" John Taylor says that one of the purposes of this exhibit is that people come here expecting the museum to avoid such a sore subject. And that dealing with it in such an info-packed manner gives them credibility. But the most important reason to tell the story is that it happened. It was an amazing outbreak of political passion. The anger that Congress expressed during the Senate investigation in 1973 and the impeachment investigation in 1974 was passion that had been building probably since the events around the time of Kent State. And I think one sees the same effect with President Clinton who was also a figure about whom there was simmering passions among many conservatives. There was a strong feeling among many conservatives, as we all know, that he quote "was not legitimate" close quote or that he had been engaged in activities which had never been fully revealed to the American people. And many of those passions came forth during the impeachment investigation and proceedings in 1998 and 1999. Taylor offers this advice to you and your library director, President Clinton. I think it would be appropriate for the Clinton Library to try to make the case, for instance, that there was a political dimension to the Clinton impeachment. And there were people, who did not think President and Mrs. Clinton should be in the White House, who used the impeachment effort as a way to accomplish that end. Pointing that out is fair comment. We pointed out in our museum, and I would think and assume that they would attempt to do so in Little Rock as well. There's a lot you can crib from the Nixon Library, Mr. President. Just substitute the name Clinton for the name Nixon in the following text from the Watergate exhibit. It reads, "Nixon himself said he made inexcusable misjudgments. But what is equally clear is that his opponents ruthlessly exploited those misjudgments as a way to further their own purely political goals." One caution, Mr. President. The Nixon Library can sometimes seem a little defensive. In the LBJ Library, a visitor's view of history is complicated by presenting both sides of the Vietnam dilemma. It's an emotional place, but still operates within the language of good old-fashioned civics, a president and his constituents loudly agreeing to disagree. The Nixon Library asks, you want facts? We'll give you some facts. And oh, by the way, grow up. Because you're not going to like any of them. In May of this year, we marked the anniversary of the death of four students at Kent State. Thanks to the Neil Young song, thanks to the way that event is generally packaged in the media and in history, one rarely hears about it from the perspective of Richard Nixon. But when you hear President Nixon talking in our presidential forum about what a dark day that was for him, it challenges the prevailing thought that he was callous and unfeeling toward the families of those who had died. In fact, he says in this museum and says in his memoirs that it was the darkest day of his presidency. And he includes Watergate when he makes that calculation. At the same time, however, you also learn, when going through the museum, that President Nixon had to weigh the lives of those four innocent young people against the lives of innumerable south Vietnamese and American soldiers whose lives were saved as a result of the incursion into Cambodia which was the proximate cause of the demonstration at Kent State which got out of hand and led to the deaths. President Clinton, perhaps you're wondering if the Nixon Library changed my mind about anything. You're wondering if citizens who shook their fists at your face on TV might someday drop in on a building with your name on it and maybe give you a break. All I can tell you is that I still think Watergate's a horror and Vietnam was wrong. But I do find it useful to remember that those decisions, even the most deadly ones, were made not by a supernatural monster, but by a real man whom we elected, a man who at least believed he was right. And that is not nothing. In fact, the Nixon and Johnson Libraries were my favorite ones to visit because they deal with quarrelsome subjects. Once, years ago, I was at the LBJ Library. I was walking away from a copy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 towards a photo of a serviceman who'd been killed in Vietnam. In the 10 seconds it took to walk from that law to that face, a song from a nearby pop music exhibit started playing, "Louie Louie." And I felt like all of America was in that 10 seconds. The grandeur of civil rights, the consequences of war, and the fun, fun, fun of a truly strange song. Mr. President, Americans like contradictions. We elected you, didn't we? So in your library, own up to your failures, but don't stop trying to win us over. In other words, just think of it as running for president forever. Sarah Vowell's latest book is called Take the Cannoli. Coming up, Lee Harvey Oswald's Little League career and other things his mother would like you to know before you judge him too harshly in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Memo To The People Of The Future, stories of people who want to control how history will see them. We've arrived at Act Two, an act we've called One And One Don't Make Two. What if you're remembered the wrong way? What if you're remembered for something that somebody else did? Well, consider the case of Marguerite Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's mother. In 1965, a reporter named Jean Stafford spent three days with Mrs. Oswald at Oswald's home in Fort Worth, Texas, to write a story for McCall's Magazine. Later, she expanded this story into a book called A Mother in History. The book's out of print now. Jean Stafford died about 20 years ago. And the tapes of these interviews were archived with the rest of Stafford's papers at the University of Colorado at Boulder. According to the librarians in the Special Collections department there, this is the first time these tapes have ever been heard by anyone other than Jean Stafford and Mrs. Oswald herself. This American Life producer Susan Burton tracked down the tapes and listened to them. On the afternoon Jean Stafford first came to visit Mrs. Oswald in her white stucco bungalow, the two sat in the living room drinking coffee. A print of Whistler's famous portrait of his mother hung over the couch. Stafford thought she would start out by asking Mrs. Oswald about something small and personal, like her recipe for brownies. "But before I could open my mouth," she wrote later, "Mrs. Oswald opened hers and never shut it once during the three monologues she granted me." It turned out that Mrs. Oswald thought that she and her son were being remembered the wrong way. And she'd devoted her life to setting the record straight. On these scratchy tapes, she tells stories like this one about when Lee was in seventh grade, and the two of them had just moved to New York. Lee came home one day. And we were in New York just about a week or so. And it was exactly the time he was supposed to get home from school. He said, "Mother, I didn't go to school today." I said, "You didn't? Where did you go?" "Oh," he said, "I rode all around." He said, "I rode all day long on the subway. I went to Brooklyn. I went to Queens, blah, blah, blah." Now I want to say this. How many boys at age 13 that play hooky from school would come home and tell his mother that he did so? And he did. In defense of my son, let's have some defense of Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother. The Warren Commission's 26-volume investigation into the Kennedy assassination discusses Lee's childhood at length. The Commission collected testimony about everything from his favorite board games to his fondness for playing hooky. They described how Mrs. Oswald sent Lee and his brothers to an orphanage then took them out again, how she moved the family around a lot, how this led Lee to become the kind of anti-social loner who'd shoot a president. From Mrs. Oswald's point of view, the government basically gave a grant to people who wanted to prove what a bad mother she was. Plus, she complained to Jean Stafford, they didn't have the courtesy to come to me and verify these facts. They printed whatever they were told. Take, for instance, the testimony her sister gave about a trip Lee took to New Orleans back when he was 11 years old. My sister remarks in her testimony that while he was there, he refused to play with any other children. She went into great details that they tried to get him out of the house and play with the children. Let's understand things a little bit. Here was a perfect stranger, a visitor. I have to smile because the whole thing is so ridiculous. Did she bring any 11-year or 12-year-olds into the home for Lee to meet? And did he refuse to meet them and to go off and play with them? Ah, that would be different. But no, no. So again, let's have defense of Lee Harvey Oswald. Why am I so concerned that the people will understand? It is natural because, as I say, I am in 26 volumes of the president's report, which is all over the world. And so I must defend myself and defend my son Lee. Did Lee like sports? Yes, he loved sports. He played baseball. I know, when I was in the insurance business, I took him to Farrington Field right here in Fort Worth, Texas, and watched him play. He used to play on a team. He belonged to the Y in Fort Worth, Texas. When I think of all the things that this boy did, how can you call him a loner, or an introvert, or whatever they want to call him? Well, he was going to be 20 in October. And that's when he hit Russia, which brings another point. All of the news media, he's such a failure in life, even The Warren Commission, such a failure in life. A failure in life at 19 and 20, a young boy going to Russia? I think this took courage, for whatever reason he went. Most boys are going to college. These men don't understand. These men that are making $100 and $150 a day, the attorneys that are interviewing these witnesses and all. They never lived this type life. I find this a very intelligent boy, and I am really proud. I think he's coming out in history as a very fine boy. She was so convinced that he was coming out in history as a fine boy that she actually tried to get Lee buried in Arlington Cemetery. Even so, it's hard not to feel sympathetic toward her. The most innocuous things she did as a parent were being scrutinized by millions of people. And she didn't believe her son had killed the president. Like 3/4 of all Americans today, she thought he'd been caught up in some bigger conspiracy. Though her ideas about that conspiracy included a few scenarios that The Warren Commission probably didn't bother to investigate. Like her theory that the owners of Neiman Marcus were behind the assassination. Or the one that Lee's Russian wife, Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova was French, not Russian. Or the one that Lee was under surveillance back at Arlington Heights High School. Lee, when we came back to Texas from New Orleans and he entered Arlington Heights High School, he entered in the end of September, I think is when school opens-- oh, let's give and take, the middle of September. And Lee joined the service on October the 17th. So approximately, he was in school four weeks. Yet, there are three pictures of my son for the yearbook. Now why pick out Lee Harvey Oswald? Now you'll say, Mrs. Oswald, I don't get the point. Well, the point is it goes on, and on, and on, and on. This is an instance here, that Lee Harvey Oswald's picture was taken three times at Arlington Heights High School out of all the boys. You understand what I mean? And this goes on and on. It looks as though this boy's life has been supervised. There are some people who would like to think that I have hallucinations. I know. It's been already said in The Warren Commission Report. It was asked by some of the attorneys, point blank, words put in their mouth. Do you think your mother or do you think-- to my sister-- that your sister has hallucinations? Because why? Because I notice the inaccuracies and the coincidences and things that don't jive? Because I know some who wouldn't hesitate to try to make a mental case out of me. And believe me, if anybody's in their right mind, it's Mrs. Marguerite Oswald. There's a way in which the kind of mother Mrs. Oswald most resembled was a stage mother. When Lee was in Russia, she traveled to Washington to personally petition President Kennedy to get him to come home. She spent most of each day managing her son's posthumous career, clipping articles, sending out photographs, phoning reporters, analyzing The Warren Report for character and motivation. But what happens when a stage mother becomes famous too? After the assassination, Mrs. Oswald toured the country, giving speeches about her son. She heard that Ernest Hemingway never gave away his autograph for free and started charging for hers too. She had a sense that she'd been picked to be in history, that she'd been cast in a great American epic. When there was news about Lee and she wasn't included, she was offended. For instance, when Lee's diary mysteriously appeared, she couldn't believe that the FBI didn't call to see if she'd been the one to release it. After the third day, I called the FBI, which is in Dallas. And I forget the man's name, and I told him who I was. And I said, I have been waiting for somebody to come over and question me about the release of the so-called diary. And I said, nobody has. And he said, well, do you have the diary, Mrs. Oswald? And I said, no, I don't. But I just can't imagine all the fuss about the diary and not coming and asking if I released the diary. He said, because they know you didn't have it. But you see, now this is a good example of agent or of whatever you want to say. Because, here, I could have had the diary if they were sincere. Let's face it. You see, one and one don't make two. My book's going to be One and One Don't Make Two or This and That. Those are the titles I'd like to have. Mrs. Oswald honestly didn't understand why she didn't get the same kind of sympathy Mrs. Kennedy did. She felt a kind of kinship with her. In Mrs. Oswald's mind, they'd gone through something very similar. I'm not unhappy, Jean. You can see I'm not. But really, I am a mother in history. I'm all over the world. My son's the one accused. History's been made because of him. And here, we have Mrs. Kennedy very well and Marina very well. And here, I'm wondering where my next meal is coming from. And it's almost unbelievable. Sometimes it's almost like a spiritual thing because if you research Jesus Christ's mother, you never heard any more about the mother of Jesus, Mary, after he was crucified on the cross. At the end of the day, when her driver arrived to pick her up, Jean Stafford decided to leave the tape recorders at Mrs. Oswald's house overnight. They were heavy, and she was coming back the next day anyway. Early the next morning, Stafford lay in bed, dreading her session with Mrs. Oswald. "My impulse was to eliminate the day by taking a sleeping pill," she confessed. While Stafford dawdled in her hotel room, Mrs. Oswald picked up the microphone and started to speak. It was Mother's Day. Jean, you left the tape recorders yesterday afternoon in my home, which was Saturday, so that we could work again about an hour today. Upon waking up this morning, and it being Mother's Day, I've decided that in defense of myself and my son, Lee Harvey Oswald, I would put a little something on the tape. I sincerely hope that you will find it newsworthy and print it. Mrs. Oswald began reading from The Warren Report, page 378, which describes how she left Lee home alone a lot when she had a job selling insurance. "This is not true," she exclaimed. From there, she pointed out that telling Lee not to talk to strangers did not make him a loner and offered menus of the nutritious dinners she cooked for her family, such as spaghetti and meatballs. "This," Jean Stafford writes, "is what she witnessed as her car crept up the street in a rainstorm." Somewhere in the neighborhood, a voice, much amplified, was blaring. "I thought at first it was coming from the soundtrack of a political candidate on a mobile stump or from one advertising an American Legion carnival. But as I got out of the car, I realized that it was pouring out of Mrs. Oswald's house and that the voice belonged to her." Mrs. Oswald was playing back the tape she had made that morning, doing the work she'd devoted her life to, answering questions no one had asked, piling detail on detail, amplifying her voice in a quiet neighborhood where nobody seemed to be listening. Really and truly, as I say, this is Mother's Day I'm taping. And I'm very proud of the role that I played as a mother. This American Life producer Susan Burton. Act Three, You Don't Have To Be An Einstein. After he died, here are some of the unfortunate things that happened to physicist Albert Einstein. He started showing up as a comic character in Hollywood films. He appeared in Pepsi ads with that evil little girl. And until very recently, his very brain was on the loose without his family's consent in the unauthorized possession of the doctor who did the autopsy, a man named Thomas Harvey. Mike Paterniti recently took a cross country road trip with Doctor Harvey and the brain. At one point, in search of the global epicenter of those who have attached themselves to Einstein after the physicist's death, Mike headed to Japan. Kenji Sugimoto is an obscure math professor at a place called Kinki University in Osaka, Japan. He is also one of the most prolific collectors of Einsteiniana in the world. When I find him at his office at Kinki, he's wearing a green tie with Einstein's face on it. He offers me a seat, then realizes it's occupied by a huge canvas, a crude, though heartfelt portrait of Einstein in later life. He briefly admires it, by way of registering its importance, and sets it on the floor next to a trembling tower of Einstein books. He produces a cache of black-and-white photographs, marking Einstein's progress through Japan during his 1922 trip here. These are among his most prized possessions. Einstein, wearing a heavy overcoat and wide-brimmed hat against the December chill, looking more exorcist than physicist. Einstein jamming on a piano. Einstein standing before a chalkboard scrawled with inscrutable equations, a nimbus of numbers about his head, under the rapt gaze of his audience. As we riffle through the photographs, the professor runs his fingers over them as if reading Braille, traces the path on which Einstein is seen walking, gently touches the great scientist's head. We're interrupted by a knock at the door, three sharp raps, and then in step the polished wingtips of a man introduced to me only as Abe, Kenji's good friend and secretary of the Einstein World Congress, an organization founded by Sugimoto to further cooperation among Einstein scholars and enthusiasts as well as to establish the first-ever Albert Einstein museum. Abe is dressed in a very sharp, shiny suit, the coral color of the sea off Bora Bora. Sugimoto and Abe stand amid the clutter of Sugimoto's office, talking turkey. They need $3 million to make the museum work. And most of all, they need the support of the powerful Mr. Kobe, the director of Kinki University and the man who apparently can make it rain gold doubloons if he likes the cut of your jib. Abe is here to join us for lunch with the powerful Mr. Kobe. And when Sugimoto consults his wristwatch and realizes we're late, both World Congress members suddenly look stricken, compose themselves, straighten their respective ties, slap each other on the back as a kind of psych, then lead me out of the office and up the elevator. When I first spy the powerful Mr. Kobe, he is sitting behind a large desk, chatting on the phone. He is a larger man than either Sugimoto or Abe, with big hands and an impassive face. He has a way of looking through a person to the skeleton reality of who you really are. He gives me a grave look and a bone-crushing handshake. I'm introduced as an American scholar though he doesn't even pretend to buy that nonsense. In his presence, even Sugimoto is more subdued, a bit more manly. There's some tough guy small talk, and the powerful Mr. Kobe's voice is a low, commanding rumble like a tank unit running through an abandoned village. Everything rides behind it. With the food, the mood lightens. Abe lays out a business plan for the Einstein museum. And Sugimoto breaks in every now and again with a statement, uttered seriously, that seems utterly unserious. With each intervention, the powerful Mr. Kobe lets out a low, Lurch-like growl, as if stricken by indigestion, then goes back to chain smoking. When the powerful Mr. Kobe gazes out at the Kusunoki Mountains, he seems to be considering the cost benefit neon-light proposition of Kinki University's Einstein museum, a place where day and night, the citizens of the world will stand on line, pockets bursting with Yen. Next up is the teacher's lounge, where Kenji seats me on a naugahyde couch, then rushes from the room and returns with a videotape, a 1994 BBC documentary about Kenji's journey to America to find Doctor Thomas Harvey and Einstein's brain. Kenji refers to it as "my movie." In it, he crisscrosses the country on a bizarre, month-long odyssey from the corridors of Princeton Hospital to a succession of humdrum Midwestern towns, dogging anyone who might know anything about Einstein's brain until he finds Doctor Harvey in Lawrence, Kansas, an old man sleeping on a sofa bed in a cramped apartment. When Kenji requests a piece of Einstein's brain, Harvey takes a steak knife from a kitchen drawer, places his hand in a glass cookie jar full of brain, and fishes out a slab, plopping it on a wood cutting board, where he silently begins slicing. And it is here where the off-screen Kenji, the real Kenji, intervenes. Impatiently, emphatically, he plunks a white canister on the table before me, switching off the television, then pacing around the table a couple of times. Then he rolls up his sleeves, loosens the knot of his tie, and unlids it. Inside the canister is a tea tin, a purple Twinings container, flavor Lapsang Souchong. Kenji gently removes it and, again, pries off another lid. Here, he reaches slowly into its dark gullet and pulls out two wide-mouthed, plastic pill containers. These, he ceremoniously sets on the table, as if he's handling two Faberge eggs. When he screws off these last lids, we both draw close, expectantly. "Einstein brain," says Kenji, beaming broadly, gesturing to the formaldehyde pools in each container. The smell catches me first. I come forward, breathing solely through my mouth. What floats in the liquid looks less like a brain than a sneeze, just gobby pieces of phlegm. "Shono," Kenji blurts, in his excitement, momentarily abandoning his English. "Cerebellum," shaped like a bonsai tree. "Piece of Einstein's brain bring harmony," he says. "My spirit belongs to Einstein's brain." He riffles through a Japanese-English dictionary that he has brought with him from his office. "Shugo," he says. "Divine protection." Then "ishiki." "Consciousness, oneself." We sit in silence. And after a time, I move closer to the floating brain bits again. "But what does it mean," I ask him, both repulsed and fascinated. Kenji furrows his brow, starts to speak, then stops, then starts again, considers the question at length, trying to forge the perfect grammatical sentence. "To be or not to be," he says. "This is what Einstein's brain is all about." After seeing the brain, there is nothing to do but celebrate by going to a karaoke lounge, a favorite haunt of Kenji and his colleagues. There are seven or eight ladies who attend to the clientele, a collection of suited men in various states of besotment. I'm introduced to Miss Michiko Miyata, the matron of the lounge. A short, friendly, over-busy woman who employs a quiet arsenal of hand signals, whispers, rib-prodding, and foot-stamping, all with a smile to keep her girls in line and on the ready. The hostesses have names like Jun and Kyoko. And one 19-year-old Chinese singer, with eyes of soft, brown liquid, is called Lily. Of all people, the powerful Mr. Kobe is here too, wearing his Noh mask of no expression, sitting in a dark corner, accepting visits from his minions, chain smoking Omar Sharif cigarettes, and making neat work of his whiskey. He is here, I'm told, six nights a week, all except Sunday. The powerful Mr. Kobe regards me from behind a wraith of smoke, but shows no flicker of recognition. The set of his face is severe, a perpetual frown from the heavy, heavy weight of his world. One of the most pleasant surprises of the night is that Kenji has a beautiful Wayne Newton voice, a supple manliness in the notes he sings to a syrupy Japanese favorite, "Blue Airport," the tale of two lovers separated by a plane trip of some sort, thankfully reunited when the return ticket is executed. He sways, he closes a fist to show pain. After some point in the evening, everyone is sloshed and beginning on a maudlin march to some unknown destination. The hostess named Lily has sung with a slew of men. And now, I'm told, that this is Lily's last evening with the troops after three years of singing at this lounge, of being in all of their lives. She is going back to China in the morning. It is very late when, at the proddings of the patrons, Lily picks up one of the cordless mics and begins a slow, sad goodbye song in Chinese. She is unquestionably stunning, long, black hair, full lips, a thin back partially revealed by her gown. As she sweetly finds the notes, as she throws herself into one last song, I realize people are weeping-- the hostesses, the men, Kenji. And Lily, who has been doing just fine, begins to falter, realizes that this is it, that her life lived at night in the cozy confines of this purple-lit lounge, among so many men who have become like fathers to her, among her fellow sisters, who have watched her become a woman, this life of money and freedom and joy will so cruelly end with a short flight to Beijing and the prison of her family. And then she is blubbering, honest wails that she tries to suppress, her grief monstrously revealed in the professional spotlight. The music carries on without her, mournfully, slowly, but with a trace of seeming malice now. Though she is trying not to lose face, she can only eke out a word or two of each verse in an attempt to catch up, bent at the waist, covering her eyes. In her last act as a karaoke lounge singer, she is dying on stage. A wave of discomfort washes over the room. But then suddenly, just as one hostess begins to rush toward the crumpled girl, a voice rises out of nowhere like a large-winged bird. Out of the shadows in the room, on a second cordless mic, a strong, full-timbred voice, deep and sure, conveying with each note the ache and pathos of goodbye, the rent feelings of everyone in the room, the death of this era, the Lily years. There is so much emotion in it, a remarkable lifetime of feeling, really, and yet such strength that even Lily looks up from where she is kneeling, a single tear sparkling on her cheek. And rising from his table, stepping into the spotlight is-- impossible-- the powerful Mr. Kobe. He stands before Lily in his well-tailored suit though he doesn't offer her a hand. He just sings. Lily, looking up to him, gains her balance, rises from the floor, and begins to sing again too. And he carries her right to the end. And everybody is bawling. When the song is over, Lily smiles, then turns to the powerful Mr. Kobe and bows to him. He nods stiffly, retires to his table, and then later, when she visits him one last time, he presents her with an envelope full of money. Even as formality and reticence slowly reassert themselves, something has happened here that no one will forget. It's one of the most honest acts of love I've ever witnessed. Out in the early morning street, six of us pile into a cab, Kenji, me, and some of his inebriated friends. No one says anything. We just watch as the neon lights of downtown Osaka fall into the melancholy swirl of the river. During the war, after Tokyo was firebombed, American fighter jets attacked Osaka, destroying much of the downtown where we now drive. Kenji himself was born in the short years after his own hometown, Nagasaki, was obliterated. His parents somehow survived the horrors of Einstein's most dubious legacy, the bomb. It's only when we come to where I'm staying, only after I've gotten out of the cab and placed a hand on its closed door, that Kenji comes down from some faraway place in his mind. "To be, Mr. Michael," he says. "It's much better to be." Mike Paterniti reading an excerpt from his book Driving Mr. Albert. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who says that he is not defensive. You just have to remember. I am in 26 volumes of the president's report which is all over the world. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Hello. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a bunch of different stories on that theme. And the best way to describe the theme of today's show is to kind of sidestep it for a minute and to begin with this story. One of our producers here at the radio show, Blue Chevigny, was living in New York a few years ago with a woman that describes as a kind of random roommate, an aspiring actress. In the middle of the night one night, the phone rang. And it was some crank caller, stalker-y kind of person. He'd start saying these creepy things to her. And it wasn't just a crank call, because they knew her name. Her roommate hangs up on him, and he calls back. And then she tells him off, then he calls back again. And then she stops picking up the phone. But it keeps ringing. And it's not exactly clear what to do. Middle of the night. So they call the police. Blue tells the rest of the story. So the police come. They come up to our apartment. We're on the sixth floor of a walk-up. They come up, huffing and puffing up the stairs. It's in the middle of the night. Our apartment's a mess. It's just strange having these strangers come into your house. It's just cinematic and disorienting. I mean, they're in their cop uniforms with these guns. And one of them is this 40-something, heavy, balding, Italian-y looking, Sipowicz kind of guy. He looks like Detective Sipowicz from NYPD Blue, Pretty much exactly. And then the other guy is this younger, really good-looking black guy. And they both just looks like they're off a TV show about the cops. They start asking us about what's happening. And we're explaining. And my roommate just goes into this whole-- launches into this whole thing about how she's an actress, and people are calling her, and people get her phone number off her headshot. It's got her picture and her name and her phone number all in one place. It's really scary. And the young black cop says to her, "Oh, you know, I've had that experience, because I'm an actor, too." He says, "Oh, I don't do it much anymore, but, you know, I was really pretty serious about it before I became a cop." They start talking about what it's like-- because they're both black, and young-- playing parts in plays and auditioning for things where there aren't that many parts that are interesting for black people. And it turns out that my roommate has played the part of Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet, in which she was the only black person in the play. And that he's played the part of Romeo in a production of Romeo and Juliet where he was the only black person in the play. So they have this in common. They're talking about playing Shakespeare. They're having this whole kind of very insider, actor-y conversation about this. Just out of nowhere. When really, looking at him, you would have just thought, cop. Meanwhile, the phone rings at some point in this conversation. And so they say, pick it up. And so my roommate picks up the phone and it's the same guy. And the cop that looks like Detective Sipowicz is gesturing for her to give him the phone. So she hands him the phone. And he gets on the phone and he says, "This is the NYPD. Don't call here anymore. If you keep calling here, we're going to trace the call and get you." He somehow indicates that they can catch him. And the guy hangs up the phone. And there's no more phone calls. The guy doesn't call again. Ever. After that, basically their job is done. But they still-- they're just kind of hanging around, talking for a few more minutes about this acting thing. And then the Sipowicz cop guy says to my roommate, he says, "If you're an actress, you should send your headshot to my sister, because she's a filmmaker. She's a small independent filmmaker." And we're like, "Oh, who is she? Who is she?" He's like, "Oh, well, I don't know if you would have heard of her. She just makes independent films." And we're like, "Well, we like independent films. Who is she?" And He says, "Nancy Savoca." Who's this, you know, pretty famous little independent filmmaker lady. She made these movies that I had seen and that my roommate had seen-- this movie True Love that's great, and this movie Household Saints with Lili Taylor. And she's just a really cool woman filmmaker. And I look over at his badge and it says Detective Savoca on it. It was just bizarre. It was his sister was this indie scene woman. And he's Sipowicz, you know? So it's just funny, and we're talking about that. And then the younger cop chimes in and says, "Well, your sister's not the only one who is creative in the family." And the Sipowicz guy gets all kind of sheepish and shy and is like, "Oh, no no no." And we're like, "What?" And the young cop says, "Well, you know, Detective Savoca over here-- Officer Savoca-- he just sent in his demo tape to Carole King." And we're like, "Carole King?" And I'm like as in, "I feel the earth move under my feet?" And he's like, "Yeah, yeah. Carole King." And we're all like, "What?" And I was like, "Your demo tape? Demo of what?" And he's like, "Well, I'm a singer/songwriter." And I said, "And why did you send it to Carole King?" And he says, "Well, because I really like her songs and our styles are somewhat similar." And it was just one of those things where here you are, it's 1997. Somebody's style, anybody's style, is still like Carole King? Plus it's this guy-- the most Sipowicz-looking guy you ever saw in your life? And it was just-- it was of those things, it was totally inspiring to me. Because it made me feel like just, as I suspected, as I hoped, it seemed that everybody was up to something extra on the side, had a secret talent or passion or interest, the secret thing that they love to do. One of the odd things about the founding of the United States of America is a phrase found in the Declaration of Independence, the phrase about life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness. What exactly does it mean to grow up in a country where you have an inalienable right to pursue your own happiness? Did Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers really mean it's OK to fill our hours making demos, sending them out to Carole King? If you ask a historian who studies this sort of thing-- if you ask the historian who I asked, anyway-- it becomes clear very quickly that this is not their favorite question. That seems to be the big question. Everyone asks that. And there is no simple answer. Pauline Maier is an expert on the Declaration of Independence. She's written a book on the Declaration of Independence. And she says all anyone ever remembers or wants to talk to her about, when it comes to the Declaration of Independence, is this one phrase, the pursuit of happiness. As a people, we Americans tend to ignore everything else about this document. Instead-- They puzzle over what does this right mean. If you have a right to trial by jury, that's pretty easy to define. But the pursuit of happiness seems somehow much more ambiguous. And I suppose it is. Because it is less concrete. It contains a promise. And almost like the kind of promise that you'd hear contained in a rock and roll song. Here's one of the founding documents of the country, which includes the phrase-- Which cares about how we feel about things in some way. The best scholarly comment on this that I've come across is by an intellectual historian named Ronald Hamowy who says, basically Jefferson left it to people to decide what gave them happiness. Happiness is, if you think about it, an extraordinarily private thing. What gives one person happiness is another person's discontent. Some people love to play golf. To me, it would be misery incarnate chasing a little white ball over all those green hills, under beating sun. You know, it's a very private-- it's extremely private. It's extremely personal. And there's a kind of an assurance that you can do what gives you the kind of contentment, that it was left to individuals to decide. Still, we have a puritanical streak that is also part of our heritage. And for a lot of us, the notion that we're going to just pursue happiness-- it seems frivolous. It lacks dignity. It lacks moral seriousness. Today on our radio program, a defense of the American notion that there is a decency to doing something just because it makes us happy. Our show, as always, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International. Today's program, The Pursuit of Happiness, in four acts. Act One, One Man's Treasure Is Another Man's Trash. David Rakoff heads out with 40 strangers in the middle of the night to tour the city in a completely pointless activity. Act Two, When Happiness Hurtles Downward Like Rain, in which we examine one small case in which the pursuit of happiness goes too far. Act Three, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. We ask why one certain group of New Yorkers is far more beloved-- far happier, probably-- in Chicago than they ever are back home in New York. Act Four, How to Be Happy, One Man's Guide. Stay with us. Act One, One Man's Treasure is Another Man's Trash. We begin this show about the pursuit of happiness with a story about an actual pursuit-- a scavenger hunt, that takes hundreds of hours to create, done for the sheer pleasure of it. David Rakoff left the sober peace and relative quiet of his apartment this summer for a night out with over three dozen happiness-seeking strangers. Jamie, captain of the white team, is reading the instructions to us, his five team members. Apparently, when we solve our first clue, we are to call into HQ, the nerve center, where, it seems, our progress will be plotted on a wall-sized map with push pins. This updates your location on the master map and starts a one-hour timer. One hour after this call, if you haven't found the next clue, you can call again for a hint. One hour? Oh my god. Half an hour after we give you the first hint you are entitled to a second hint. 15 minutes after that, if you still haven't found the next clue, we tell you where it is. Although this scavenger hunt is called Midnight Madness, and is modeled after a 1980 movie by the same name-- a movie that Mat Laibowitz, the organizer of this event, has seen dozens, if not hundreds, of times-- it is happily only after 8:00 in the evening when all seven teams-- some 40 of us in all-- convene on the plaza in front of the World Trade Center. Believe me, it will be midnight soon enough. Our playing field for the evening is Manhattan, anywhere south of Houston and east of Broadway, an area which includes Wall Street, Chinatown, Little Italy and all of the Lower East Side. We will move from location to location, following a series of stealthily hidden clues. I joined Jamie's team because, like most people, I'd like to think of myself as being spontaneous, ready for anything, fun. It will prove to be an evening of hard-won insights. The first is, I am lousy at puzzles, riddles, and games, with a negative capacity to solve clues. The clue is "Three Eyebrows." You know, we're standing in a bank lobby. "Three Eyebrows" turns out to be an anagram for Bowery and Hester, not some downtown picture of Frida Kahlo, as I actually suggested. It's a clue that says, "The shortest distance to this subway station is four from Union Square, five from Union Street, and five from Wall Street." This is actually the Delancey Street subway, not the Brooklyn Bridge stop as I posited, which is a good $6.00 cab ride out of the way. Ah, there you go. There you go. Very clever. Very clever. It's a picture of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. And [? the sighting is ?] Queen Elizabeth. This is a clue directing us to go to the corner of Prince and Elizabeth streets. Even I got that. I'm not a complete idiot. All told, it will be an evening of over seven hours' duration before I finally give up. My team's peregrinations will take us, both in taxis and on foot, from the World Trade Center to Bowery and Bayard, to Bowery and Hester, to the McDonald's on Canal Street, to the Brooklyn Bridge, to the Delancey Street subway, to-- you get the picture. There is anger. There is treachery. And there is a fair amount of boredom. Case in point, one particularly long stretch when all 40 of us stand around on the corner of Prince and Elizabeth for the better part of an hour, watching happy diners come and go from restaurants, gingerly nudging trash aside with our feet, unable to find the clues. I can just feel the puns raining from my body. As abject as this extended loitering sounds, it's not. Some of the clues are downright beautiful. In the Delancey Street subway, the clue was a perfect mock-up of a Transit Authority notice taped to the white wall-- the font, the paper stock, right down to the two Ms for Midnight Madness, printed in that bold white uppercase letter in a black circle that indicates a subway line. Everything about it is such a flawless imitation that we walked by it three times before realizing. One year the game masters printed the clue in fake Chinese takeout menus and threw them around a building lobby. I asked Dan Michaelson, Mat's co-game master, about his favorite moment of the night. There was a moment during the damage control when everybody was in Battery Park. So we got to see everyone at that time and walk around. That, to me, was a really nice moment. It's no great revelation that he and I might have different ideas of what constitutes a good time. People are rarely in sync. One person's gun safety lock is another person's abridgement of their most sacred right. One person's Barbra Streisand concert is another person's, well, Barbra Streisand concert. I know the moment Dan is talking about. It was when we were all at the War Memorial, a starkly beautiful plaza right by the water with about a dozen huge concrete slabs, 20 feet high by 18 feet wide, engraved with the names of the young men who gave their lives for their country. The players walk around shining their flashlights over the tablets, looking for the names of soldiers that correspond to the clue that has been dredged up from the depths of the Hudson River. I might agree with Dan about how nice this moment was if it was during the day. But it is close to 4:00 in the morning. My brain has long since stopped functioning. My feet hurt. I am tired. And I am very, very cranky. Rats scurry through the bushes nearby. Mosquitoes buzz about our ears, their thoraxes no doubt full of West Nile virus. Just then, Jamie runs into a friend of his. This friend is not part of our game. I'll let you in on something. If you are a gay man walking through a dark New York City park at 3:30 in the morning, there is a reason for it. And that reason is not so you will run into someone you know. In fact, the last person you want to run into is someone you know. Actually, the second last person you want to run into is someone you know. The very last person you want to run into is someone you know accompanied by dozens of jolly amateur sleuths. With flashlights. Jamie's friend beats a hasty retreat. My co-Encyclopedia Browns go back to parsing the tombstones while I, in turn, come upon my second insight of the evening. I am no fun, no fun at all. Or perhaps I'm just a different kind of fun. I decide to follow my own bliss-- the bliss of the quitter, the killjoy, the pill. Emerging from the park, I hail a cab. Hurtling through the deserted canyons of the Wall Street area, I settle back into the seat of the taxi. I'm on my way home to bed. And for almost the first time that evening, I feel happy. David Rakoff. Act Two, When Happiness Hurtles Down Like Rain from Heaven. Back when Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "pursuit of happiness" into the Declaration of Independence, the phrase was kind of knocking around. People used it. And one of the ideas that it referred to was the notion that people would find happiness when they did things for the common good, teamed together for everybody's well being. A very democratic idea. In modern times we rarely hear the word used this way, the phrase used this way. If anything, when we talk about people pursuing happiness, they're pursuing their own happiness, sometimes at the expense of others. We have this short story from Thomas Beller about one of the smallest possible examples of this more selfish kind of pursuit, of how we go from the innocently amusing of ourselves to less innocent activities. Alex Fader grew up in an apartment on the 14th floor of a large, prewar building that took up an entire block of Riverside Drive. From his bedroom window, which looked north, he could see a broad patch of sky, the tops of buildings, a multitude of wooden water towers. And off to the left, visible only if he pressed his cheek to the window pane, the Hudson River. The view that most fascinated him, however, was the one to be had by looking directly down. Once when he was six, he suddenly rose from his bath, opened the narrow bathroom window above it, and leaned out. He balanced on his wet stomach, arms and legs outstretched like Superman, contemplating what it would be like to take the plunge, and if his life so far had contained enough satisfaction so that it could now reasonably come to a close. He stayed teetering on the window sill, looking at the distant pavement below, trying to imagine what it would feel like to land there and what he would be thinking during those thrilling seconds of flight. Half his body felt the moist familiarity of the bathroom. And the other half, wet and gleaming like a dolphin, hung in the cold air of the unknown. Then a faint curiosity as to what would happen after his fall-- the ensuing hours and days, the circuit itself. He pictured himself in a steaming heap on the concrete below, and a few minutes later, his parents would be staring confusedly at the bathtub, full of murky water but empty of him. The image of his parents trying to make sense of the empty bath was amusing at first but then became unpleasant. With the same entranced conviction with which he had got up on the ledge, he got down, closed the window, and resumed his bath. Having decided he would not throw his body out the window, he began throwing smaller, less valuable objects. First, a cracker. It went spinning out the window and out of sight and its absence seemed profound. Next were water balloons, whose wobbly downward trajectory he always monitored until they hit the ground, after which the small figure of the doorman would appear hustling out onto the wet pavement, looking up. Alex loved the sight of this tiny figure, so formidable in real life, appearing on the sidewalk. But in watching from above, he was usually spotted from below. Things were different at his friend Walker's apartment. Walker lived a few blocks south of Alex on Riverside Drive, also on the 14th floor. They were 10, and new best friends. And Walker was constantly surprising him with new and interesting ways to express malice. With regard to throwing things out the window, it was Walker who introduced the idea of a human target. The windows of Walker's apartment all looked out over the Hudson River, and directly below was a broad, lonely patch of sidewalk onto which people arrived like actors walking onto a stage. They would stand perched at Walker's kitchen window, both holding onto a pot full of water balanced on the ledge, waiting for a suitable victim. They once observed an attractive young woman walking briskly, with a bouquet of flowers in her hands, towards a man who was standing with several suitcases around him, as though waiting for a taxi, right beneath their window. He was a perfect victim. They were about to douse the man with water, but it looked like something incredibly romantic was about to occur, some long awaited reunion. And Alex and Walker instinctively held back and watched. The woman had a strapless top on. And even from the distance of 14 floors, Alex could make out the subtle jump of her shoulder muscles and the tremulous softness of her breasts as they bounced up and down with each step. The flowers had delicate pink petals. The man with the suitcases stared at her as she approached with bold strides. His body was still and unmoving, his gaze fixed. He was oblivious to everything else in the world but her. She walked right up to him and bashed him in the face with the bouquet, a violent forehand smash. The petals scattered like confetti. Then, without missing a beat, she turned on her heel and stomped back in the direction she had come, still clutching the considerably less flowery bouquet. The man just stood there. Alex and Walker were so transfixed by this scene they forgot to pour water on him. Other people were less fortunate. Alex and Walker would stand guard at the kitchen window until someone appeared on Riverside Drive. There would be time to size up the target-- gait, posture, clothes. At a certain ideal moment, the water would fall forward from their pot in one solid translucent mass and then split in half, and then in half again, and again, so that what started as a single glob on the 14th floor ended as a thousand pellets of water on the ground. The pale pavement darkened, and the victim became completely still. This momentary freeze was, for some reason, the most delicious part. There was one set of victims who stayed in Alex's mind for a long time afterwards. A little girl wearing a pink coat, white stockings, and shiny black shoes ambled down the sunny street a half step behind her mother. She looked as if she were on her way either to or from a party. She walked with unsteady steps and her mother walked beside her, looking down and talking, but also giving the girl her independence. They were two small objects alone on the sidewalk. The water hit the ground in a great hissing mass and they froze like everyone else. But in the several seconds between the pour and the splatter, as Alex watched the water fragment and descend, a tremendous pang of regret leapt up in his stomach instead of the more familiar thrill. As he watched the jerky, awkward expressiveness of the little girl walking beneath the water's widening net, he understood that there was a small corrupting moment about to take place. One kid introducing another to the random world of fate and bad luck. Thomas Beller reading from his novel The Sleep-Over Artist. Coming up, a second story about New York cops, which'll show you another side of them that you have also never imagined. That's in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme. Today's program, The Pursuit of Happiness. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but in the years since Thomas Jefferson declared that it was our inalienable right to pursue happiness, we have pursued it about as aggressively as any group of people could. We invent pointless, time-wasting activities like no place else does-- the television industry, all manner of extreme sports, Nerf equipment. We are the world's biggest proponents of the idea of just hitting the road and starting a new life if the old one does not suit you. We perpetually create new ways to have fun. Which is sort of the subject of the next act of today's show. Act Three, When Irish Eyes are Smiling. Every year the Emerald Society, an association of Irish Chicago police officers, flies in policemen from New York City for Chicago's two big Saint Patrick's Day parades. Every year they are met by a group of South Side women. This American Life producer Julie Snyder tells the story. There are two main Irish cop bars in Chicago. One is called Dugan's in the not-so-Irish neighborhood of Greektown. The other is the not-so-Irish-named Ira's, located in Chicago's 12th police district. And normally these bars are pretty tame, filled mainly with men watching sports on the overhead TVs. But on the Saturday of Saint Patrick's Day weekend, everything changes. The bars are filled with women, who are there for the New York City police officers, who are there for the women, who are there because they get to act in a way they never normally act. Normally, you wouldn't make out in a bar. Especially at our age, we're too old for that. But by 4:00, 5:00, 6:00 in the afternoon, sure. You can give somebody a big smooch at the bar. That's totally acceptable that weekend. Kelly [? Farider ?] is a waitress at Dugan's, and she's the person who originally told me about the New York City cops coming to Chicago. But when I called her recently to find out more, she said she'd really have to take me to the source. So we got together one night in Tammy [? Tanzillo's ?] living room, surrounded by police paraphernalia-- policeman's hats, shirts, photographs. Tammy is 40-ish, completely beautiful, and is an attorney for the state of Illinois. She is also the original New York police groupie. It all started about 13 or 14 years ago. At the time, Tammy knew a lot of Chicago cops because she trained supervisors in the police department. And one Friday night, like most Friday nights, she went to Dugan's after she got off work. And one of the cops that I knew was there, and he had a bunch of guys with him. No one was in uniform or anything. And he said, "I have a favor to ask you." And I said, "What?" I just got done with work, I had-- this was at least 12 years ago, I had on those big beetle glasses and a stupid plaid skirt. I looked more like a school teacher than anything else. Which isn't a bad thing but not in that circumstance. Anyway. So he said, "I need you to help me out." I said, "What do you need?" He said, "Well, I've got this group of 12 New York policemen here, that are here for the weekend for the parades, and I was hoping you could help me to entertain them." And I said, "Whoa. Hold on a minute here. What do you mean by entertain?" And he said, "Seriously, you're a lot of fun to hang out with. Just have a few beers and keep them company and talk to them. I can't talk to them all myself." So I begrudgingly said yes. Well, we had so much fun that from that day on, I was glued to them. The first year, there were 12 guys brought by the Emerald Society into Chicago. By this past year, it had grown to 160 men and women from the New York City police department to march in the Saint Patrick's Day parades. And it's no wonder they come. They're feted at the parades, at parties thrown in their honor, and at the local bars. They're kept on an itinerary that seems completely geared toward making the police officers feel like kings and queens. They are ready to go from the minute that they are feted at Chicago. And that's why a little bit they are followed around. And there are young ladies that-- I think the word is on the street that they're coming to town. I've gotten to be more of a mother figure to some of these guys. I mean, there's a drill. When I show up at the parade, I see them, and I say, make sure that you take your shields off. Make sure that you keep your uniform. Make sure that you stay with the group. Make sure that you don't give away your collar brass too early, because it's going to go up in stock as the weekend goes by. OK. A quick explanation. The officers have to take off their shields, or their badges, because the New York Police Department doesn't officially sanction their trip to Chicago. They have to watch their clothes-- their hats, their jackets, their shirts-- because as the drinking continues, and as the flirting continues, women are constantly taking their things and trying them on. One year, when the weekend was over, Tammy had to FedEx one of the $300 uniform jackets back to a New York precinct. And then there's the collar brass. Everybody, all the women especially, are vying for the collar brass. And I'll show you what that is. Now I have a box about the size of a shoe box full of little numbers. And I couldn't find it, but I did find this little one. And this is what they are. As you can see, they're just about short of an inch high and, depending upon the letter, about an inch long. But that says two four, that'd be the two four. That'd be the 24th precinct in New York. I mean, it becomes a real clothes fest. Well, I'm showing you some of the pictures of what I look like by the end of the night. You know, I mean, that guy's getting a little frisky there. And there was one in here where I was looking really like I was having a good time for a long time. There we go. You're in a police officer's shirt and hat-- That's just not a shirt, that would be a sergeant's shirt. Sorry. The sergeant's shirt. Now are these all the pictures you have, or do you have more than this? Oh, no, I have tons and tons of pictures. In fact, they'll send pictures. This is a picture of Mike, who is the person that now is still coordinating the trip. And you can tell he's having a good time-- big smile on his face, cute young lady sitting on his lap. And Brian. Who's Brian? Brian is the police officer that I met the first year that they had the group here, that I probably will always have a little bit of a crush on. But then there's Joey. This weekend, Saint Patrick's Day weekend, is not really Tammy's actual life. She's a grown up, an attorney who's now in a long-term relationship. But that's the beauty of it all with the New York cops, because none of it is real. Tammy says that all normal, real-life ways of dating don't apply that weekend. How many romances do you think that you've had through the Saint Patrick's Day weekends? During this pause, I can't tell if Tammy's deciding whether to answer the question or counting. I think I have to protect the innocent here. I have taken a shine to a few gentlemen over the years, but always realizing that-- I've had a guy come back over the past couple of years that I've enjoyed some time with. But I'm seeing someone now, so-- you know, your life doesn't stop. Once, when Tammy was dating someone and Saint Patrick's Day was coming up, she told her boyfriend that he may not be seeing much of her that weekend, that maybe it was a good time for him to go on a short, three-day vacation to Wisconsin. She says the following year she didn't even have to ask him to leave. He just knew. All of this might come as a surprise to the citizens of New York City where, to put it mildly, these same New York cops don't get this kind of adulation. Like they say, nobody's a prophet in his own land. Even Tammy, who started a website called NYPD Love, can't explain what makes them seem so larger than life. Tammy comes from a whole Chicago law enforcement family. She says she loves Chicago cops, but the New York police feel different and special. Maybe out here in the Second City, the NYPD gets respect because they seem like the real police, the police we see on TV, the police who just sound like police. I think it's something about those accents. Oh, their New York accents? Yeah. It's so real. It's so real. I mean, they sound so genuine. And most of them really are. To put all this in context, this happens in the Irish part of Chicago's South Side, where lots of people have cops as family and friends. During a weekend when the whole neighborhood turns itself over to one big party, the main event is the South Side Saint Paddy's Parade on Sunday. The parade route on Western Avenue is lined with dingy little Irish bars, the sidewalks are clogged, backyard parties are thrown-- even some with those big white tents-- and you'll hear this song sung over and over and over. [SINGING] "Oh we're the South Side Irish like our fathers were before. We come from the Windy City and we're Irish to the core. From Bridgeport to Beverly, from Midway to South Shore, oh, we're the South Side Irish," and then it goes on and on and on. You know that song. I couldn't even have sung it. And I've heard that about 10,000 times. It's even on the jukebox, actually, in a lot of neighborhood pubs. And most people, in fact, growing up on the South Side with everybody going to the parade, a lot of people know that they're not going to work Monday. They're not kidding themselves, so they take the day off. And growing up out there, it can sort of be a family event too. Because people's parents, they know you go to the parade, but they're going to have dinner waiting back at the house. So you come back, eat dinner. You go to so-and-so's aunt's. I mean, there's a lot of-- I guess it's kind of like Christmas without the presents, but then a lot more beer. Or maybe like New Year's Eve, I suggest. Tammy and Kelly both say, no, it's way better. There's no pressure to look your best, or have the right date or do something significant to mark another year. The great thing about Saint Patrick's Day, they tell me, is that it's not really about anything. So you can make it into whatever you want. This American Life senior producer Julie Snyder. Act Four, How to be Happy, One Man's Guide. Finding happiness is serious business. Or it can be. I think for many of us, it requires an act of will. Nancy Updike tells this story of somebody who decided to turn something that made him unhappy into the opposite. Marcus Johnson runs a boxing gym on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles and he's a great teacher. To explain what makes him so good, let me ask you a question. Have you ever had a parent try to teach you a sport? Where they push you way too hard and you can see them getting more and more frustrated and disappointed. And on the inside you give up, but on the outside you keep going. And they keep going too. And both of you just end up miserable. Marcus is the opposite of that. He's like a good date, where everything feels both easy and serious at the same time. He's always paying attention, always murmuring directions and encouragement. Don't raise up, squat down. Step. Step. There you go. Step. There you go. All of Marcus's clients are adults, except this one, who's the son of a friend. Josh is 11 and this is his first lesson. Josh is, frankly, adorable. He has big brown eyes, dark curly hair, and dimples when he smiles. And he's making a very common beginner's mistake, which is starting his punches from way too far back, telegraphing his every move. Marcus keeps telling Josh he has to be quicker and throw shorter punches. Finally Marcus just starts moving the pads away before Josh can hit them, to show him what can happen with too big a wind-up. It's not fair. Come on, you keep putting your hands back, you're letting me know. You've got to be quick. From right there. Come on. That's how it's got to be. This tastes like I just had a Fruit Roll-up. Did you catch that? Josh made a face and said, "It tastes like I just had a Fruit Roll-up." What did that come from? A Fruit Roll-up? I don't know. Boxers are supposed to-- Boxers are not supposed to be-- The two of them had a ball and Josh visibly improved over the course of just an hour. He relaxed, which is the hardest part of boxing. And then something really sad happened. After Josh was finished, his father walked over. He'd been on his cell phone in the back of the gym the whole time. And he started making Josh do these special tough-guy push-ups, something about keeping your butt in the air and only lowering your chest to the floor. And then push yourself up from there. One more time. One more time. He just went a whole hour, man, boxing. One more time. That's it. You see? Your butt hit the floor before your chest did. You done? Or you dead? You could just see Josh withdraw and get sullen over the course of these exercises. But then even after that-- and I swear I am not making this up-- Josh's father made him read a paragraph about responsibility from some pamphlet out loud, twice, because Josh stumbled the first time. No stuttering. Come on. I have to memorize this? You will. But right now you have to read it clearly. And loud. Um. "Responsibility. Responsibility starts with saying you were cause in the matter." What makes Marcus such a good teacher is that he's not an over-eager parent. And maybe it helps that as a kid, Marcus never even liked boxing. He did it to please his dad, a college track star who almost went to the Olympics and dreamed of turning Marcus into the heavyweight champion of the world. "You're going to be my ticket out of the ghetto," he'd tell Marcus at 13. Then after Marcus's mother died and his father got caught up in the wave of crack that hit the neighborhood in the mid-'80s. his father lost his job, the power got cut off, and Marcus still kept boxing, because the guys at the gym were the only ones who looked after him. They fed him, drove him to school, let him stay with them sometimes. As he told me in the car one day, it was the only part of his life with any promise. I was boxing and I never liked it. But I started making myself like it because I wanted some nice things. I wanted the nice life. I used to tell the guys at the car lot-- I was, like, ninth grade, 10th grade-- you know, what? When I win a gold medal, I'll make the Olympic team or turn pro, I'll be the champion of the world, I'm going to come and buy a car from you. And it was like, OK, all right young man, keep on, hang in there. You know, all right. [PHONE RINGS] Speak to me. I would like to have at least two big screens. Marcus is driving around doing errands for a party he's planning at the gym. He's invited around 70 people, friends and clients, to come watch the Oscar De La Hoya-Sugar Shane Mosley fight. The party's in a few days and Marcus is bringing in two huge televisions, catered soul food, and security to watch the door. Most of his clients are agents, producers, and writers for TV shows-- bigwigs, but behind- the-scenes bigwigs, no one whose name you'd know. Marcus needs more clients. He's had the gym for less than a year and the rent is high. The party is wiping him out, but he doesn't want to talk about that. He gets back into the car after a quick stop at the bank. I ain't happy. Well, I am happy, but I ain't. I ain't got no money. I'm broke. No, no. I got money, but-- I hate that. Is the party tapping you out? No. I mean, I know I got money. I mean, I'm cool. What? I got money. I got an abundant amount of money. Oh, I got money flowing. Woo-hoo, boy. I got loot. I got millions, baby. For real. Marcus's single-minded goal since he was little has been to be happy. A lot of people find happiness too abstract, or maybe too ambitious a goal to aim for. But to Marcus, it's very real. It's something he trains for, and plans for, and believes in. He has a commitment to being happy. When he's not enjoying something anymore, he just stops it-- stops doing it, stops thinking it, stops talking about it. It's hard work. It's daily work. Like in the car at the bank. He won't talk about not having money. He'll pretend he does have money. Like when I watch him get some bad news from a credit card company in the mail. He just stops himself in the middle of getting mad about it and says, "I'm hungry." Like when he started teaching boxing, he made a rule. No hitting in the face. Just because he always hated it. It hurt. So at his gym, you learn to punch hard, move your feet, and keep your stamina up. But no hitting in the face. He still doesn't like boxing. But boxing is what he knows. He wants to use it to get to the point where he can stop boxing. What he really wants is to be an actor, a model, both of which he's done a little bit of. Whenever one of his clients brings a celebrity by the gym-- Puff Daddy, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube-- he can just feel it. He's getting closer. Can you believe somebody hitting this hard, he wrote Harriet the Spy. For children. And look at him. Rrrrr. Rrrrr. Harriet the Spy. Marcus is in the ring with Doug Petrie, a television and screenplay writer. They're practicing a rapid-fire jab-hook-jab combination. When Marcus first started getting more and more Hollywood people, like Doug, as clients, he found he was afraid to speak a lot of the time. He'd hear a voice in his head telling him-- Man, just be quiet. Just shut up, don't say nothing. Just don't ask no questions. Or you are going to make yourself look bad, don't look like no fool. So he made a decision that he was just going to stop worrying all the time about looking bad in front of these rich, college-educated white people. It was miserable. He made a change. I used to listen to people all the time and say the words that they said. And use the words like they use them. And he really does this. I heard him do it with me. We were in the middle of a long talk about the fears that learning to box can help overcome, and somehow the word conjuring came up. We fear the unknown. And it's things that come to us, like in our mind, what we-- what word am I looking for? Not dream, but conjugate up, condur-- Conjuring up. Conjuring up. The fears that you conjure up. Fears that you conjure up, but those-- He went back to the word four minutes later, making sure he'd got it. Because he's going to conju-- con-- say that word again. Conjure. Conjure. He's going to conjure up just different-- what if somebody jumped from out behind the alley and want to take my purse. All those things are conjured up in your mind. 15 minutes later, he used it again, when he was talking about his own fear, his fear of speaking. And this time when he said it, he looked at me and laughed, because he knew he was doing it. I'm listening to people talk all the time. They're doing deals on the phone and these business people. And I'm going, I want to be able to, you know, conjure up words and sound smart. Los Angeles, like every other big city in America, is segregated between black and white. But it's more complete here. The dividing line is the 10 freeway. North of it is West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Hollywood. South of it, where Marcus grew up, is Inglewood, South Central, Watts. The separation is so complete that if you live north of the 10 it's possible to go for a week without laying eyes on a single black person. Only a certain kind of person ever makes the jump from one side of the 10 to the other. And one of the things that makes Marcus capable of it is that it's not a chore for him to find out about new things. He's curious about them. He enjoys it. In high school, when he spent a year at a mostly white school, he started getting into heavy metal, Quiet Riot. Now he eats an organic salad for lunch every day, the kind of food he'd never even heard of growing up. The party is in two days. Marcus is sprucing up. He's already had a manicure and now he's at his sister Michelle's cosmetology class to get his hair rebraided. Michelle is going to show the class how to braid by doing Marcus's hair. He walks through the room introducing himself to everyone, a process that involves a blend of charm, attentiveness and self-effacement so potent that the room feels giddy by the end of it. It's not just because he's 6'1", high cheekbones, model good looks, huge smile. His charm doesn't only work with women. I've seen him work it over the phone with strangers, with someone he cut off in his car. He's interested in people. He asks where they're from, where they live. He notices things about them. While his head is under a faucet a friend of Michelle's is standing next to him, holding the shampoo. How old is your child? Two. You said, how old is my child? Two. Two. Boy? Girl. Girl. He said, how old is your child? I was trying to figure out how he knew I had a child too. Maybe it was just a lucky guess. I ask Marcus about it later, how he'd known she had a child. And he couldn't tell me. He didn't know how he knew. He just had a feeling. I'm going to have the VIP seat. A VIP going to be able to sit in the ring and watch the fight. Nice. It's the afternoon of the party and Marcus is all energy. He's arranging chairs, checking the angle of the two big TVs, one of which is blaring the movie About Last Night. The pre-fights don't start for another two hours. The main event is in five hours. The caterers are setting up tables for the food. They can adjust them. They can move them closer if they want to. You know, this ain't no [UNINTELLIGIBLE], they better fix them chairs where they can see. It's like a backyard barbecue. I know we here in Hollywood, and Hollywood is going to be in here, but we doing it the old-fashioned way. You better get your plate on, your paper plate, and get your plastic fork and spoon and your water. It's all good. In 45 minutes the food is set up. It smells great, and there's a ton of it, enough for 100 people-- cornbread, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken. Everything's all set. The TVs are on the right channel. The doors are open. Over the next several hours, people trickle in. Some family, some friends from Inglewood and South Central, Marcus's pastor, people he knew from boxing. But Hollywood never shows up. Clients he's had for three years, people whose Passover Seders he's attended. Only two of Marcus's clients come by, and one of them is the kid, Josh. I'm one of about half a dozen white people. Marcus's frenzied party energy dissipates slowly over the hours. But he stays charming with everyone he talks to, seems genuinely happy to see the people who do come. His poise is painful to watch. During the five hours of the party, and in the days afterward, I never hear him suggest that anything that night is a disappointment. If he ever thinks such a thought, I'm sure he stops himself. There's something I haven't told you about Marcus. Two weeks before I started interviewing him for this story, he found God. As Marcus puts it, he gave his life to Christ. The whole time I was interviewing him, all I wanted to talk about was what he did to get where he is, and all he wanted to talk about was how God was the real force behind every good thing in his life. It frustrated me. Marcus's faith kept intruding on the story I wanted to get. I wanted to know about Marcus's life, his experiences, his choices, the hard work of creating a happy life. That was going to be my whole point in this story, that we pretend happiness is some natural state we would just fall into if we stopped running around being so ambitious and greedy and self-obsessed. When, in fact, it takes tremendous effort to be happy. But if I'm looking at Marcus as a study in how to be happy, then there's something besides hard work that you need to be happy. You need faith. Not necessarily religious faith, although in Marcus's case it is. But you do need to believe that happiness is possible. You need to accept that. That's what God gave Marcus. My motto is "Feed the faith and starve the doubt." Now I just have faith. I just got faith. I'm out here on faith. I did everything on faith. What did you go on, how did you keep going before you started believing in God again? This is what I'm telling you. I was just going without the belief of God. I just was going on just my strength, courage and faith. And I wasn't going to quit. I was going to find out. I wanted the life that I wanted. And I wanted a life of peace and happiness. I wanted heaven on earth, that's what I wanted. I lived on this street here. When I started boxing, I started boxing on this block right here. We're driving down the street Marcus lived on when he was 13, Manhattan Place. His godmother still lives on the block. Hi, Ms. Culvert. Heya. Hi, ma. How you doing, son? Fine. We only stay for a few minutes, just long enough for him to tell her the big news. Guess what? What? I gave my life to Christ, who saved me. Praise the Lord. He saved me. Mother's Day. That's the greatest that you ever could have done in life. He saved me Mother's Day. That's the greatest thing you could have ever done in life. I said to myself, what have I been doing this whole time? OK. Nothing like being in the hands of the Lord, is there? Nothing. Nothing. See why I stay with it? At this point, she abruptly turns to me while Marcus is still talking and asks, "Do you know God?" I shake my head, and she gives me a look so startling, a combination of bewilderment, pity and disgust. And then she turns away. We can't stay long. I've got to get ready to go. I just stopped by to just say hi. OK. All right, good to see you. And give you a hug and say, God bless you. We get in the car and drive back across the 10. I love you. Love you too, baby. You know we do. Hurry back, now. All right. Nancy Updike. Our program was produced today by Blue Chevigny and myself with Alex Blumberg and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike and consiglierie Sarah Vowell. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Hillary Frank. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. 312-832-3380. Or you can listen to our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who begins every staff meeting with his weird diatribes about fictional child detectives. Rrrrr. Rrrrr. Harriet the Spy. Harriet the Spy, indeed. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Tom Hodgson's one of those "get tough on crime" politicians, a Republican who was appointed to the job of sheriff by a Republican governor. And as soon as he became sheriff in Bristol County, Massachusetts, he went right to work in the county jail. Before he came, we had no control over this jail. The inmates had control of the jail. He changed all that. Carlos Carrero has worked in the jail for 10 years. He says Sheriff Hodgson imposed discipline on the inmates and the guards. He changed the rules so that inmates had to go into classes or activities if they wanted their time counted as good time. He removed the TVs from the cells, removed the weight room. Carlos gestures around his own office. As a matter of fact, this office right here, this used to be a weight room, right here we were are. He removed all that, because to him, it made no sense for us to make people charged with crimes, to make them even stronger than when they came in. I remember before him that we used to have requests every single day from different institutions, of inmates who wanted to come to this institution. This was vacation ground. This was where they could do whatever they want. Everything was going fine. Now it's the other way around. Everybody wants to leave this jail. They don't want to stay here. It's a very strict institution within the laws. But not long after Sheriff Hodgson took office in 1997, Carlos Carrero started to tell him about something going on at the jail that seemed terribly unfair. There was a new immigration law put into place just a year before, which was sentencing lots of people to deportation who had never been eligible for deportation before this. Here's Sheriff Hodgson. When I took over this job-- obviously one of the things that is fundamental whenever you're in public office is to make sure that the scales of justice are properly balanced. So if I see that somehow the law is being applied in an unbalanced way, then shame on me if I don't stand up and try to correct that. First of all, there were certain offenses-- drunk driving, for example-- that prior to '96 was not a deportable offense, that today would be a deportable offense. In fact, any crime that got a sentence of a year in length was suddenly bad enough to get you deported if you didn't have full citizenship-- drunk driving, petty theft, minor drug possession charges. All of these could suddenly get a person deported. But what made this especially severe was that it was retroactive. If you committed these crimes decades ago, served your time, been a model community member ever since, suddenly you could be thrown out of the country. If, for example, someone, say, when they were 20 years old, was arrested for drunk driving, got a year, either probation or jail, finished their probation-- it was the only run-in with the law they had. And then at 24 years old, he decides to get married. Has a job, responsible, pays taxes, has a couple of children. And now, the kids are four and five years old. The '96 law kicks in, the change in the law. The person decides, my son's three years old, my daughter's now five. I'm going to go ahead and get my citizenship. Or perhaps they heard about the changes in the law and thought, hey, the country is getting tougher on green card holders. I should finally get my full citizenship. And they head down to the immigration service to do that. When they get there, voluntarily, to apply, they run their background check and find out that 15 years earlier, this person got arrested for drunk driving. INS says, I'm sorry, we're shipping you back to wherever. That to me is a law that clearly is unfair. The person had done their time. They'd volunteered to go get their citizenship, and here, now, they're being taken away from their family. And so this law-and-order Republican has found himself in the position of calling for Congress to change a law that he thinks is too harsh. He's traveled to Washington DC to lobby legislators. And for the people in his jail who are awaiting deportation, he's brought in teachers to prepare them for their new lives overseas. Bristol County happens to be home to a large Portuguese population, which has seen over 400 people deported in the last four years under this new law. On any given date, 35 to 40 people are being held in the county jail, most of them waiting to be deported back to Portugal. Mario Medeiros drops some Portuguese money onto a desk for four inmates and explains to them how much each coin and bill is worth in the country that they will soon be deported to, for most of them a country they haven't even seen since they were small children. The whole thing's done in Portuguese so they can get some practice. Some need it more than others. Most of them don't even remember seeing this money before. Yeah, that's totally new to me. Yeah, totally new. Jorge Aruda expects to be shipped overseas any day now. Weird-looking money. It's all different colors, and coins. I'm used to an American dollar bill, you know? I am lost with that. Jorge Aruda came to America when he was two years old. Now he's 25. He's no angel. He was addicted to heroin. While robbing a store, he got into a fight with an off-duty cop. It was the second time he was convicted of an assault charge, and he was sentenced to a year, which he served. That was enough to result in deportation under the '96 law. Do you feel like you shouldn't have been punished? I feel like I should have been punished somewhat, but not punished for the rest of my life. That's how I take it. That was a life sentence for me. They've punished me for the rest of my life. I feel there's no need for it. If someone pays-- if someone does their time, is committed to any kind of sentence for what they've done, then that should be their punishment. That's it. Let him go home. He's done. He's paid for what he's done. Let him go home to his family. Why ship me out of the country? Jorge will be sent to a part of Portugal where his family's from, where he has godparents and an aunt, all elderly. What do you picture when you picture what it's like there? What do I picture? We've seen a video here of how it was out there. And it's like a country life, you know? I've lived in the city all my life. You know what I mean? I'm watching this video and there's people riding on donkeys and milking cows and stuff, you know? That's something I've never done. I drink milk from the fridge and I ride around in a car. I can't picture myself on a donkey and milking cows, you know? It's going to be hard to adapt. But I guess I've got no choice but to get used to it. Today on our program, the story of a little-known law and how it has affected one community in Massachusetts. We live in a big enough country that there are actually lots of laws too obscure for most of us to have heard of, which actually affect tens of thousands of lives in huge, huge ways. Today we hear about one of them. It's an immigration law that the immigration service itself says is unfair. Most of the law's original sponsors in Congress now say they went too far, they were too harsh when they passed the law, and yet most of the law's key provisions still stand unchanged and unchallenged. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our show today, Where Goes the Neighborhood? We hear how the immigration law of 1996 has a community of nonpolitical people reluctantly going to protests, attending meetings at night, talking to politicians, doing all sorts of things most of us would do anything to avoid. Act Two, Whose Idea Was This Anyway? Congressman Barney Frank argues that most of his colleagues had no idea what they were voting for when they voted for key portions of this law, and an advocate for the law explains why we should want to deport more people. Act Three, Man Without a Country. What happens if the immigration service wants to deport you, but the country that you come from won't take you back. Under current law, usually, you stay in jail indefinitely. Alex Kotlowitz tells the story from Texas. It is an action-packed hour. Stay with us. Act One, Where Goes the Neighborhood. When the 1996 immigration law kicked into effect, the number of people deported because of their criminal past doubled from about 30,000 people a year to about 60,000. Two towns in Massachusetts, Fall River and New Bedford, were especially hard-hit because of the large Portuguese community there, which includes many newcomers and which mostly comes from the Portuguese island called the Azores. This American Life producer Blue Chevigny spent some time there recently talking to people about the effects of the law. Mario Fredas is the kinds of dad who has learned to tune out the fact that there's a five-year-old, a one-and-a-half-year-old, and a recently-born baby all wanting attention as he tries to talk to me in his living room. He came to this country 19 years ago, when he was 17, from the Azores, the islands off of Portugal. He and his wife Maria show me pictures, one from 1980. That was when we came to this country. Who are these? This is me. This is my older brother. And this was a friend of us who was already here. He's from Boston. Hey, Daddy. That's Uncle Tony. Yes. Mario is like most of the people in this community who face deportation under the '96 immigration law. They came here from Portugal in the '70s as children with their families to escape the Salazar dictatorship. They were legal immigrants with green cards. Typically they got involved with drugs or alcohol and got in trouble with the law for drunk driving, drug possession, domestic violence, and minor assault charges. Mario was convicted of cocaine possession with intent to distribute when he was 24. He served a three-year sentence. He was released in 1991. Then, after his parole, he didn't think about his crime all that much until one morning last year. I was going to work. I work in Boston. Just a regular day. I get up. I get [INAUDIBLE]. We walk outside. And I just get in my truck over here. I just went inside. I've got my coffee, my bagel. Just on my mind is getting to work, make some money. I back it up, just like a regular back-up. When I reach to that car right there-- He points to a car half a block away. That's about, what, 150 feet? I see a police car coming from the corner where you see that tree, coming this way. He pulled over, thinking the police were there for someone else. And suddenly officers appeared on both sides of this truck. They opened my right door, my left door, and pulled their guns all over. So I cannot move. I can't even pull the key. Wow. So then he did the key for me, pulled the emergency brake. They take me out of the truck. I thought I was being kidnapped. I thought it was a mistake, you know? They identify themselves. They say, that's immigration, and you'll be going to Portugal next week. Never mind this country. Think about Portugal. Of course, I was in shock. I have my family, my kids sleeping over here 150 feet away. So I was not too happy. It's still not clear why they came for him that particular day, what brought his case up on their radar. They put him in a van and drove him into Boston, right past his actual job site. He lays concrete on the massive tunnel highway construction project that's called the Big Dig. I thought it was a bad dream, you know? I go by my job. I'm thinking, I'm supposed to be over there. I'm not supposed to be on all those [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I was asleep when my next-door neighbor called and said, they took your husband. This is Maria Fredas, Mario's wife. And I knew in my heart that it was immigration, because we already had heard of a few cases. So when she said immigration, my first reaction was to run outside. Because I'm thinking he's still outside, but they already had taken him away. So the only thing I could do was, I got into the truck, and his coffee was still sitting there. The hot coffee and a warm bagel. And I took the truck and parked it into the yard and started calling family. I think the worst part was my daughter. She was, at the time, four. And that was hard for her, because she thought her dad had died. She said, "Why are these people here?" This was in the morning. "Why are you crying?" And I said, "Nothing." And she ran to the window and said, "Mommy, that's Daddy's truck. Did Daddy die?" I said, "No, Daddy didn't die." And she said, "Yes, he did." And I said, "No, he didn't," and she said, "Yeah, my Daddy died." The INS held him for 20 days, and then his lawyer got him out on a technicality. A year later, he's still waiting for a final decision about whether he'll be sent to Portugal. As you've heard, the 1996 law did a few things. It made a lot of crimes deportable that weren't deportable before. It was retroactive, applying to crimes that happened years before it was written. And it did one more thing, and it's this third change that's probably had the most effect on this community and the country. It removed judges from the process. Before the 1996 law, Mario would have had the right to appear before a judge, who would examine the specifics of his case, take into account the fact that he hadn't had other arrests and that he's a parent of three children with a job and a house, and then decide whether he deserves to be deported. Fred Watt is an attorney in New Bedford who's handled dozens of these cases, including Mario's. I think that probably the easiest way to understand the changes in the law is to understand that what the new law or laws did is-- the big difference is that now the judges do not have the discretion, in many cases, to give a waiver from deportation. Fred Watts says that if they had that discretion, well over half of his clients might have had a decent shot at staying in the US. Before the changes in the law, that's how many of his clients won their cases with judges. As it stands now, though, all sorts of cases lead to deportation more or less automatically. I never knew that this thing was going to happen like this, you know? Because I'm not a criminal. I consider myself-- I'm not a criminal. My problem was drink. Luis Ramos is 48, did construction and manufacturing work, and served a sentence for drunk driving. Before 1996, a judge might have taken away his driver's license and ruled that he posed no further danger to the community. Now the INS is planning to deport him. I never go around robbing houses or something like that. I've worked in this country for 32 years. 32 years. And I never robbed nobody. I always pay taxes to the government. And I've hurt no one. I have an 18 years' marriage, two kids, wife. Never did nothing to hurt America. New Bedford and Fall River are both really pretty port towns, with cobblestones, colonial-looking downtowns, and small houses on streets winding back from the waterfront. And Portuguese immigrants have been coming here since the 1790s, because this was a major whaling town, and the Portuguese islands, the Azores, were full of whalers as well. A section of Moby Dick where Ishmael meets up with whalers from all over the world is set in New Bedford. This is the kind of place where it seems like every little store and doctor's office has a Portuguese name, and where many first-generation Portuguese immigrants never learned to speak English. Over half of the population is of Portuguese descent. At this point, there have been so many deportations, a women's group has formed here, made up of mothers, sisters, and wives of men who've been deported to Portugal. They hold a monthly support group and weekly vigils in downtown New Bedford. They dress in black and carry signs protesting the deportations. Last month, they held a speaker's forum in a Fall River church, where women were invited to tell their stories, and politicians were invited to come and listen and respond. I would also like to recognize Maria Costa, who's representing Congressman Jim McGovern. About a dozen politicians showed up or sent their aides, most of them state and local representatives who can't do much about the federal immigration law. The women go up to the podium first-- a niece, a few sisters, a wife, several mothers-- and each one gets a few sentences into her story about someone's deportation and starts to cry. Good afternoon, everybody. My name Mary [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I come today here to talk about my brother, Norbert Souza. He's in a jail for nine months. So I'm so confused in this life because-- --but this time it was different. In our car ride on the way to the airport, he told me, "Melanie, Titi's very sick."' My name is Lillian Rodericks. And I'm speaking on behalf of my husband. Good evening. I'm here on behalf of my brother, Emmanual [? Meros. ?] He came to the US at the age of two and a half. This is the first political involvement of any kind that most of these women have ever had. As the number of deportees has grown and affected more and more families, even not very civic-minded people are becoming outraged. Guilherme Lourenco is a New Bedford fisherman, a sea scalloper. He was taken to Louisiana by the INS and detained for 15 months, after which his immigration case was decided in his favor, thanks to a lot of fancy footwork from his lawyer. He says his time away from home was especially hard on his two sons. They used to send me things that they'd drawn in school and stuff. And there was a lot of things that I notice about them, is they've changed, where they used to like-- you know, all kids used to like firemen, policemen. I'm going to be that when I grow up. And they had it different-- they would send me pictures of the cops getting killed. And I didn't really care too much for that. They lost some of the respect, I think, for authority. They knew I was being held for no crime, or a crime that I already had committed and paid for. So there was no reason for me being in jail. I think that's the way they looked at it. Lillian Rodericks is raising her three kids alone since her husband was deported a year ago. And they're not doing so well. While we're talking, Lillian's youngest child comes in, her eight-year-old son, Derek. He went with her to visit his father in Portugal the summer. She pulls his roller blades off for him. The three of them are not participating in school. I just had a meeting with the principal from his school. They told me, since we came back from seeing his father, he's had a major attitude. The principal said he's acting out on them. Because he's a child. He doesn't know how to put his feelings, so this is where he's bringing out his feelings, at the school. And that's what's happening with my other two. So when they changed this law, they didn't punish them, they punished the family, the children. The '96 immigration law was passed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the World Trade Center bombing. Its sponsors hope to combat terrorists, and to stop what they thought were lenient immigration judges from allowing so many convicted felons to stay in the US. Immigration lawyer Fred Watt. I don't think that the average Republican or Democrat was aware of what this law was going to do. I'm not even sure the people who wrote it had a full understanding of it, because it took months for the immigration law community to understand it. I don't think that they necessarily meant it to affect the number of people it did. And I base that just because nobody seemed to get it, for the longest time. A good year. And the judges and the bar were all scratching their heads as the full impact of the law became clear. Here's one sign that Congress didn't intend for the law to work the way it has. There's a bill right now to soften some aspects of this law, backed by most of the original sponsors of the '96 law, and written by one of its key sponsors, Republican Bill McCollum of Florida. It passed the House and is awaiting a Senate vote right now. It would allow some people who have been deported retroactively to return. Fred Watts says it would help about a third of his clients. It won't affect any of the people we saw in the Bristol County jail, or Lillian Rodericks' husband, or Mario Fredas. It won't do the thing opponents of the '96 law want most-- put these deportation cases in front of judges again, as they were before 1996. And I think that it's time that people thought about deportation for what it is. I mean, really, it's almost like a little death penalty case, every time you do one. And that's maybe a little bit melodramatic, but when you see the families, particularly the mothers, this is about the worst thing that can happen to a family. I ask Mario Fredas, the guy who was nabbed with his bagel and coffee still sitting in his truck, for a tour of his house. After he and Maria had been married a couple of years, he bought this old two-story house that was completely run-down, condemned in fact, for a really cheap price. This is a brand-new kitchen. It was an old one here. So I took it down. I did the floor tile. I take all the walls down. I put new electrical, plumbing, insulation. The house is beautiful, on a quiet street with other houses that look like it. He's got plans to fix the basement. He says sometimes he relaxes in the backyard, daydreams about what he'll do with his life. And then he remembers all of a sudden how tenuous his future is, that he's still waiting for a final decision from INS. I'm just thinking, maybe next week I get deported. Who knows? I'm just thinking, if they come get me tomorrow-- I don't know. Always my mind stops me, and says, you know, why am I trying to do this? Because I don't know what's going to happen to me. It's like, I'm out of balance, you know? Mario shows me a panoramic photo of the island where he comes from in the Azores, lush green farmland in all directions. And he points to the spot where he'll move back to if he gets deported. He says it's a very small town with no industry other than farming. I ask him if he thinks of himself as an American, and he says no. He knows he's Portuguese. He says he's just built a life here, and had planned on living here forever, like a lot of other people do. Blue Chevigny. Coming up, a US Congressman calls the Congress stupid. That's right, stupid. An INS official says that they're asked to enforce a law that's unfair. And other examples of your government at work, in a minute, from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, an obscure law that you probably have not heard of that's deporting tens of thousands of people per year. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Whose Idea Was This Anyway? Thus far, on our program, we've been hearing about 1996 changes to the immigration law. That law, of course, is enforced by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and at this point, the INS officially opposes certain parts of the '96 Immigration Act even while it uses them to kick people out of the country. Bill Strassberger is a spokesperson for the agency in Washington DC. I think it's safe to say the INS feels that the law went a little too far, although we were pleased with a number of the things that were included in the law. It's harsh. It was overreaching in many ways. It was probably the best compromise that was available at the time. In what ways did it go too far, in INS's view? The retroactivity of the law, reaching back, penalizing those who were convicted previously. I think the biggest problems, and what we really have advocated for the greatest change, is in the lack of discretion that we now have, that immigration judges now have. INS would like to see a return to that discretion, to allow immigration judges to review the totality of someone's life, not just the fact that they were convicted of a relatively minor offense 15 years ago, let's say. It strikes me that INS is an odd situation, of having to enforce a law it doesn't agree with right now. Well, that's quite often the case in law enforcement. The old phrase is, "I don't write the law. I just enforce them." And in many ways, that's true in this case. We give our input, but Congress does pass the law. The president signs the bill. And then we have to enforce it. Bill Strassberger of the INS. Meanwhile, legislators are hard at work backpedaling on the law. As you've heard, one of the original sponsors of the '96 act, Congressman Bill McCollum of Florida, has drafted a new bill that undoes some of the more controversial parts of his '96 law. The House of Representatives has approved the measure. It's still awaiting a vote by the Senate. But as it waits, the question is, why did they pass the '96 law in the first place, this law that they now want to fix? What were they hoping to accomplish? It's a case of an outrageous law substantively being made in an outrageous way procedurally. This is Congressman Barney Frank. All of those Portuguese people from Fall River and New Bedford that we heard earlier in the program-- they're his constituents. They live in his district. And so he supports this new McCollum bill which reverses part of the '96 law. Back in 1996, he was on the House committee that handled the immigration bill, and he says that to understand how the most controversial parts of the bill became law, consider just one of the most contentious pieces of all this, retroactivity. He says the committee considered a proposal that would make tougher immigration standards retroactive. Now, when they offered that in the committee, we were able to defeat them. The Republicans win most things around here, but this was so bad that almost all the Democrats and a couple of Republicans rebelled. The bill, without retroactivity, went forward. The House and Senate approved it. And then comes the procedure that Barney Frank was just calling outrageous. A conference committee met. That's a committee with both members of the House and the Senate. Well, they didn't exactly meet in the normal way. The final bill was written by the Republicans in a conference committee which never met. Literally, the Democrats were excluded. The Republican leaderships of the two committees wrote the bill. They put in that provision that had been defeated by vote of committee, the provision that said, you will retroactively be deportable automatically for certain crimes that had not previously carried that penalty. And then they put it into the omnibus appropriation bill of that year. This is the bill that funds all of government activities? Exactly. Or most of them. Now, the immigration bill had been voted on, in the House at least, and maybe in the Senate, separately. But at that time, these obnoxious provisions about retroactivity weren't in it. They were added by the Republican congressional leadership in a last-minute secret meeting and incorporated into the overall bill so there was never any chance to vote on them. Were you following this closely enough yourself that you actually were aware that this thing had been put back in? Oh, yes. Yes, because I was a member of the House/Senate conference committee that never met. And we insisted, finally, the Democrats, on a meeting. But at the meeting, no motions were allowed. The rules of the House and the Senate allowed them to do this. And they explained that they were doing this. We complained about it and we objected very strenuously, but the problem was that, in the first place, other parts of the immigration bill seem attractive to people. But even worse, there was never any separate vote on this. It was just part of the one overall package. Now when this passed in '96, did legislators understand what they were passing? Most did not, unfortunately. Most members did not know that the ultimate bill they were voting for included this obnoxious provision. But the Republican leadership manipulated the procedures so that they were able to do it anyway. So you have this new bill which is now working its way through the legislative process. It's past the House, correct. What would it change? It undoes most of the bad effects but not all of the retroactivity. And it also says, very importantly, at my insistence, if you have already been deported because of this, and you can show that you would not have been deported had the law not been so changed, you can come home. So the nice thing is that we're doing away with retroactivity retroactively. Common sense will come back into the process. My understanding, though, is that what's going through in this current legislation is that it doesn't give judges discretion again for these cases since '96. Right. Since '96 it does not. As I said, it only repeals the retroactivity. Why doesn't Congress just let the immigration judges look at the cases-- Well, why don't you ask the people who are doing that? I thought it was stupid and cruel then. I still think it is. And I oppose it. I can't tell you. I really am not a good explainer of other people's bad mistakes and evil intentions. I have enough trouble with my own. Congressman Barney Frank. We invited the key Republican legislators behind the '96 law to come onto our program and explain why they thought it was necessary in the first place. All four-- Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas, Bill McCollum of Florida, Henry Hyde of Illinois, and Senator Spence Abraham of Michigan-- all declined our interview requests, saying they were too busy with the end of the legislative session and the fall elections. So to understand better why we as a nation might want these controversial parts of the law, we turn to an organization called FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which strongly supported the '96 law and still stands by it. We're talking about immigrants to this country who have not become US citizens, who are simply living here under our laws as, in effect, guests either invited or uninvited. This is Jack Martin, director for special projects at FAIR. We certainly have felt that it is fair that an active effort was undertaken for removing people who have abused the hospitality of our society. Let's talk about retroactivity a little bit. One of our producers met a man named Mario Fredas who was convicted of drug charges, served three years, got out in 1991. He was a green card holder. He cleaned up, has a family and kids now, works on the Big Dig in Boston. Didn't he already pay for his crime? What good does it do to deport him? There are many cases that have received publicity of people such as the one that you're referring to, who have committed what may seem a fairly minor offense. And even though they have paid a debt to society, under the law, if they had just come into the country after the '96 act, they would be deportable at the time that they had paid their service. In other words, we have judged that these people have abused their immigrant status and should be removed back to the country that they came from. And I think that you can make a reasonable case for people in certain limited circumstances where they've demonstrated that they are responsible members of the society to continue to stay in this country. But the Attorney General's discretionary power, under the law, is amply sufficient for taking care of these exceptional cases. In other words, the Attorney General can overturn these cases and basically say, these people shouldn't be deported. It's not fair. That's correct. Why not just have judicial review? Why not just have immigration judges look at the cases, the way it was before? If somebody's going to have to weigh the merits of each case. Well, the main reason for that is because that lends itself to judicial shopping, which was a standard practice and one of the main abuses that the '96 act was intending to correct. A lot of immigration lawyers were in effect given free rein to shop around from judge to judge during a very lengthy and extensive appeal process that ended only when they were able to find the judge, finally, who would agree to forgive the offense and allow that person to stay in the country. Jack Martin of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He's exactly right, by the way, that the Attorney General has the power under current law to stop deportation of anybody who she thinks is deserving. Janet Reno could issue an order allowing Mario Fredas, or any other potential deportees, to stay in the US. In fact, the INS itself has the power to look the other way in any case and not deport somebody. But it's almost never done. Presumably this is why. If Janet Reno or the INS pardon somebody who then went on to commit terrible crimes, the Attorney General and her party and its candidates-- they are the ones who would take the blame. Now, the Republicans say that is just fine. If something bad happens, politicians should take the heat for it. And Republican congressmen like Lamar Smith have been saying for years now that INS does not need a new law. It should just make exceptions for those cases that merit it. I asked Barney Frank what he thought about his colleague saying that. Oh, that's an outrageous cover-up of themselves. If you go back to the debates in '96, their argument was precisely that they had to take away the discretion from the INS. Then, when that law began to have outrageous results, they said, "Well, it's not our fault. The INS should have used its discretion." But the very purpose of the law was to take away the discretion. You know what their argument is? Well, the INS in effect should ignore the law selectively. Even though the law says these people should automatically be deported, the INS should simply refuse to invoke it in these cases. Now, I think that's probably true in a lot of these cases, but don't pass a law and then blame the INS for carrying out the law that you passed, and say, well, it's their fault, they should have ignored me. One last political note with all this. We contacted the two presidential campaigns to find out where they stand on the '96 immigration law. Of course, in the scheme of presidential politics, this is not a very big issue. And, in fact, the Bush campaign does not have an official position on the law. The Gore campaign does, though. Candidate Gore believes that the '96 law went too far, and favors putting these cases back in the hands of judges. Act Three, Man Without a Country. This next story is about another little-known part of US immigration policy. What happens if the INS wants to deport you but there is nowhere to deport you to? People awaiting deportation, by the way, are housed in county jails around the country. And they can be there for a long, long time. Alex Kotlowitz has this story about the unusual relationships that sometimes form between these deportees and their jailers. On a recent Friday night in Victoria, Texas, a blue-collar town of 60,000, I met up with Trung Tran. Trung is a Vietnamese immigrant and had driven the two hours from Houston where he works as a lab technician at a sleep disorder clinic. He's 33, broad-shouldered, handsome, and well-dressed in a sapphire blue shirt, khaki pants, and Tommy Hilfiger boots. Together we drove to the home of Virginia [? Escahito ?] and her husband, Lupe. Virginia had met Trung when she was a guard at the local jail and Trung was an inmate. Virginia, who is 45, is a short roundish woman with red hair and rosy cheeks. She feels somewhat maternal towards Trung, and when we arrived, she embraced him. ?] Hi, Tran. How are you doing, Tran? Pretty good. Virginia pulled on Trung's thick black hair. ?] I always look at Trung's hair-- It's grayer. ?] --to see if it's any grayer. Because it was jet black in the jail went I met him. And he was so, so skinny, and I was kind of worried for him for a while. And now his cheeks are chunky, and he's got a little gray hair. Every time I see him, I see more. But he looks good. I'm glad to see him. This is the story of an unlikely friendship, friendship between captor and captured, a connection that pushed both an American and an immigrant to question their place in America. This tale begins in 1975, when Trung and his family fled Vietnam for America. Trung was seven at the time. His mother had worked for the US military. The Trans eventually settled in Houston, where Trung's parents bought and ran a convenience store. Trung quickly adapted to his new country. In high school he ran track. On weekends, he attended Friday night football games and afterwards joined classmates at Kentucky Fried Chicken. His date for the prom was the homecoming queen. Those he hung out with, he says, were all Americans. He had no Vietnamese friends. I just lived since then like a typical American kid, grew up and played sports and went to school and did the whole nine yards. And I went through the procedure of even trying to apply for citizenship with my whole family. And I went through, took the test and everything. And the whole time, I graduated from high school, went and filled out my draft card, did the whole thing. And already, I filled out my financial aid paper and anything else-- I'd put down as a US citizen. Trung went on to college at Texas Southern University, and there he lost his footing. His grades slipped and his scholarship was rescinded. He began to sell crack cocaine, and he was pretty good at it, netting $500 to a $1,000 a week. On October 19, 1992, he was arrested and charged with drug trafficking and money laundering. He plead guilty to both counts and served 32 months in federal prison. But when his time was up, he wasn't released. Trung, in fact, was not a citizen, though he was a lawful permanent resident. While he had begun the application process, he never completed it. Given the serious nature of Trung's crime and the fact that he was not a citizen, an immigration judge could and did decide to deport him. But there was a catch. Vietnam is one of a number of countries, including Cuba, Cambodia, and Laos, which won't accept deported individuals. And so Trung was without a homeland. Vietnam didn't want him, nor did the US. So what to do? The INS's policy has been to keep people like Trung incarcerated, even though they've completed their criminal sentences. The INS sent Trung to the county jail in New Braunfels, Texas. To tell you the truth, at first when I was in INS detention, it was like a cat and mouse game between the officers and the inmates. And they had a lot of officers that were veterans, because they went to the military and so forth. So they would make comments, calling me [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] VC, stuff like that. When they served us our meal time-- "Here, you little VC, get your food." Then, in May of 1997, Trung was transferred to the county jail in Victoria. Trung had no reason to expect he'd be treated any different there. The building itself is an imposing two-story cinder block structure, and like most county jails was built to hold inmates for only short stretches, anywhere from a few hours to a few months, while they awaited their trial or their sentencing. The jail doesn't allow television. The only outdoor facilities are two courtyards, each the size of a basketball court. Inmates are allowed outside for a total of three hours a week. Inmates have no privacy. There are no cells, just dormitory-style locked rooms which house anywhere from 4 to 24 prisoners in bunk beds. It's jail facilities like this, designed for locking people up temporarily, to which the INS sends those like Trung whom it's detaining for indefinite periods. There are roughly 4,000 such detainees, which publicly the INS refers to as long-termers, and which internally the agency has called lifers, a suggestion that this could be their permanent home. At Victoria, Trung shared a cell with Julio Martul. Julio, who was a legal permanent resident as well, emigrated from Cuba, committed a crime, served his six months, and was then ordered deported. But Cuba won't take him back, so he was placed in the Victoria county jail indefinitely. There are some people who were sentenced here to two years. Then they let them out. They've come back here, committed another crime. They served their time, they let them out, and now they're back a third time. And they'll come back here and they ask me, "When are you going to get out?" And they don't believe it. It's at the Victoria county jail where Trung met Virginia. Virginia was a jail guard responsible for the institution's educational program. Many of the detainees attended language classes, and they would tell her of their situation. "How could someone be in jail and not know when they were getting out?" She would ask of them. She was puzzled. ?] Because they had no date, no release date. There was no release date for them. And I'm going, everybody's got a release date here. Except INS. And it was just unreal. I couldn't comprehend that. I'd come home and tell my husband, I'm in the wrong job. I'm just in the wrong job, because it was just so frustrating sometimes. And I felt like I couldn't do enough for these people. I couldn't do enough. She began to call the INS to try to get some answers for Julio, Trung, and the others. I think, though, she was also trying to make sense of it herself. ?] I would ask, what was their status? They wanted to know, and we wanted to know also. And they would just tell you that they couldn't tell you anything. ?] Right. That they could not tell me anything. That must have driven you batty. ?] Well, I felt bad. Because what was I going to tell these guys? There they were, standing by me or sitting at the desk and waiting for an answer. And they were so happy that I was making a call for them. And then for me to tell them, well, they wouldn't even talk to me, you know? Other guards at Victoria, many of whom like Virginia are first- or second-generation Americans, were equally perplexed. And so they too found ways to make life just a bit more bearable for these INS detainees. The guards gave the lifers certain privileges and did so at some risk. A sergeant at a nearby jail was fired after she publicly questioned the policy of detaining immigrants indefinitely. The guards at Victoria made many of them trustees, which allowed them some freedom of movement in the jail. They were assigned to kitchen duties or to mopping floors, or in the case of Trung, to the GED program. Virginia looked out for Trung and the others. ?] Some of these inmates have not seen their families in so many years. And they would ask me, "Miss Virginia, my family hasn't seen me in so long. They don't even know how-- do you think you could take a picture of me?" And maybe I shouldn't have, but I did. I took pictures of these guys and sent them home. And I think somebody had warned me, "Virginia, you know you might get in trouble by doing that to these inmates, because they're incarcerated." And I'd go, "Yeah, but they've already done their time." They were small favors, but they showed a level of trust that doesn't ordinarily exist between guard and prisoner. Some deputies would bring back an extra hamburger or sandwich from lunch to give to the men. Teachers at the jail gave the lifers email accounts so they could communicate with their attorneys, and allowed them access to the internet so they could keep up with the changes in the immigration law. Trung, in fact, found an internet site in Spanish for Julio. One detainee, Victor [? Altume, ?] who'd served 16 years for kidnapping and aggravated battery, charges stemming from a bar fight, became the chef at the jail. The deputy sheriffs were such fans of Victor's cooking that they'd bring Victor along to their Monday night softball games, where he'd grill for them their favorites-- fajitas, tacos, and hot dogs. Victor was so well-liked that when he went to a local hospital for emergency heart surgery, so many deputy sheriffs visited him the hospital staff thought he too was in law enforcement. A jail officer allowed Trung and five other lifers, including Julio, to room together. And the guards found ways to get the INS detainees outside for more than their allotted three hours a week. ?] Well, one time we went out and painted that mural. And I was shocked when Miss Virginia said, well, you know your going out with us today, and we got approved from the INS. And please don't run on me. ?] And I was so scared when I first took Tran. I was going, "Tran, please don't run on me, Tran. Because I can't run that fast. And I'm not going to run after you." And it's going to be my job, because they told me, "If he runs, it'll be your job." For Trung and the others, there was a clear incentive to win over the guards. About a year and a half ago, under pressure from immigrants' rights groups, the INS began reviewing the cases of lifers. If the agency determined that the detainee was not a danger to society or a flight risk, they considered releasing them, and the only way Trung or the others could show that was by recommendations from those who knew them best, their captors. And indeed, the jail guards wrote letters to the INS, urging them to release these men. One sergeant wrote on behalf of Victor, the cook, "When Victor leaves this jail, he will be missed by the employees. Many of us depend on him. The only complaint I might have of Victor is he's a little heavy on the garlic." A dozen other guards and jail staff wrote on behalf of other detainees, including Julio and Trung. And after two and a half years in indefinite detention, Victor, who's now 53, was released, and someone at the jail helped him get a job as chef at a small local seafood restaurant. Victor still volunteers his culinary skills at the guards' Monday night softball games. In July of last year, the INS agreed to release Trung, after four years in indefinite detention. His family came up with the $15,000 bond. The INS determined he was no longer a danger or a flight risk. Trung had expected to get out on a Friday, but an INS agent came by two days early and told Trung to pack his stuff. He wasn't quite ready to leave, though. He first wanted to pass along some of the computerized records he'd been keeping for the jail's education programs. To tell you the truth, I told the officer, "Hey, I'm not even finished with my work here yet." At that time, I was so involved with the GED stuff up there, and I took care of a lot of the paperwork and stuff. And I wanted to show them everything before I go, so-- Let me get this straight. So here they tell you you're free, and you say, "No, I want to stay in jail for a few extra days so I can help out the guards and the teachers here." Yeah. I want to go home, but then I also want to finish my job before I leave. ?] Tran and I got very close. We worked for a long time together. Again, Virginia [? Escahito. ?] And still we see each other, and he tries to stop by once in a while. And I just-- I love him. And there's several other of the guys that write to me and send me letters. And I've kept every piece of mail from them. I've got it, too. Virginia goes into her bedroom and emerges rather excitedly bearing a shallow plastic bin. She kneels and spills the contents onto the floor. She's held onto everything. There are a pile of letters from former INS detainees and trinkets made by the Cubans. ?] All of these are nothing but handkerchiefs. Trung leans back on the couch, calmly smiling. Virginia's now a police officer in a nearby town, and she's still in uniform. She goes to sit next to him and pokes him in the ribs. "I'm glad you've put on some weight," she says, giggling. She teases him about the female inmates in the jail. ?] They would try to grab or something, and I'd go, don't you-- Soon, another former guard, Mike Martinez, arrives. He and Virginia ask Trung about Julio, Trung's old cellmate. The day before, Julio had marked his fifth anniversary at the Victoria jail. It's possible he could be there for the rest of his life. In the eyes of the INS, if a detainee's crimes are serious enough that he seems like a threat to society, it doesn't matter how long he serves or what he does in jail. It's unlikely he'll be released. Julio has submitted testimonials from jail staff but the INS has turned him down, possibly because his offenses are among the worst from the INS's point of view. He has five convictions for smuggling illegal aliens. Trung visits him on occasion, and recently sent him a gift, one which, intentional or not, bore a message of sorts. I bought Julio a big duffel bag so in case-- when he does get released, he'll have a bag to carry. Because I, myself, when I got released, I didn't have duffel bags. I had two boxes full of legal documents. And I was picked up from here by immigration and taken to San Antonio, and I had to catch a Greyhound back to Houston. And here I am, carrying two plastic container boxes walking around, with old clothing, you know? So I felt sorry for Julio, so I ended up buying a duffel bag and some other stuff for him. Trung himself is in a state of limbo. If he gets in any kind of legal trouble, the INS could send him back to prison, and if and when Vietnam reaches an expatriation agreement with the US, Trung would be deported. This experience has-- and perhaps it was inevitable-- altered Trung's perception of himself. He now considers himself Vietnamese, not American. He reads a weekly Vietnamese newspaper and listens to Vietnamese music. He only eats at Vietnamese restaurants. He sends money when he can to his grandmother who still lives in Saigon. With the exception of those he met at Victoria, he only hangs out with other Vietnamese immigrants, and for the first time, he's dating a Vietnamese woman. I do. I finally realized that I'm not that American kid that I once thought I was. That status has been taken away from me, that, hey, you're just a visitor here. And that this door can shut at any given time, so don't have too much fun and get adapted to it. Virginia's journey has been a quieter but no less profound one. ?] Before I worked back in the jail, I wouldn't question anything. I'd go along with, OK, this is right. This is the law. This is America. This is the way it should be. And now I'm going, uh-uh, there's something wrong here. Because it was just a shock to me, what they do to the INS inmates. Yes, they've made mistakes but they've paid for those mistakes already. Sometimes I think, who do we think we are? God? To keep these people up here, like this-- it's not right. Virginia is not alone. When I was at the Victoria jail visiting Julio and the other detainees, a deputy sheriff who looked to be about 50 came up to me. "Are you the one visiting the INS guys?" He asked, rather gruffly. I told him I was. He smiled. "I just wanted to shake your hand," he said, "and say thank you." Thank you from a guard for doing a story on his prisoners. "I do feel for these individuals," he told me. "After all," he said, "they've served their time." Alex Kotlowitz is the author of There Are No Children Here and other books. Just this month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases of these indefinite detainees, people who are in jail with no country to go back to. Well, our program was produced by Blue Chevigny and myself, with Alex Blumberg and Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Hillary Frank. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who, from the beginning, felt this way about the fact that we quote him at the end of each and every show-- I thought it was stupid and cruel then. I still think it is. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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There are certain things you should really only say to your best friend. This is probably one of them. Do you ever just shut up and just listen to somebody? Go right ahead. That's what-- spill it out there, brother. I already did. Tom and Scott are in an all-night diner around midnight. Scott is disheveled and tired. He's been working all night as a bartender at a Chinese restaurant, serving lots of free drinks on the sly to Tom. And Tom, in response, seems astonishingly ungrateful. Here is the kind of sass that Tom keeps throwing Scott's way. You're the-- you're the one who needed the food and the beers and all that stuff like that to calm down after your traumatic night stealing from your employer. Really? Just at that moment, a man in a Hawaiian print shirt and khaki pants walks by their table. He hears the word "employer," mistakes it for the word "lawyer," and then turns to Tom. Are you a lawyer? No. No. Do you want to be? Who brought up a lawyer to start with? You just came-- walked in-- You did. No, I didn't. Not at all. He didn't say lawyer. You thought that you heard something and then you let your mind take over and then it got you in-- it put you in-- Well, I am a lawyer, so that's probably why I might have thought that. But you know what? I'm trained in the art of listening, and I could've sworn you said you wanted to be a lawyer. Well, I definitely wouldn't hire you because you heard completely wrong. Really? Yeah. There's some conversations that you overhear and it's hard not to want to keep listening or to butt in, even though everybody knows that it is not the right thing to do. One Sunday morning a while back, I was sitting in one of the booths in this very diner, the Golden Apple, in Chicago on Lincoln Avenue, and I looked around the restaurant. The table next to me, a family was taking their teenage daughter out to an awkward last breakfast before she shipped out with the military. There were dressed-up people who'd come in from the church across the street, and young couples who'd stumbled in with the paper and were working on the crossword together. And I thought, if only somebody could interview every person at every table in this restaurant. That would be amazing. You'd get such a wide variety of different kinds of stories from different kinds of people. So we decided to try it. One Friday night, a big group of us took shifts starting at 5:00 AM and going to 5:00 AM the next morning. During quiet hours, it was just one of us on duty, recording and interviewing people. During the busiest hours, which means late night, three or four of us worked the tables. We first broadcast today's program all the way back in 2000, and we'll be running it again today. From WBEZ Chicago, today's show, "24 Hours at the Golden Apple." It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay tuned. It's 5 o'clock in the morning. My name is Pete. I work from 10:00 PM to 5:00 AM, and now we're going to have the taxi drivers and the cops, you know, come for a cup of coffee until 6 o'clock, the morning crowd is going to be in. Pete's one of the three owners of this restaurant, along with Nick and Tom. All three are Greek, and one of them is always there 24 hours a day. The restaurant sits at one of those intersections where three streets come together, not two, so every one of the corners in the intersection is wedge-shaped, which means that the restaurant itself is wedge-shaped, with booths along the windows on two sides of the wedge. There's a counter with stools and a larger room with tables in the back. There are those oversized, laminated menus that go on for pages-- pages-- with pictures of the food. By the door is one of those revolving dessert cases, an octagon made of glass. Three shelves of cream pies and melon slices and cakes. Lately, it's been nothing but trouble. Here's Nick, another one of the owners. It's supposed to be turning. It's not turning because the motor broke. Jimmy's supposed to come out like three days ago. He's still coming. Now, if you can figure this one out, the-- the pie case is not turning. And believe it or not, it's not selling as good. That's-- that's a truth. Dessert sales are down, he says, by half, ever since it broke. People just like desserts more when they're in motion. It catches the eye. You know, when it's turning, it catches the eye and it sells. Over the course of 24 hours, the staff of the Golden Apple changes, the regulars who come in change, and the atmosphere changes, from quiet in the early morning to crazy hectic late at night when the bars in the neighborhood let out. Nancy Updike took the first shift of our 24-hour surveillance, mic in hand, from 5:00 AM till 10:00 AM. This is Eddie. He comes to the Golden Apple a few times a week in the mornings and plays the harmonica in the middle of the restaurant for a few minutes. He's in a pale blue shirt and hopping lightly from foot to foot. I might fall down. Eddie heads to the back of the restaurant to play there. No one is complaining. No one is rolling their eyes. In fact, a few people are smiling and saying hi. Eddie is not an outsider here. He's a regular. Early morning at the Golden Apple is like that, a profoundly democratic place. Early morning welcomes the night shift workers, the unemployed, the retired, the confused, the disappointed, the slightly off. The people who work for themselves and the people who don't work at all anymore, but crave a little morning routine. Every morning, I'm here between 4:30 and 5:00. I love the Golden Apple. They're wonderful people. They got good food. And that's it. This is how Joe Molica ends every sentence. And that's it. Or sometimes-- And that's all I could tell you, honey. Joe's not used to talking about himself. His story comes out bit by bit. Our entire conversation takes place in a different era. He's completely unselfconscious about calling me honey. He bangs on his coffee cup with his spoon to get the waitresses attention for a refill. Please don't try this at home, but he gets away with it. I do construction, remodeling, rehab. And that's what I do. I retired. I'm 78 years old. And I gave the business to my two sons and that's it. How did you start that business? Through my dad. My dad done the same thing. When I was, I don't know, maybe 10, 11 years old, I started working for him. He was paying me a dime an hour and that was it. Clean up, sweep up the floors that he's working on. What else you want to know, honey? At 5:30 in the morning, almost everyone is sitting alone, by choice, it seems. Joe's friend Bob is sitting in his own booth behind Joe. No one's talking much, but it's a comfortable silence. When you're up this early, it's hard not to feel some sense of community with everyone else who's awake. But you don't necessarily want to talk to them. As it gets lighter and lighter outside, more people trickle in. A guy with thick, dark blond hair and a face that looks like it could use another six hours' sleep sits down at the counter. His name is Scott Johnson, and he says he usually comes in around 3:30 AM, but today's different. It's about 20 after 7:00. How did you start coming to the Golden Apple? I own a bar right down the street. It's called Wits. And I own another one on Clark and Oakdale called Jake's. How did you get into the bar business? Oh, boy. Well, about eight years ago, I turned 30, quit my career, got a divorce, and bought a bar in the same month. Oh, my god. Took the Etch-a-Sketch and shook it. Just turned it upside down and shook it real hard and changed my life forever. It's completely light outside now. Commuter traffic is picking up. The Golden Apple isn't crowded, but all the front booths are taken, and most of the counter. Nick keeps getting deliveries-- orange juice, potatoes-- and his butcher comes by, John Zervas. John is a big man in that way that's the norm in Chicago. Not fat, just big. John has been eating at the Golden Apple and supplying its meats for 10 years. When he was eight years old, he became famous for being the youngest butcher in Illinois. Back in 1979, I was interviewed by Fahey Flint. I don't know if you remember. Back in 1979, Fahey Flynn was a well-known newsman right here at Channel 7 news before he died in '81. I was the youngest butcher in Illinois in 1979. And yeah, I've met Governor Thompson down Randolph Street. My father was in a retail business still out on Randolph Street. And that's how I started learning how to cut. So I've been doing this for-- I'm 33 now and since I was, like, eight years old. You were a butcher when you were eight? Well, yeah, I'd been involved, you know, cleaning tables. And about 12 years old, I started cutting meat on a band saw. Wow. Do you remember the first piece of meat you cut? Pork chops. Piece of pork loin and I sliced it. I remember very well, like it was yesterday. Real slow on a band saw. Pork chops. Pork loins like 18 pounds. First thing I did is cut it down the middle and start from the middle. The trick is, at the end, not to cut your hands when it comes really small. You got to use a special kind of thing that's underneath the band saw, not to put your hand in it because the band saw doesn't have any friends. I mean, if it's going to grab your hand, it's going to cut it. The front of the Golden Apple is the smoking section. Sitting there is a grayish woman with a fleshy face and wavy hair in one of the small, two-person booths. Her name is Alice Deluca. I work at a purification center. It's sauna, running, vitamins and minerals. It's a program to rid your body of toxins and radiation. Wow. Have you done the program yourself? Yes, I have. Now, to the naked eye, it looks like you're smoking and drinking coffee. Yes. And about to have some sausage. So how does that square with the whole toxins thing? Well, I'm trying to wake up. You need some toxins to wake up? I guess so. The restaurant never gets crowded this morning. Turnover is slow. People linger over their coffee or their conversation. It's a weekday, so there's no impatient brunch crowd waiting for tables to open up. And if you don't have an office you need to get to, why rush? Donna, the waitress, is finishing up the night shift and getting ready to go home. She's been on since 11:00 PM, but you would never know it to look at her. She's six feet tall and looks like Catherine Deneuve. She's one of the most beautiful people I've ever seen in person. How long have you been working here? Oh, 26 years. Wow. How old were you when you started? Well, you think I'm going to tell you that? [LAUGHS] Are you kidding? My kids don't even know how old I am. Donna says she's actually not a night person, but she's worked the night shift the entire time, all 26 years. She came to Chicago from Oklahoma City in her early 20s with three kids. I was divorced when I came here, and I had married so young, had my children young. No education. And I had a little baby. That's why I started working nights. But this is a great job for that. I mean, working nights, that way you're with them during the day. You don't sleep much, but-- when they're asleep and you're working. And I'm still working the night shift. I don't know why, but I still am. Every Christmas Eve, Donna brings in a big tray of homemade cookies for the homeless guys and the old men and the taxi drivers-- anyone who shows up that night. Every once in a while, on her afternoon off, she'll go see a play starring one of the actors who come in every night after their own shifts waiting tables. Her customers give her tapes of the bands they're in, bring in their artwork for her see, tell her about their successes and failures. These are people she's known for years. It's like home here to me. And when I think about going on a day job, I just can't. It's almost like it'd be another div-- you know, a separation because it's like home when you've been here this long. Donna runs her shift at the Golden Apple with a lot of compassion and generosity. But like any good waitress, she's also ruthlessly practical. She can be direct when she needs to. Early morning is no time to stand on ceremony. Honey, I got to get finished with the rest of my work. All right. Can I-- are you doing anything to set up or clean up? I got to check and see what I've got to do. Can I just follow you around and you tell me what you're doing? I'll just like-- Well, I don't even know if I have anything more to do. I just didn't want to talk anymore. Oh, OK. I didn't want to be rude, but-- No, no, no. You're [INAUDIBLE]. I just told her I'm tired of talking. [LAUGHS] In the middle of the day, a muted light streams through the windows through a pale haze of cigarette smoke. At certain hours, it feels like everybody is smoking at the Golden Apple. Three industrial smoke-eaters, a non-stop. At lunch, some customers come in, eat quickly, and head back to work after just a half hour, but they're in the minority. Probably 3/4 of the customers are regulars. Many of them stay for hours. Nick, the owner, says some come two or three times a day. I mean, they go home and sleep, of course, but this is their base. We got Charlie right now, and there are some that comes twice, three times a day. Floyd, which is right next to him. Mitch. Mitch with his son on the counter. He's a counter man. Mr. Harland there with Steven. They come twice a day. Russ comes about three, four times a day. Al, two, three times a day. At the counter, a man who looks a little bit like the actor Harry Dean Stanton, scruffy and lean, is here for the second time in 24 hours. He gives me what he says is his nickname, Robert. He says he usually just comes for coffee. Can't afford much else. So why do you come here? Just something to do. Coffee. I come over here because I'm single, no wife, no girlfriend. No kids either. Robert is one of three different men who tell me that they come here in the afternoon to drink coffee and talk to the waitresses. All three actually seem a little shy and intimidated by the waitresses. Robert is so bashful, he has a hard time saying much of anything to them. I've never said more than hello, you know, or goodbye. That's all I ever said. I don't know what to do with a pretty girl, what to say. I don't know what to say. At a table in the back, Manuel Hernandez is here for the second time today. He's a retired carpenter. Came to Chicago from Mexico in 1965 as one of the workers who built the Sears Tower downtown, one of the tallest buildings in the world. He quit, he says, when they got to the 105th floor. It was too windy up there. After two guys, they-- they fall down, and then I quit because I don't want to be the next. As the afternoon passes, he calls over one of the waitresses, Sherry, and asks her for help reading a document that he got in the mail from an insurance company. He's worried it's some kind of scam. She reads it, tells him no. They've sent him a check. It's real. Sherry says this kind of thing happens all the time. Some of these guys, who else do they have to turn to? Out on the sidewalk when the weather's good, the restaurant sets up tables. At one, Allison Musgrave and her two kids are eating. Ian is four, Madeline is two. Both are wearing their bicycle helmets at the table and eating the Mickey Mouse pancakes. Three pancakes arranged in violation of US copyright law. Two ears and a head, maraschino cherries, canned pineapple, and whipped cream as the eyes and mouth. Cover it with maple syrup and you have a sugar concoction so powerful that four-year-old Ian literally cannot sit in his chair. Ian, Ian. Around here, please. Thank you. I don't live far from here and I do not think there is a four year old in a 10-block radius who does not know the Mickey Mouse pancakes. Turn around now, Ian. Turn around, please. The restaurant has toys for kids in a corner inside. One couple named Mike and Liz tell us that they come here so often with their four and seven year old and feel so at home here that they've instructed their kids that if they're ever lost, they're supposed to find a policeman and tell them not to bring them home. Bring them to the Golden Apple. As evening falls, it takes a while for the dinner crowd to show up in any kind of force. It's a slow day, everybody says. It is Friday, and couples start to arrive. Some on dates, some just friends. Some in that vague territory in between. The topics of conversation in the room start to make an orbital shift toward couples sorts of topics. One of our producers, Susan Burton, notices one couple in particular. A man and a woman in their 30s sit down in a booth by a window. The man's long hair is tied back with a bandanna. I'm Daniel Romero. Silvia and I just got through playing a few sets of tennis in Grant Park, and stopped at Healing Earth for a little incense and some good karma. And we decided to stop and grab a bite. You know, Sylvia and I have this kind of weird history. She actually dumped me not too long ago. And-- that's right. That's a long time ago, Romero. Well, not that long ago. So she's-- she's now happily in a relationship, and I was telling her as we were driving here about how lonely I am. Actually, it's been three years since Daniel and Sylvia broke up. They met when they worked together at the same nonprofit organization. Well, you're ready to settle down now. I am. Well, I'm proud of you. I'm proud of you. I actually-- when you first told me that, I actually wasn't sure. Right. But you will not be coming to the wedding. You already told me that. I did-- I did-- I did tell you that. I won't be participating there. You'll have my best wishes. Why? We're friends. I still love you and care about you. Why can't you be there? Well-- [LAUGHS] well, why can't-- it would just be weird. I mean, you and I have a pretty significant history together. But I would-- I would still be happy for you and you'd have my best wishes, and I'll still buy you a toaster. A toaster? OK. See, I think that that's unusual. I think-- I would be very happy for you. Would I have some feelings there? Yeah, maybe there would be a little twinge, thinking why-- why wasn't it me? That's actually a Sex in the City topic a lot. Right. Absolutely. In case you've missed it, Sex and the City is a TV show on HBO. Each episode circles around some central question, like, can you be friends with your ex? If Daniel and Sylvia and I were suddenly cast in our own episode of the show, this would be the moment where I would light a cigarette and flip open my PowerBook and ponder what I'd seen. Daniel and Sylvia began by talking about Sylvia's new boyfriend, but wound up discussing each other. And I started to wonder, when you talk about your ex's new relationships, are you really just talking about the two of you? I didn't tell you this. You asked me how my love life was a little bit earlier. I did meet somebody about a week ago. Her name is Amy and she works at-- where does she work at? She works at Supercuts. And she was with her-- her boyfriend, actually. And she was hitting on you? And she was hitting on me. She said to me, I want to go out with you. And I said, fine, let's go out. She says, well, you have to wait a month because I'm still going out with this idiot over here. I mean, and she's talking about, you know-- so nothing happened though. But nothing happened. But you would go out with a woman who would degrade her boyfriend that way? Who would treat the guy that she's supposedly dating that way? Yeah, but I'm not going to marry-- I'm not going to marry this girl, you know? I mean-- you know, I mean, I wasn't interested in a lifetime commitment at that moment. I mean, I was much more looking for the immediate gratification. That's what you're always looking for. That's not entirely true. That's not entirely true. Each time Daniel brings up someone he's interested in, Sylvia gets exasperated with him for refusing to make a commitment. It happens when he mentions the woman he saw in a lounge chair by a pool in Las Vegas, and the girl he's taken on a dozen dates, but is pretty sure he wants to break up with. It turns out that this is a conversation they've had before, at the end of their own relationship. I was ready for the next step and he was ready to back out. Any time I pressed forward, he went backwards a couple steps. You're right. You and I were in a place where you were frustrated because I couldn't move forward. I was frustrated because you were pressing so hard. And right-- And then you met the next girl and moved in with her after three weeks. I think it's a hard topic for us both. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, it's just-- you know, the thought of-- you know, it's like-- He trails off, staring out the window. I don't know, it's kind of hard to-- it's kind of hard to-- It is kind of hard to talk when two babes go by. Yeah. Outside on the sidewalk, two girls with blond hair and short skirts approach. They catch Daniel's eye. He mumbles. As the girls stride by the window, he turns his head and follows them from one end of the glass to the other. The gesture seems to happen in slow motion. He does that all the time. Yeah, but I-- I'm not-- but-- I know, I know. I'm not saying that. Yeah, I understand. I'm just saying that when we were together and you did that, that really hurts. Even if-- even though it's just looking? It says you're not interested in what's going on right here, and that's exactly-- No, see, that's-- --you did by doing that. You couldn't even formulate the sentence because your eyeballs were glued to that window. Look, this-- this is another-- this has-- this has been another topic on Sex and the City. Just for the record, what actually happened in that episode, the woman got so mad at her boyfriend that she punched him in the face. And then she realized she couldn't change him. Over by the restaurant's front windows, which look out on St. Alphonsus Catholic church, a huge building, sits Kay Frank, known to our friends as Katie Keane, 75 years old, dressed in a nice outfit and matching scarf. She's here because one of her longtime neighbors, another Golden Apple customer, is laid out dead in the funeral home right across the street. She'll eat and pay her respects. She tells me that she's lived her whole life within walking distance of this very spot. Yeah. I was born and raised on Lakewood 75 years ago. Went to St. Alphonsus School, so this is my neighborhood for a long time. Wow. And it gives me a lot of pleasure to walk the neighborhood and say, Margaret Kuntz lived in that house, Lucille Sutchell lived in that house. I can still see all the things in my mind as I did in the '30s and '40s. Back then, for instance, a pharmacy was on this spot. Kay and her friends would come here after 11 o'clock mass. I'm talking about first year, second year high school, when you didn't go to the kiddie mass anymore at 9 o'clock in the morning. This was like a hangout here after mass. And this whole section here, they had a wonderful soda fountain. It was right here where this would be. See what I'm saying? She points at a section of booths. For years, this neighborhood was all about which parish you belonged to. St. Alphonsus for the Germans, St. Andrews for the Irish and Italian, St. Josaphat for the Polish. Till finally, in the 1960s, that ended. Kay's five sisters and her parents all moved away from the neighborhood. I'm the only one that stayed in the neighborhood because we couldn't afford to move out of here. We bought our house in the mid-'60s, '64. And everybody thought the neighborhood was going to change. So of course, they're moving to the suburbs or farther north or farther west. Change? You mean people thought it wasn't going to be white anymore? They thought-- yes. They thought it was going to go down. That's why people were scared and moved out. So we couldn't afford to move, so we bought a house there for $27,000. I've had offers of $500,000, $550,000 for my house. Meanwhile, one of her sisters who moved away to avoid the blight of this area, who moved to an area too expensive for Kay or her husband to afford, just sold her house for only $200,000. Gentrification, which spread through this neighborhood in the last 15 years, hasn't made it out to where her sisters live. But around here, on Southport and on Clark and all over, there are little boutiques and several Starbucks, and expensive restaurants with fake European names. The neighborhood has changed a lot, you know? A whole lot. Some for the better, some for the worse. Close by, we have our gay people, which we never had as a kid. They were around, maybe, but we didn't know who they were. Today, you know who they are. My husband, coming from the old school-- we have the nicest neighbors we've ever had, two gay men. They can't do enough for you. They cut your grass for you. They water-- now that I'm older. And when they moved in, my husband, coming from way back, oh, my god, you know, he didn't want really too much to do with them. Within a year, I'd say, we saw that they were nice people, very clean. And when we had our 50th wedding anniversary party, had some [NON-ENGLISH] here, it was our neighbors that went to the hall without any-- they wouldn't take a penny. They decorated that place like you wouldn't believe. Now, how many neighbors would do that for you, you know? So gay or not gay, they're really nice people. So I think that the gays can be credited for being such a nice people. They swayed a lot of the old-time people into different thinking. There's still a lot of racial stuff. Maybe if you had a black neighbor here, or one of the people would rent to a black person, I think they'd be frowned upon a little bit. But if you rent to a gay person today, it's OK. A lot of things that we think should be this way and that way as you grow up, it's really not that way, shouldn't be that way. So I don't feel that we should really judge them, you know? Let the Lord judge them. Coming up, drunks, partyers, people on the make, and lots of other people to try not to judge. I mean, we have not even gotten to the cops. In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, warm up that coffee for you when our program continues. We never close. We have no keys. We got no keys. If you see the doors, we have no locks. Always open. We'll never, never lock the doors. Just at that moment, a young woman burst through the door. Laughing, she swivels around and drunkenly tries to lock it to keep her two friends out. It takes a second before she realizes there are no locks. The three stumble to a table. This is Kim. I'm at the Golden Apple. I know I am. And I'm with Oscar and Beth. Oscar. Oscar, who I have no idea where he is. Beth and I are riding in a cab, and he like hops in. I've never even met this guy. I need to order food. I'm a journalism major, by the way. Yeah. So I understand what you're doing right now. I work with Kim. And Kim lives-- I don't live downtown. I live in the suburbs. And Kim was like, OK, we went to-- I live downtown though. Right. I do. That's right. She lives in Sheffield. It doesn't matter. Anyway, so we go to this premiere party of the Star Wars exhibit at the Field Museum. Yes. It was so awesome, by the way. Kim, this is my story. Look at my stars. Look, do you see it? Yeah, she sees it. Star Wars. I'm the most sober one here, as you can probably tell. So anyway-- I'm sorry. I'm drunk. That's fine. I-- I meet Oscar. We just meet him, like, standing at the bar, and he offers-- he buys us a couple shots. So we're like, you know, fine. We started drinking with him. We start talking to him. Oh, so I'm sitting there talking to Kim. All of a sudden, I feel two hands on my back. Two hands I do not recognize. Two hands I do not want on my body. And I look and who do I see? It is Oscar, and I don't even know your last name, do I? Which we're not going to say on the radio. I'll be honest. I will-- I will be honest with you. He paid for a lot of tonight. Like, he paid for my drinks. OK, great. You know what? Don't touch me, but you can buy my drinks for me. If you're going to hop into the cab and pay for it, then fine, I'll let you get into the cab with me. That's fine. And he's probably going to buy our food here tonight. So that's fine with me. The brutal truth. What? The brutal truth. It's the brutal truth. I'm just-- I'm just honest. I'm not going to go home with you. My name's Oscar. I bought them-- I bought them a drink or two. Or a bottle of $300 champagne, OK? I'm successful, what can I say? And gloat. We didn't even have to pay when we walked in. I'll be completely honest with you. My goal is to share a bed tonight. Yeah. I'm going to end up with both of them. See, it doesn't matter which one. It's just to share a bed. He just wants to get some play, basically. Is that what you're saying, Oscar? And I'll bet you, if you follow us home, one of them two will be in bed with me tonight. Would I be sitting here talking to you in front of a microphone eating breakfast with them if I was not going to go home with them tonight? Either I'm a complete moron or-- or I know something that you don't. You're just a sleaze ball. I really hate him, Beth. Oscar, you're a good guy. I understand you have a lot of hormones and that's fine with me. You're just not going to be able to act on them tonight-- with me. I don't know about you. Not me either. Unless it's paying by food. Where the hell's the waitress? I don't know. I just want to know where the waitress is. By 1 o'clock, the diner is at capacity and it feels like one big party. A woman sits in a booth in the back with a friend. She's in her early 40s, grew up in the neighborhood. My name is Nancy. Where am I and what time is it? Well, I don't think I'm really here. I think that there's-- I'm doing like a two-dimensional kind of thing. So there's part of me that's here, and then there's part of me that's somewhere else, the future me. So what time is it? Earthly time, it's 1:15 AM, and there is no time where my future self is. You know how you-- when you go to sleep and you dream, how you can bend and shape the events that take place in that dream? Well that-- what if that were your reality and what if this were the dream, you know? You can actually paint your future and you can make everything that's ever happened, is happening, and will happen has already happened. It's shapeshifting time and events so that you know why your soul is here. And that's the purpose, to know why you're here. To know why you came back. I know one past life, I was a cowboy and I was shot by accident. And I've met two of my four buddies that I was with together here at-- we-- we agreed to come back on some kind of subliminal basis. So yeah, I was a cowboy in one lifetime, probably right before the turn of the century. And my other lifetime, I really don't know, but I know I was crushed. And I don't know by what, but probably a large building. I haven't identified the time yet. I'm still working on that. Can I have-- can I have a short stack, please? That's all. Thank you. Not far away, in another booth, sit Danielle, who's 17, and Allison, 18. They're best friends. A month ago, because of problems at home, Danielle moved in with Allison's family. They both live in the basement there now. They've been driving in from the suburbs to the Golden Apple to hang out, meet friends-- guys mostly. We're sitting here waiting for this guy Jeff, who's hopefully going to come. We've just been coming here for the last three nights at about midnight, 1 o'clock. Because we're bored. Just sitting here waiting for random people to show up. She kind of has a crush on this guy, and so we kind of come here in hopes to find him. It hasn't worked yet. You paged him and told him to come here. Yeah, I paged him and told him to come here. Paged him, no answer. Paged him again, no answer. Paged him again. No answer. So basically, we have no life, so we come down here and wait for people. All right, phone call time. Do you have the number? Yeah, I have the number. All right, give me money. All right. I am calling this guy Jeff and I'm going to make him come here because my best friend wants him to. All right. And it's still ringing. Hi, Jeff. We are at the Golden Apple and I am wondering if you're at all coming because Allison kind of wants to see you, and I'm not going to stick around here all night because I have to sleep. So hopefully you'll be here by like 2:00. If not, call Allison tomorrow. All right, bye. And he'll be here. He'll be here. Err. Six messages on his machine at home. I just called Jeff and told him that he's not here and he should be. I still think he will come, I just don't know when. See, the thing that makes this a big deal is the fact that I think he actually might like me back, which doesn't happen ever. So that's why I, like, want to see him again. You want to know the really weird thing about us? Is she, like, hates herself. She never likes anyone ever. And whenever anything goes right, she freaks out. Seriously, like, you say that there's so many people that like me, but how many times has it actually ever worked out? It's not hard for you because you're just like this massive guy magnet. You know, and you act sometimes like you don't see it. You see it. You got to see it. Because we go somewhere, and it's like, whoosh, and everyone's there by you. And not even just guys. Like, you're just-- like, people like you, you know? It takes no effort. But it's not-- no, you're wrong, though. No, I'm not. Because it's not like I just get them like that. It's-- err! OK, I'll give you sometimes it just-- I don't know why, but sometimes, it happens like that. And it's the fact that I talk and I'm not, like, boring and I don't just sit there. No, I'm not saying you're boring. I'm just saying that that's what I'm not. People, like I said before, are robots and they're going to want to follow the life of the party. That's how people are. If you put an idea in their head-- like, if one person says you're a good kisser, you are deemed a good kisser forever and ever and ever. That's the point. Like, you have this thing where you just like radiate positive vibes, you know? And you're always, like, upbeat, you know? When I've been really outgoing, or trying to be, I'm like almost imitating you to see if it works. It doesn't work for me. And you know, we're best friends, especially now that you live with me. It's like you're just always there, so the issue is always there. When you didn't live with me, you know, sometimes I'm not even thinking about it. I don't care. But now you're there all the time and, you know, we've been, like, going out more and it's always there. It is 1:25 almost. OK, I am calling my friend Marion in hopes that he is up. OK. Marion? Are you sleeping? You are? We're just at the restaurant and waiting for people, and no one's coming. So we were wondering, do you want us to come pick you up? Say yes. To come back here. Just say yes. No, say yes. So don't go to sleep. Oh, come on. You know you love me. Thank you. I will be there to pick you up in like two minutes. Bye. So we're here. Hi, Marion. Hi, I can't go anywhere. [LAUGHS] You can't go anywhere? Get in the car. I cannot. Marion. I cannot. My mom has convinced me to stay. Marion, go tell her that you have to come back to the restaurant. I can't-- I have to wake up at 8:00 tomorrow morning. Marion, I'm going to go beat you up. Danielle, however, does not do such a good job convincing him with her fists. Actually, she doesn't try. He won't come. So she climbs back into the car to head back to meet Allison, who's waiting back at the Golden Apple. OK, me and Allison. I think that she feels like we're growing apart because I-- I've kind of been mean lately. Not like-- not like too mean. But like, she's my best friend. She will always be my best friend. It's just like now that we live together, we have constant each other. And it's just like we realize the things that we could overlook before are actual issues now. Like, we're complete opposites. She doesn't like people. I love people. She likes staying home and reading. I can't stand staying home and I can't stand reading. And I mean, I don't-- I don't like thinking. It's like thinking is something you do in school, and then when you need to. And she is not like that, and that's very cool. I mean, it shows that, you know, she's not a robot or whatever, you know? But she's 17. She's only 17. And she acts like she's 23. She's, I guess, above, you know, the normal teenager. She thinks of things. She-- she cares, you know? And that's what people in college do and that's what, you know, older people do. But me and most of all my friends, we're not ready. We're not-- we don't want to do that, you know? We want to-- we want to just sit back and have fun. I mean, she just needs to find the right people to hang out with. And for right now, it's not my thing. This is my thing. I like this scene, where it's just like, we're going to sit back. We're going to have fun. We're going to laugh. We're just going to let everything go, you know? Just like, all right. The Golden Apple scene. Yeah. When she's back in the restaurant, after all this thinking about how she and Allison are so different, she heads over to her best friend. They started a band together called Mixed Emotions, just the two of them. Allison plays guitar. They both sing. And they do one of their songs together now for the microphone. Ready? (SINGING) So much for faith, so much for loving you. So much for everything you told me you would do. So much for love. You won't believe in me. So much for all the times you say you'll never leave. I needed you and thought you'd be there, but now I see the change in you. And now you just don't seem to care. So much for faith. So much for loving you. They skooch in tight to each other near the mic as they sing. Allison's sitting, Danielle's standing, leaning in close. And then, the thing that they had been waiting for all night finally happens. Sort of. This is Jeff. That's Juan. He's got a face for radio. That's Billy. This-- OK, yeah. Oh, Billy's here. It is 2:15 and they have finally arrived. Yeah. Like-- When we'd given up all hope, poof, they're here. It's the greatest thing. I told you. I knew it. I never gave up faith. They all sit down together. The guys who they've been waiting for, who they called six times, Jeff, he never arrived. But there is another Jeff with this group, and Allison transfers her crush to Jeff number two. At some point, Danielle drags her outside the diner to confer. They stand on the sidewalk, just on the other side of the plate glass window Jeff number two and everybody else. Allison reviews the facts of the case. Well, it's just like, OK, he's-- you know, he's into some of the supernatural stuff too-- Uh-huh. --and we have a lot of things in common. Like, we're both big Tim Burton fans and-- so-- I don't know. I actually had something to talk to him about for hours now. And-- but then again, it's like, what's the point of liking him if he doesn't like me? So-- Do I ask him? No. I'm just going to go and be like, OK, here, look. I'm trying to hook her up and-- Don't. OK. I was wondering. I'm trying to set Allison-- I'll be slick. It'll be fun. For you, yeah. I'll give him a flower. Come on, it'll be fun. If he says no, we just won't come out here ever again. Please. No. Whatever else it might do for Allison if she were hooked up with somebody, it might just reduce the general level of tension between her and Danielle. And Danielle does not take no for an answer. She gives the flower to Jeff number two, saying it's from Allison. He smiles a big number two smile, then he and Allison sit alone at a table and talk for a while until Danielle comes over. Are we leaving now? Yes, we paid and we left a tip, and I put the rest of the change in this little box here. And now we're leaving. It can be our research foundation. It was fun. We got here at like 11:30 and it is now 3:15. And it is time to leave, so we'll be back tomorrow. Bye. Bye. Good night. By 4:00 AM Saturday morning, things have finally started to die down. Once again, like when we arrived the day before, it's mostly cab drivers and cops. What was that show Florence was on? With Mel's Diner? What the hell's the name of that show? Alice? No. These two police officers are sitting in a booth in front. Even on a break, they are required to wear 18-pound bulletproof vests. They call over their waitress, Donna, to help settle this question. Let me ask Donna. Maybe she knows. Hey, Donna. Do you want another [INAUDIBLE]? Oh, no thank you. What's the TV show that-- where they were in the diner with-- Mel's Diner with-- Flo. Flo. Flo was the redhead. Yeah, Flo was the one waitress. It was Alice and Flo and Vera. Yeah, it was-- and it was Mel's Diner. Vera was the dark hair. Flo was the Western. And then Alice was the one from New York. But it was called Flo's, I think. No, it wasn't called Flo's. No. No? It was-- I think it was Alice. I'm stumped. Now I won't be able to sleep today till I find out what the name of that show was. I'm Officer Norman Knudsen, and this is my partner. Officer Clark Eichman. We work beat 1922 tonight in the 19th district. We're on a personal. We're allowed as many personals as we want for coffee breaks, use the washroom, whatever. And so it's almost 5 o'clock in the morning, AM. OK, 0500 hours. It's often-- this district normally is slow. But on the weekends, it's like any other district. Gun calls, fights-- Narcotics. --narcotics. It's real busy for two days a week and real slow for five. With all the bars on Lincoln and Clark, and even further north on Lincoln, you can go from one jab to another. One fight after fight after fight after fight. We had a bar fight over at Irish Eyes. One of the guys is going to need plastic surgery. Yeah. Because he got hit with a beer stein in the face. You know, Sox fan versus Cubs fan. OK, the Cubs fan got hit in the face with a stein. And then we had another brawl over at Cubby Bear, where we made three arrests. And we just got done with all the paperwork and it's been, what, two and a half hours on the paperwork. Yeah. Yeah. Total of four arrests. Four arrests. Yeah, four arrests. First time to sit down and have a cup of coffee and relax and unwind. This is my regular hangout here. The Golden-- what is it? Pancake? I don't know. You come here all the time. I know. I come in here all the time. I used to know. 2971 Lincoln. Mike is always hanging around, and then there's, well, Bob over there. He's sitting on the end. Hey, Bob. How you doing? Donna, Mary. Dave, the one cab driver. I've come here quite a bit. 19th and West Belmont. 19th and West Belmont. Damon and Belmont. Right down the street. --three men standing on the street. One is a male-- There's a car right now three blocks away, three guys with a gun. Three blocks from here. I'm getting description of a male, white, bald head, white t-shirt. Now, supposing they're heading towards Barry, which is this way. They can break our personal if they want. Our lunch break, they're not supposed to. But if it's a hot call-- like, this one might even be bona fide. Probably 8 out of every 10 calls are garbage. They're not-- now there's two calls. Now it might be legitimate. One thing that happens is, when you get a regular partner-- and even somebody you can work for the first night. You learn their first name, not just their last. And then, where did you work before, are you married? He collects hockey cards. I collect monster memorabilia. Models. I do model collecting. I collect a couple of guitars. I play the guitar. And then you create a bond. You even tell some intimate secrets, you know, things that even the wives don't know about. But you're creating a bond, and people don't realize that. 90% of the job is you and your partner in the car. It can be a long night or it can be a lot of fun. The other thing is if you don't feel like doing anything, on some nights, you don't have to. You might not get a call. You can chill out, drive around. You know, you can just kind of be off in a haze and it doesn't really matter. It's almost 5 o'clock in the morning, AM. Three more hours. Yeah. If we don't get a late arrest. 1922 is back with you. They head toward the door. Donna, Pete, we'll see you guys manana. Hasta la bye-bye, says Donna, over by the counter. All right, see you guys all later. The damn sun is coming up already. The damn sun streaks its damn light through the cursed windows. Donna straightens things up a little, surveys the restaurant. She's the waitress that we first interviewed a full day before, the one who brings in cookies on Christmas for everybody. She eyes the morning regulars at the tables. Well, it's now 5 o'clock Saturday morning. I got one hour and 45 minutes. And I know it sounds a little corny, but I really do enjoy it. As soon as it starts to get daylight, I start to feel good. The day people come in, the nice smells, nice colognes. [LAUGHS] You know, it's kind of wore off on the night people, but the day people, it's so fresh. It's nice, refreshing. Everybody else is getting sleepy and I'm starting to wake up because I'm a day person that's been working nights for 26 years. [LAUGHS] But I'm handling it all right. Well, our program was produced this week by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Blue Chevigny, and Jonathan Goldstein. Other people who did shifts recording at the Golden Apple include Mary Wiltenburg, Joe Richman, who recorded Danielle and Allison, Wendy Dorr recorded the policeman, Oscar and two drunk women who would not go home with him, Tom and Scott, and the lady who explained earthly time. Nancy Updike's story was produced with a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of HearingVoices.com. Many thanks to Tom and Nick and Pete, the owners of the Golden Apple, and dozens of customers that we interviewed over the course of the day. This show was recorded in July of 2000. The Golden Apple still stands at Lincoln Avenue, where it hits Southport. My recommendation is the feta cheese omelet. Additional production for today's program by Aviva DeKornfeld, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can stream over 600 episodes of our program for absolutely free, see all kinds of videos we've made over the years, the musical we did on stage, favorites lists, staff recommendations. Again, ThisAmericanLife.org. Or get our app, which has all that stuff, and you can download as many episodes as you want. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who's always reminding me-- I'm a journalism major, by the way. Yeah. So I understand what you're doing right now. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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There's this scene in a book I love, About a Boy, by Nick Hornby. The situation in the scene is this. There's this very well-meaning guy who's decided that a good way to meet women would be to join a group for single parents. He's not a single parent himself. He has no children at all. But this guy, whose name is Will, goes to a meeting and gets caught up in conversations. He finds himself making up all sorts of things about his non-existent child and non-existent ex-wife. There's a tall, blond woman named Susie at the meeting. She's nervy-looking. She's beautiful. They chat. They make plans to meet at a picnic for kids and parents. And, comes the day of, Will calls Susie to tell her that his son, Ned, will not be there. Now, Ned will not be there because Ned does not exist, but Will tells Susie that Ned won't be there because his mom has taken him for the day, at the last minute. Susie tells Will that Will needs to stand up to his non-existent ex-wife a little more firmly. And then there's this passage, which I'm going to read. It was much more confusing than Will had imagined, making people up, and he was beginning to realize that he hadn't thought it through properly at all. How could he carry it through? How many times could Ned reasonably be whisked away by his mother, or maternal grandmother, or international terrorists? What reasons could he give for not inviting Susie round to his flat where there were no toys, or cribs, or diapers, or balls, and where there was no second bedroom even? Could he kill Ned off with some awful disease? A car crash? Tragic. Tragic. Life goes on. Maybe not. Parents got pretty cut up about kids dying, and he'd find the requisite years of grief a real drain on his thespian resources. No, disaster was approaching, and there was nothing he can do about it. Best pull out now. Walk away. But walking away wasn't Will's style. He always felt something would turn up, even though nothing ever did, or even could most the time. Once, years ago, when he was a kid, he told a school friend, having first ascertained that this friend was not a CS Lewis fan, that it was possible to walk through the back of his wardrobe into a different world, and invited him around to explore. He could have canceled. He could have told him anything. But he was not prepared to suffer a moment's mild embarrassment if there was no immediate need to do so. And so the two of them scrabbled around among the coat hangers for several minutes until Will mumbled something about the world being closed on Saturday afternoons. The thing was, he could still remember feeling genuinely hopeful right up to the last minute. Maybe there will be something here, he had thought. Maybe I won't lose face. There wasn't, and he did, loads of it, a whole head full of face. But he hadn't learned a thing from the experience. If anything, it seemed to have left him with the feeling that he was bound to be lucky next time. As this scene makes clear, there are different kinds of deception. And the line between deceiving others and deceiving yourself can get kind of hazy, especially when hope comes into play. Today on our program, the three kinds of deception-- at least we're claiming that there are only three for the purposes of this radio show-- the three kinds of deception and how any one of them so easily turns into any one of the others. Act One of our program, Self-Deception, the story of an ex-con who not only told himself a lot of things that were untrue, he created a sort of web of unreality around himself so that dozens of people in a small town started kidding themselves about what was real and what was not real. And then, all of them together, decided to make a feature film. Act Two, Deceiving Others, an African-American lawyer in a fancy Manhattan firm decides that he wants to see what life is like in the exclusive country clubs that his colleagues go to. So he enters one the only way that they would let a black man like him in. Act Three, Accidental Deception, American tourists in Paris accidentally mistake writer David Sedaris for a French pickpocket. At first it makes him mad, and then he starts to kind of like it. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Act One, Self-Deception. It's a truism that a great salesman has to actually believe the lies he tells to make the sale, the way a great actor has to believe in his own part. This next story is about somebody who aspires to be a great actor, but, in fact, is probably just a great salesman, a charmer in the old school. Alex Blumberg has the story of how he convinced an entire town a bunch of things that, on deeper examination, were more hope than truth. Of all the tall tales Richard Castellano told, the most incredible one was the easiest to actually verify. He had been in a film with Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal called Analyze This. He had a total of 16 lines. Almost all of them were one or two sentences long. He sounded like this. What are you, some kind of moron? This is the story of the power that 16 little lines like that can have, how those 16 lines can be parlayed into money, and excitement, and hope for lots of people. And it starts shortly after Richard Castellano finished filming Analyze This and moved with his wife to a tiny community in upstate New York where there's one main street, called Main Street, one block long, and one bridge across the Delaware River to Pennsylvania. It's called Narrowsburg and, with a population in the hundreds, it's, literally, a hamlet. There's no population requirement to be a hamlet. If it were bigger than that, it would be a village, and we don't have a village because it's not enough people. Dick Crandall is the supervisor of Narrowsburg. Supervisor's what you call a mayor when a town's too small to have mayors. And he remembers when Castellano-- Richie, as he came to be called-- first moved to town. In fact, everyone here has a story. He was a kind of a flamboyant personality, absolutely. He wore his dark clothes from New York City and a leather jacket open. And he swashbuckled down the street a little bit, and hollered, and talked to everybody, and, you know, was sort of a conquering hero-type person. He was larger than life, he absolutely was. He would walk into what was then the Chatterbox Cafe and say that he was buying everybody's breakfast. And he would walk in and say, "Hi. I'm Richard Castellano, and I'm buying breakfast." And then he would walk out. And he liked to sign stuff, and every time I see him he gives me signed stuff of himself, pictures of himself and a bunch of stuff. He signs everything. The first time I went to his office, he had me run over to the restaurant to get him a cup of coffee. And he wrote down what he wanted in the coffee, and he signed that. He started talking about his checkered background. He didn't hide it. People really liked that story, you know, of a guy who was a con, and look at him now, and he's in a movie with De Niro, you know? He told people that the name of Narrowsburg was going to be changed to Castellanoville. He said he heisted a armored car, and he got sent up to Attica. He said to me-- he said it to many people-- that he had $2 million stashed away. From his bank heist? Yeah. I mean, he told me he killed somebody. That was about the extent of my impression of him, except he called me Bill, which didn't make me too happy because my name is Dick. It isn't easy to get an interview with Richard Castellano. My first instructions were to call, let it ring once, hang up, and call back again so they knew it was me. When we finally do meet, it's in Manhattan in his lawyer's office with his lawyer there. Castellano's in his 50s, but good-looking in that Hollywood way-- slim, well-dressed in expensive blacks and grays, good haircut. He says he understands why everyone in Narrowsburg was so excited to meet him. You know, I've met celebrities myself and I still get that-- what's that word-- I was smitten by people I met in movie theaters. And I remember, when I was a kid, I saw the Three Stooges. They made a personal appearance at the Avon Theater here in Brooklyn. I shook their hands. How did you feel when you met them? I'm still talking about it. There must have been some effect, right? So, I'd want to give them a chance. You know what I'm saying? Have a little Hollywood. In the beginning, everyone seemed happy to have a little Hollywood. The town got a charming celebrity with bad boy appeal. The celebrity got an adoring public. Richie opened an acting studio, The Richard Castellano School of Acting, and 42 people signed up for his classes. He and his wife also organized the ambitiously named First Annual Narrowsburg International Independent Film Festival. He said Narrowsburg would soon become the Sundance of the East. But, most exciting, he planned to shoot a movie in Narrowsburg, a gangster picture. Richie himself was the lead. People from the town would fill out the cast. 17-year-old Zac Pontier was one of the ones who showed up at the audition. Well, everybody, and all the kids in the town, and everybody that wanted to be an actor, everybody I knew was there, probably, a huge number of people. And he had people come up and improv scenes. Like, he told you what to say. I remember the scene that he had most people do was this kid, Dominic, was yelling at his sister about how he didn't like his father anymore because he felt like his father killed his mother. So, I was a little nervous when I came up and he said, "Action," or whatever he said. And I just went totally off on this one girl, and I was like, "How dare you talk about our mother like that! She's dead! And if it wasn't for our father, then she'd still be alive! And what about me? What do you think about me? I have nobody!" It went on and on like that. So, after it was over, did you feel pretty confident about it? Yeah. He told me I did a good job, and he had me put a star by my name. That had to be a good sign. Yeah, that was. I was like, oh, star, that's a good sign. I'm good to go. And so, I don't know, I remember that we didn't have call waiting then. And so I was like, "Oh, stay off the phone. No one-- Can't talk on the phone." Like, three weeks after that, I talked on the phone very little. Eventually, Zac got the part. The movie was called Four Deadly Reasons, and shooting began in the spring of '99. And it was the real deal. Giant Italian characters actors with Brooklyn accents wandered around Main Street. People pushing cameras yelled "Cut," and "Action." Guys in vests hollered into walkie-talkies. Larry Revene, the director of photography, is a 30-year veteran of over 100 low-budget films. He did Hollywood Hot Tubs, Doom Asylum, Bedroom Eyes II. He says, typically, he can shoot a movie in 10 days. The formula always includes either a little T&A, or a little violence. This [? has no ?] [? pretense ?] to art. This is low-budget, commercial film, you know? Almost immediately, things started going wrong. Castellano was constantly missing from the set. At the end of the first week, the checks he gave the crew all bounced. Stories with headlines like, "Hey, Castellano. Where's My Money?" started appearing in the local paper. And all sorts of secrets about him came to light. His name wasn't Castellano like the former crime boss, it was Castaldo. He'd never murdered anyone. And the armored car he claimed to have robbed turned out to be a shoe store. It was all playing out like a very old and very familiar story-- charismatic flim-flam man comes to town, raises people's hopes, rips them off, vanishes. "If only it were so simple," says director of photography Larry Revene. "If only Richard were capable of a con like that." Well, I think that that would be giving too much credit to him because I don't think he's capable of that kind of thinking ahead. I think he was thinking, you've got some helmets, I've got some swords, let's go to my garage and we'll put on a play. And he's going to believe it too because it's happening. People are involved. It's all going forward. I hope some money shows up, maybe we can pay everybody. And he's playing out his role as this wonderful movie star. 17-year-old Zac tells this story. Well into the film, long after the script was done and the parts were cast, Richie was still sending people he'd met to the set, saying that they could get a part in his movie. And this would happen all the time. Every time the town coordinator came outside onto the porch, there would be more people there, like, "Are you the town coordinator? We're looking for the town coordinator. Richie said that we had a big part in his movie. In the scene by the pool, I'm the guy that's supposed to be in it." And the town coordinator would be like, "No, you're not. You're not that guy. I'm sorry. Richie was mistaken." So they were all standing around like, "Oh, can I have your autograph then?" So I felt really bad for all these people that Richie just-- he didn't get it through his head that, for that time, from when they left where he was and drove to where the movie set, they thought he was the best guy in the world. He wasn't the person that said that they weren't going to be in the movie, he was the person that said they were. So it made him look like a really good guy, a really nice guy. I think that's why he did it. He liked people to think he was a really good guy. Richie had misled people about who he was. He'd made promises he couldn't keep. But when you talk to him, you get the sense that he'd hooked himself along with everyone else. I'd become what I put in my head, and I'd become that person. Like, my wife was just talking. We were watching a movie about Vietnam. And we're sitting there, and I said to my wife, "Yeah, you see that guy, he's in the foxhole? When I was in Vietnam, that's where I used to hide. And when it used to rain, we used to go there." She says, "You were never in Vietnam." I said, "I know," I said, "but it sounds good, don't it?" I find it very easy to do, to become somebody else, because sometimes, if I'm not happy with who I am, I could step into that character. During one of Richie's many appearances in court, the prosecuting attorney asked him if he'd ever told anyone he'd committed murder. He said yes, he had. The attorney then asked if this was true, and he said no. He explained, "I live the roles I play in my movies." The final straw came in August of 2000. For months, advertisements had announced that Four Deadly Reasons would premiere during the Second Annual Narrowsburg Film Festival. Zac Pontier rented a suit especially for the occasion, set up a video camera in the back of the theater to capture the whole event. Here's what he recorded. Joe Dinki, the screenwriter on the film, came out in front of the curtain, sat on the edge of the stage, dangled his legs over the side and, leaning back on one elbow, the microphone in his free hand, delivered this news. Everybody raise their hand, anyone remember those summers where everything just stinks? I wrote this screenplay for Four Deadly Reasons from an original story by Richard's son and another person. And we took it and we made it into a, I think, a very viable, very sellable, very fun, mob film. So let's all applaud Narrowsburg for their participation. Thank you. All right! Now, the hard part. We don't have the whole film here today. And I really do apologize. But, what you will see is 15 minutes, sorry, of the film that shows exactly what we were doing, and how much fun it is, and how great your area looks, and all the people that were in this film. So, I don't want to belabor the point and keep apologizing because you guys are great, and I think it's a fun film. And I know it's going to go places. And I'm having one of those really bad summers. What came next was a hastily produced, 15-minute montage of scenes from the movie. It was like a porn film without the sex scenes-- awkward dialogue, noodly soundtrack, gratuitous use of bikinis and double entendres, and, most offensive, no scenes with people from Narrowsburg. Laurie Stuart, who works at the local paper, said that when it ended, the audience was stunned. You just couldn't believe it. Nobody could believe it. And then, 175 people just were excused, I mean, literally, excused. The guy stood in front of the audience and said, "OK, that's it. You're excused." And 175 people, in disbelief, filed out of that theater. I mean, at that point, any good will that folks had was really just frittered away. After the premiere, people in town stopped treating Richie as a lovably outsized character and set their sights on revenge. Suddenly, everyone was suing him-- a rental car company, 14 people from his film crew, a half dozen of his acting students. Part of the reason they were upset has to do with the real reasons most of them got involved with Richie in the first place. And to understand those reasons, you have to visit someone like John Borg, the biggest investor in Castellano's film. There is all my proceeds from my check, which I give him-- checks, $3,000 here, on 8/10/99, $5,000, 7/9/99. John Borg lives in a double-wide trailer on a small farm off a gravel road in the woods. On top of his dresser, there's a handgun laying next to an English pronunciation dictionary. Chickens run free in his yard, and he supplements his social security income by selling their eggs. There's some dispute about just how much money Richard Castellano owes John Borg. Castellano admits to borrowing around $60,000. Borg says it's $154,000. Borg says that, in decades of marriage, he'd never gone out to eat once. He didn't invest in the stock market and, up until he met Castellano, he had his entire life savings in the bank. When I ask him why he loaned so much of his money-- by his account, his entire life savings-- to a man he barely knew, he goes to his living room, picks up a video off the top of the TV, and shows it to me. He said, "I made movie with Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal." I went to buy the movie. I bought it in Kmart in [? Honesdale. ?] I've got the movie right here, Analyze That. Did it sound suspicious to you at all, or not really? In the beginning, no, because he's a very great and a very sweet talker. And I believed the guy because of that stupid movie right there. In the end, one of the most surprising things about this story is just how little stardust Castellano was offering people, a bit role in a so-so Hollywood movie, and how far it took him. John Borg is like most people in Narrowsburg. He says he loaned Richie the money because he thought it would help bring people and business to the area, but you get the sense there's something more. I ask, did Richie ever offer to put him in the movie? "Well," he said, "we're going to see. Maybe going to get you some part." I told him I'm not interested. But part of you was a little interested? Well, if I would be interested, I would have play Marshal Dillon, which I got a picture right there. Marshal Dillon, what do you mean? At this point, John Borg goes and picks up a framed photograph, resting on a doily on top of his VCR, of a figure with a cowboy hat and a handgun. So, this is-- Yeah, that's me. Yes. That's you? Yeah. And that's my gun too. Uh-huh, and you've got a cowboy hat. Is that at your house? I got my hat here in the closet. Yeah. This is the part you wanted to play? Wait, wait. Not much, you know, because we didn't talk too much about it. But he told me that he going to give me a guy going to be like a law enforcement officer. So it was Marshal Dillon. Well, everything [? ran up for the end, ?] so what can I do? The more time I spend in Borg's house, the more evidence I discover of his obsession with the movies. He owns dozens of videos in big shopping bags, and on shelves, and stacked on tables. Later in the conversation, fairly abruptly in the middle of a story, he gets up, grabs his cowboy hat, turns the brim up like Soupy Sales and announces that he can act, if that's what you call this. I'm [UNINTELLIGIBLE] guy, and I [UNINTELLIGIBLE] for anybody who [UNINTELLIGIBLE] this. Borg calls this his stupid voice. And, as near as I can figure out, it's a schtick he developed several decades ago in Brooklyn that he used to entertain his co-workers during long night shifts. He says he showed it to Castellano, who said he'd put him in the show. That's what he said, he's going to put me in the show. "I'm going to give you a wonderful part in the movie." And I don't get [BLEEP], not even one minute. He promised me he's going to put me in a movie, and everything else, but he never have. You want to know why Paul Vitti comes here? Paul Vitti comes here because his father was whacked here. His father was whacked here? What do you mean he was whacked? Yeah, his father was whacked right here in that corner many years ago. This is Richard Castellano quoting other people's lines from the movie in which he played a bit role, Analyze This. In our two-hour interview in his lawyer's office, he was defensive and guarded, until I asked him about his favorite actors and favorite movie scenes. He stood up, rubbed his hands together, and got into character. Shut up, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] [? you ?] [? know. ?] Why? What's the big secret, Charlie? Gee, everybody knows what happened to Paul Vitti's father. Standing there in the conference room, Castellano blocked me into the scene, positioning me a couple of feet from him. You're the doctor. You're the doctor. Oh, wait. OK, he comes to me. I got you. OK. You know me? Yeah. No, you don't. Did you read about me in the paper? Yeah. No, you didn't. See, I was doing Billy Crystal. Do you know me? No, you don't. You see my picture in the paper? Yes. No, you didn't. I don't even get the paper. Did you read about me? Oh yes I did. No, you didn't. Well, I didn't even get the paper today. You know, that's Billy Crystal. Castellano acted out whole stretches of dialogue from scenes in which he didn't even appear, like someone who'd watched the film dozens of times. It wasn't hard for him to package the dream of Hollywood to the people of Narrowsburg. It was a dream he understood. Well, I know the feeling it gave me, that I'd go to sleep every night still thinking, did I really act with De Niro in that? I mean, you read, hear so much about big celebrity, the guy that made hundreds of movies. All this talk of the world, he's the best actor in the world. Then here you are, standing right with him, shaking his hand, drinking coffee with him, acting across from him, walking with him and, you know, just being involved with him. It's the most exciting-- the next exciting feeling I'll ever get is when I meet God. That'll be the closest I can get to how I felt when I met Bobby De Niro. Everyone I spoke with in Narrowsburg got asked the same question-- if all this were made into a movie, who would you want to play the part of you? And all of them said the same thing, from John Borg, to Zac Pontier, to Richie Castellano. They wanted to play themselves. Alex Blumberg is a producer here at This American Life. Four Deadly Reasons was finally released in 2002, and that's two years after this story first was broadcast. It played a few festivals and then went to DVD. Coming up, David Sedaris swears he took a bath, really, despite what the tourists say. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Our show today, The Three Kinds of Deception. Act One, if you'll recall, was about self-deception. We've arrived at Act Two, Deceiving Others. When he was 30 years old, a Harvard Law School graduate and a practicing attorney making over $100,000 a year, Lawrence Otis Graham decided to take a job as a busboy at an all-white country club. To be clear, he didn't decide to do this because of his own experience at these kinds of clubs, though he'd had some. Growing up on the border of Scarsdale, New York, there were white families all around that belonged to country clubs, though his family, a well-to-do black family from Memphis, did not. My very first club experience was not a very positive one. It was when I was around seven years old. My parents objected to my brother and I going to a country club with our best friends who lived across the street. And they belonged to a club that my parents said did not permit blacks or Jews, so they brought us to the club because we insisted we wanted to go. I was seven. My brother was nine. But we got into the children's swimming pool. They had a kiddie pool and then an adult pool. And, within less than two or three minutes, all of the kids got out of the pool. And my brother, Richard, and I ran out of the pool too because we thought there was something in the water that was going to hurt us. And then we realized this was a club that just did not want us there. My parents had warned me that something might happen, but my brother and I were growing up in what we imagined to be liberal and informed New York suburban communities where we thought that the stories that my parents told us about Memphis and the other parts of the South from the '40s and '50s didn't exist anymore. I just think about your parents in that situation, of how protective and sad they must have felt for you. But also, at the same time, they must have felt like, well, it's good that you saw it. Right. They felt it was good that we saw it. They understood the environment. They knew that nothing, physically, would happen to us. But it was an important lesson for me to learn at that age. Many years later, as an adult working at a fancy Manhattan law firm, Lawrence Otis Graham and his friends all noticed something. Many friends who were working in New York, who were black, or Latino, or Jewish, or female, kept sharing stories with me that, in their firms, they were noticing that the people that were moving up had-- in their businesses-- were ones who were brought to country clubs over the weekend. And I started to notice that there was a pattern, that none of us-- none of the blacks, none of the Jews, none of the women, none of the Latinos or Asians-- were being brought. Again, to be clear about his motivations, he wanted to be part of that network. He wanted access to those connections. And he was curious about what, exactly, went on at these exclusive clubs. And that's why he decided to get in the only way that he could, as a busboy. For two weeks, he left his high-paid job at the law firm and went undercover, essentially, a black man impersonating a black man. He chose the oldest, most prestigious club he could get to, the 100-year-old Greenwich Country Club, in patrician, white Greenwich, Connecticut. It turned out to be hard work, physically demanding work. And he wrote up this account of his experience. March 28 to April 7, 1992. I invented a completely new resume for myself. I erased Harvard, Princeton, and my upper-middle-class suburban childhood from my life. I pieced together a wardrobe with a polyester blazer, ironed blue slacks, black loafers, and a horrendous pink, black, and silver tie, and I set up interviews at clubs. Over the telephone, five of the eight said that I sounded as if I would make a great waiter. But when they saw that I was black, the club managers told me I would quote, "probably make a much better busboy." "Busboy? Over the phone you said you needed a waiter," I argued. Sunday, April 12. Today was my first day at work. Looking in my wallet, I removed my American Express Gold Card, my Harvard Club membership ID, and all of my business cards. When I arrived at the club, my new boss waved me in. "Good morning, Larry," he said with a sufficiently warm smile. "Hi, Mr. Ryan. How's it going?" Glancing at his watch to check my punctuality, he shook my hand and handed me some papers. "Oh, and by the way, where'd you park?" "In front, near the tennis courts." Already shaking his head, he tossed his pencil onto the desk. "That's off-limits to you. You should always park in the back, enter in the back, and leave from the back. No exceptions." "I'll do the forms right now," I said. "And then, I'll be an official busboy." Mr. Ryan threw me an ominous nod. "And Larry, let me stop you now. We don't like that term busboy. We find it demeaning. We prefer to call you busmen." Leading me down the center stairwell to the basement, he added, "And in the future, you will always use the back stairway by the back entrance." He showed me the Mixed Grill, a well-lit pastel room with glass French doors and white wood trim. "Guys, say hello to Larry. He's a new busman at the club." I waved. "And this is Rick, Stephen, Drew, Buddy, and Lee." Five white waiters dressed in white polo shirts with blue 1892 club insignia nodded while busily slicing lemons. "And this is Hector and Carlos, the other busmen." Hector, Carlos, and I were the only non-whites on the serving staff. They greeted me in a mix of English and Spanish. "Nice to meet all of you," I responded. "Thank God," one of the taller waiters cried out. "Finally, somebody who can speak English." Standing outside the ice room, Carlos and I talked about our pasts. He was 25, originally from Colombia, and hadn't finished school. "You going to live in the monkey house?" Carlos asked. "What's that?" We climb the stairs to take our 10-minute lunch break before work begin. "Monkey house is where workers live here," Carlos said. I was soon back downstairs working in the grill. At my first few tables, I tried to avoid making eye contact with members as I removed dirty plates and wiped down tables and chairs. I was sure I'd be recognized. At around 1:15, four men who looked to be in their mid to late 50s sat down at a six-chair table while pulling off their cotton windbreakers and golf sweaters. "It's these damned news people that cause all these problems," said golfer number one, shoving his hand deep into a popcorn bowl. "These Negroes wouldn't even be thinking about golf. They can't afford to join a club anyway." Golfer number two squirmed out of his navy blue sweater and nodded in agreement. "My big problem with this Clinton fellow is that he apologized." As I stood watching from the corner of the bar, I realized the men were talking about Governor Bill Clinton's recent apology for playing at an all-white golf club in Little Rock, Arkansas. "Hope, I couldn't agree with you more," added golfer number three, a hefty man who was biting off the end of a cigar. "You got any iced tea?" golfer number one asked as I put the silverware and menus around the table. Popcorn flew out of his mouth as he attempted to speak and chew at the same time. "Yes, we certainly do." Golfer number three removed a beat-up Rolex from his wrist. "It just sets a bad precedent. Instead of apologizing, he should try to discredit them, undercut them somehow. What's to apologize for?" I cleared my throat and backed away from the table. Suddenly, golfer number one waved me back to his side. "Should we get four iced teas, or just a pitcher and four glasses?" "I'd be happy to bring whatever you'd like, sir." "Oh, busboy," a voice called out as I made the rounds with two pots of coffee. "Here, busboy. Here, busboy," the woman called out. "Busboy, my coffee is cold. Give me a refill." "Certainly. I would be happy to." I reached over for her cup. The 50-ish woman pushed her hand through her straw blond hair and turned to look at me in the face. "Decaf, thank you." "You are quite welcome." Before I turned toward the kitchen, the woman leaned over to her companion. "My goodness, did you hear that? That busboy has diction like an educated white person." A curly-haired waiter walked up to me in the kitchen. "Larry, are you living in the monkey house?" "No, but why do they call it that?" "Well, no offense against you, but it got that name since it's the house where the workers have lived at the club and since the workers used to be Negroes or blacks, it was nicknamed the monkey house. And the name just stuck, even though Negroes have now been replaced by Hispanics." Saturday, April 18. Today, while I was wiping down a table, I heard a member snap his fingers in my direction. I turned to see a group of young men smoking cigars. They seemed to be my age or a couple of years younger. "Hey, do I know you?" the voice asked. As I turned slowly toward the voice, I could hear my own heartbeat. I was sure it was someone I knew. "No," I said, approaching the blond cigar-smoker. "I don't think so." "You must be new. What's your name?" "My name is Larry. I just started a few days ago." The cigar-smoking host grabbed me by the wrist while looking at his guests. "Well, Larry, welcome to the club. I'm Mr. Billings, and this is Mr. Dennis, a friend and new member." "Hello, Mr. Dennis," I heard myself saying to a freckle-faced young man who puffed uncomfortably on his fat roll of tobacco. The first cigar-smoker gestured for me to bend over, as if he were about to share some important confidence. "Now, Larry, here's what I want you to do. Go get us some of those peanuts, and then give my guests and me a fresh ashtray. Can you manage that?" Tuesday, April 21. Just as we were all leaving for the day, Mr. Ryan came down to hand out the new policies for those who were going to be living in the monkey house. Since it had recently been renovated, the club was requiring all new residents to sign the form. The policy included a rule that forbade employees to have overnight guests. Rule 14 stated that the club management had the right to enter an employee's locked bedroom at any time, without permission, and without giving notice. As I was making rounds with my coffee pots, I overheard a raspy-voiced woman talking to a mother and daughter who were thumbing through a catalog of infants' clothing. "The problem with au pairs is that they're usually only in the country for a year." The mother and daughter nodded in agreement. "But getting one that's a citizen has its own problems. For example, if you ever have to choose between a Negro and one of these Spanish people, always go for the Negro." One of the women frowned, confused. "Really?" "Yes," the raspy-voiced woman responded with cold logic. "Even though you can't trust either one, at least Negroes speak English and can follow your directions." Before I could refill the final cup, the raspy-voiced woman looked up at me and smiled. "Oh, thanks for the refill, Larry." Wednesday, April 22. Today, the TV was turned to testimony and closing arguments from the Rodney King police beating trial in California. "I am so sick of seeing that awful videotape," one woman said to friends at her table. "It shouldn't be on TV." At around 2:00, Lois, the club's official secretary, asked me to help her send out a mailing to 600 members after my shift. She took me up to her office on the main floor and introduced me to the two women who sat with her. "Larry, this is Marge, whom you'll talk with in three months because she's in charge of employee benefits." I smiled at the brunette. "And, Larry, this is Sandy, whom you'll talk with after you become a member at the club because she's in charge of members' accounts." Both Sandy and I looked up at Lois with shocked expressions. Lois winked and, at the same moment, the three jovial women burst out laughing. Thursday, April 22. At the end of the day, Mr. Ryan handed me my first paycheck. When I opened the envelope and saw what I'd earned, $174.04 for five days, I laughed out loud. Back in the security of a bathroom stall, where I had periodically been taking notes since my arrival, I studied the check and thought about how many hours and how hard I'd worked for so little money. It was less than 1/10 of what I'd make in the same time in my law firm. I went upstairs and asked Mr. Ryan about my paycheck. "Well, we decided to give you $7 an hour," he said. I'd never actually been told my hourly rate. "But if the check looks especially big, Larry, that's because you got some extra pay in there for all of your terrific work on Good Friday. And by the way, Larry, don't tell any of the others what you're getting because we're giving you a special deal, and it's really nobody else's business." I nodded and thanked him for his largess. I stuffed some more envelopes, emptied out my locker, and left. Lawrence Otis Graham, reading from one of the essays in his book, Member of the Club. He says he wasn't surprised at what he called the passive bigotry of the club members, who, he said, did not think of themselves as racist. Interestingly, the more pointed language came from club staff who routinely used the word nigger. It was not a reference to me, but it was in reference to them watching television. The television was constantly on, so it was, there those niggers are again kind of thing. But, two seconds later, they would turn to me and say, "Oh, Larry, can you come, do so-and-so?" I honestly don't even believe that they thought that people would have been offended by the use of the term. When you heard this, were you surprised at all? No. No. Not at all? I'll tell you why I wasn't surprised. I wasn't surprised because of what they had put me through in order to get the job. I had three call-back interviews for this job, three call-back interviews for a busboy job. Wow. I mean, that is outrageous. If you look at what it would take to get a job at IBM, I don't think you'd have three call-back jobs. So it was very clear to me there was something about myself that made them feel uncomfortable. We called the Greenwich Country Club to find out if the club now admits blacks, or Jews, or any minority members at all. The club declined to respond. Act Three, Accidental Deception. OK, to review, thus far on our program we have witnessed self-deception, the willful deception of others, and how one of those can lead to the other. David Sedaris is a writer living, these days, in Paris, France, with his boyfriend, Hugh. He now has this story of accidental deception and how it can send somebody down the slippery slope to both of the other kinds. It was July, and Hugh and I were taking the Paris Metro from our neighborhood to a store where we hoped to buy a good deal of burlap. During the summer months, a great number of American vacationers can be found riding the Metro, and their voices tend to carry. It's something I hadn't noticed until leaving home, but we are a loud people. On the first of our two trains, I listened to a quartet of college-age Texans who sat beneath a sign instructing passengers to surrender their seats and stand, should the foyer of the train become too crowded. The foyer of the train quickly became too crowded. And, while the others stood to make more room, the young Texans remained seated and raised their voices in order to continue their debate, the topic being which is the better city, Houston or Paris? It was a hot afternoon, and the subject of air conditioning came into play. Houston had it, Paris did not. Houston also had ice cubes, tacos, plenty of free parking, and something called a Sonic burger. Things were not looking good for Paris, which lost valuable points every time the train stopped to accept more passengers. The crowds packed in, surrounding the seated Texans and reducing them to four disembodied voices. From the far corner of the car, one of them shouted that they were tired and dirty and ready to catch the next plane home. The voice was weary and hopeless, and I identified completely. It was the same way I'd felt on my last visit to Houston. Hugh and I disembarked to the strains of "Texas, Our Texas," and boarded our second train, where an American couple in their late 40s stood hugging the floor-to-ceiling support pole. There's no sign saying so, but such poles are not considered private. They're put there for everyone's use. You don't treat it like a fireman's pole. Rather, you grasp it with one hand and stand back at a respectable distance. It's not all that difficult to figure out, even if you come from a town without any public transportation. The train left the station and, needing something to hold onto, I wedged my hand between the American couple and grabbed the pole at waist level. The man then turned to the women saying, "PU, can you smell that? That is pure French, baby." He removed one of his hands from the pole and waved it back and forth in front of his face. "Yes, indeed," he said, "this little froggie is ripe." It took a moment to realize he was talking about me. The woman wrinkled her nose. "Golly, Pete," she said, "do they all smell this bad?" "It's pretty typical," the man said. "I'm willing to bet that our little friend here hasn't had a bath in a good two weeks. I mean, Jesus Christ, someone should hang a deodorizer around this guy's neck." The woman laughed, saying, "You crack me up, Martin. I swear, you do." It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and, therefore, speaks no English whatsoever. An experienced traveler could've told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And, even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals. Because they had used the tiresome word froggie and complained about my odor, I was now licensed to hate this couple as much as I wanted. This made me happy, as I'd wanted to hate them from the moment I'd entered the subway car. Unleashed by their insults, I was now free to criticize Martin's clothing-- the pleated denim shorts, the baseball cap, the t-shirt advertising a San Diego pizza restaurant. Glasses hung from his neck on a fluorescent cable, and the couple's bright, new, his-and-hers sneakers suggested that they might be headed somewhere dressy for dinner. Comfort has its place, but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you've come to mow its lawns. People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American. France isn't even my country, but there I was, deciding that these people needed to be sent back home, preferably in chains. In disliking them, I was forced to recognize my own pretension, and that made me hate them even more. The train took a curve and, when I moved my hand further up the pole, the man turned to the woman, saying, "Carol. Hey, Carol, watch out. That guy's going after your wallet." "What?" "Your wallet," Martin said, "that joker's trying to steal your wallet. Move your pocketbook to the front where he can't get at it." She froze. And he repeated himself, barking, "The front! Move your pocketbook around to the front! Do it now! The guy's a pickpocket!" The woman named Carol grabbed for the strap on her shoulder and moved her pocketbook so that it now rested upon her stomach. "Wow," she said. "I sure didn't see that coming." "Well, you've never been to Paris before, but let that be a lesson to you." Martin glared at me. His eyes narrowed to slits. "This city is full of stinkpots like our little friend here. Let your guard down and they'll take you for everything you've got." Now I was a stinkpot and a thief. It occurred to me to say something, but I thought it might be better to wait and see what he came up with next. Besides, if I said something at this point, he probably would have apologized and I wasn't interested in that. His embarrassment would have pleased me, but once he recovered, there would be that awkward period that sometimes culminates in a handshake. I didn't want to touch these people's hands or see things from their point of view. I just wanted to continue hating them, and so I kept my mouth shut and stared off into space. The train stopped at the next station. Passengers got off. And Carol and Martin moved to occupy two folding seats located beside the door. I thought they might ease onto another topic, but Martin was on a roll now, and there was no stopping him. "It was some [BLEEP] head like him that stole my wallet on my last trip to Paris," he said, nodding his head in my direction. "He got me on the subway, came up from behind, and I never felt a thing. Cash, credit cards, driver's license, poof, all of it gone, just like that." I pictured a scoreboard reading Marty, zero; stinkpots, one. "What you've got to understand is that these creeps are practiced professionals," he said. "I mean, they've really got it down to an art, if you can call that an art form." "I wouldn't call it an art form," Carol said. "Art is beautiful, but taking people's wallets, that stinks, in my opinion." "You've got that right," Martin said. "The thing is that these jokers usually work in pairs." He squinted toward the opposite end of the car. "Odds are that he's probably got a partner somewhere on this subway car." "You think so?" "I know so," he said. "They usually time it so that one of them clips your wallet just as the train pulls into the station. The other guy's job is to run interference and trip you up once you catch wind of what's going on. Then the train stops, the doors open, and they disappear into the crowd. If stinky there had gotten his way, he'd probably be halfway to Timbuktu by now. I mean, make no mistake, these guys are fast." I'm not the sort of person normally mistaken for being fast and well-coordinated, and, because of this, I found Martin's assumption to be oddly flattering. "It just gets my goat," he said. "I mean, where's the polizioni when you need one?" Polizioni? Where did he think he was? I tried to imagine Martin's conversation with a French policeman, and pictured him waving his arms shouting, "That man tried to pick-a my friend's pocketoni!" I wanted very much to hear such a conversation, and so I decided I would take the wallet from Hugh's back pocket as we left the train. Martin would watch me steal from a supposed stranger and would most likely intercede. He'd put me in a headlock or yell for help. And, when a crowd gathered, I'd say, "What's the problem? Is it against the law to borrow money from my own boyfriend?" If the police came, he would explain the situation in his perfect French while I'd toss in a few of my most polished phrases. "That guy's crazy," I'd say, pointing at Martin. "I think he's drunk. Look at how his face is swollen." I was practicing these lines to myself when Hugh came up from behind and tapped me on the shoulder, signaling that the next stop was ours. "There you go," Martin said. "That's him. That's the partner. Didn't I tell you he was around here somewhere? They always work in pairs. It's the oldest trick in the book." Hugh had been reading the paper and had no idea what had been going on. It was too late now to pretend to pick his pocket, and I was stuck without a decent backup plan. As we pulled into the station, I recalled an afternoon 10 years earlier. I'd been riding the Chicago El with my sister, Amy, who was getting off two or three stops ahead of me. The doors opened. And, as she stepped out of the crowded car, she turned around to yell, "So long, David. Good luck beating that rape charge." Everyone on board had turned to stare at me. Some seemed curious, some seemed frightened, but the overwhelming majority appeared to hate me with a ferocity I had never before encountered. "That's my sister," I said. "She likes to joke around." I laughed and smiled, but it did no good. Every gesture made me appear more guilty. And I wound up getting off at the next stop rather than continue riding alongside people who thought of me as a rapist. I wanted to say something that good to Martin, but I can't think as fast as Amy. In the end, this man would go home warning his friends to watch out for pickpockets in Paris. He'd be the same old Martin, but, at least for the next few seconds, I still had the opportunity to be somebody different, someone quick and dangerous. The new and dangerous me noticed how Martin tightened his fists when the train pulled to a stop. Carol held her pocketbook close against her chest and sucked in her breath as Hugh and I stepped out of the car, no longer finicky little boyfriends on their overseas experiment, but rogues, accomplices, halfway to Timbuktu. David Sedaris, reading an excerpt from his book Me Talk Pretty One Day. Our program was produced today by Blue Chevigny and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jonathan Goldstein, Starlee Kine, and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors for this show Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. [? Sho Ja Yung ?] runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and [? Vija ?] [? Navarro. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can get our free weekly podcasts or listen to our old programs online for absolutely free. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Torey Malatia, who's all mad at me. How dare you talk about our mother like that! She's dead! And if it wasn't for our father, then she'd still be alive! And what about me? What do you think about me? I have nobody! I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Hey, Torey, say something else to the people. I'm going to give you a wonderful part in the movie. Promises. PRI. Public Radio International.
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With the holiday season about to begin, it's a show about holidays and milestones of all kinds. Today's This American Life was taped a few years back in front of a live audience. When the big day finally arrives, the day you've been waiting for, it's like the invisible is made visible. And sometimes you look at it and you think, that's it? For weeks before his 11th birthday, Jason wanted a party at a roller rink with all his friends. He had never had a birthday party, so he invites 11 friends, gets their RSVPs, and comes the big day, the party room at the roller rink is his. And we waited around, we waited around. And we're waiting there for around a half hour, and none of my friends, none of the invited guests had arrived. And so they put us in the room and my mom asked me, well, where is everybody? Where is everybody? And I say, Ma, I don't know where everybody is. Well, didn't they say they'd be here? Yeah, they said they'd be here. I have this vivid, vivid image marked on my brain of a table and 10 chairs around the table and all of these sundaes, these white sundaes with hot fudge on them. 10 empty chairs. 10 uneaten sundaes. It's like The Last Supper but if none of the apostles made it. Exactly. To this day, Jason still cannot explain it. He had friends at school, he was always picked first for kickball. The next year his cat, a cat that was the same age as he was, died on his birthday. Another year, his aunts and uncles accidentally set fire to the back of his house. In preparing for today's program, I have heard lots of horrifying birthday stories. Matt was robbed on his birthday. Lynn's home was destroyed by an earthquake. Sarah had a tree that was planted the day she was born. And on her 17th birthday, lightning hit the tree. It burned to the ground. How do you not see that as symbolic of something? Years after Jason's party at the roller rink, the one where nobody showed up, his girlfriend still asks him about it. And she asks him about it a lot. It must explain something about who he is today. And I have to point out again that I don't think, at least, that I was a loser when I was growing up. But the thing is, as much as I say that, it happened. I had this birthday party that only one person went to. And that's going to hold stronger than anything that I could possibly say to convince you that I was not a loser. Certain days have symbolic meaning whether we want them to or not. That's why it's important, I think, to overcompensate, to go big, throw a huge party, surround yourself with people, make a lot of noise. That is why, my friends, today, on the fifth anniversary of our radio show, we have come out here to be with you in this huge theater. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program recorded today on a four-city tour of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. A co-production with radio stations WNYC, WBUR, WBEZ, and KCRW. Many, many thanks to them. Today on our program, birthdays, anniversaries, milestones of all sorts, and what do they really mean anyway? Act One, Pilgrim's Progress. Sarah Vowell takes over the family Thanksgiving dinner by bringing everyone to New York City. Babies cryin', birds a-dyin', people sighin', Ellis Island. Islan'. Act Two, Kodak Moments of the Dead, the story of a young funeral director who is updating one of our most sacred and oldest rituals of commemoration, doing something that even other funeral directors find very, very strange. Act Three, Birthday Gift. Russell Banks has a story that unfolds so cleanly and pleasingly that really, I have to say, the less said about it at this point, the better. Music throughout our hour from Chicago pop music sensation OK Go. Stay with us. Act One, Pilgrim's Progress. We are a nation whose national holidays are usually more about getting together with family and friends than actually commemorating the past. When Labor Day rolls around, I do not think that many of us review the history of Haymarket Square or the fight for the eight-hour work day. Even in this crowd. I will confess that I was actually well into my 20s before I fully understood that Veterans Day and Memorial Day are actually two separate holidays with separate meanings and not just one holiday that comes around a lot. This does not mean that our big national holidays do not contain deep, commemorative meaning to us. It's just, I think, that the meaning is often personal. Sarah Vowell is one of our contributing editors, and she says this year, her family broke with all its traditions on Thanksgiving and launched into an entirely new era as a family. Please welcome her. When I invited my mom and dad to come to New York City to have Thanksgiving at my house, I never expected them to say yes. Not only had they never been to New York, they had never been east of the Mississippi, nor had they ever visited me. I've always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I'm here to tell you that dreams really do come true. I was terrified we wouldn't have enough to talk about. In the interest of harmony, there's a tacit agreement in my family. The following subjects are best avoided in any conversation longer than a minute and a half-- national politics, state and local politics, any music by any person who never headlined at the Grand Ole Opry, my personal life, and their so-called God. Five whole days. When I visit them back home in Montana, conversation isn't a problem because we go to the movies every afternoon. That way, we can be together but without the burden of actually talking to each other. Tommy Lee Jones does the talking for us. Bless his heart, that is a public service. But my sister Amy is bringing her, shall we say, lively seven-month-old son Owen along, so the cinema is not an option. Which means five days together, just us, no movies. We are headed into uncharted and possibly hostile lands, pioneers in a new world. It is Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims had the Mayflower. I buy a gravy boat. It's lucky that Amy's coming with Mom and Dad. Amy still lives six blocks away from them in Bozeman. She would act as interpreter and go-between among my parents and me. Like Squanto. Amy's husband Jay has decided to stay home in Montana to go deer hunting with his brother. Everyone else arrives at my apartment in Chelsea. Amy and Owen are bunking with me, so I walk my parents around the corner to check them into their hotel on 23rd. "Here we are," says Mom, stopping under the awning of the Chelsea Hotel. There she stands, a woman whose favorite book is called, simply, Matthew-- --right on the spot where the cops hauled Sid Vicious out in handcuffs after his girlfriend was found stabbed to death on their hotel room floor. "No, mother," I say, taking her arm and directing her down the block to the Chelsea Savoy, a hotel where they go to the trouble to clean the rooms each day. It is around this time, oh, 20 minutes into their trip, that my dad starts making wisecracks like, "boy, kid, bet you can't wait 'til we're out of here." My father, a man who moved us 1,600 miles away from our Oklahoma relatives so he wouldn't have to see them anymore, makes a joke, on average, every two hours he is here about how much I'm anticipating the second they'll say goodbye. I find this charming, but so disturbingly true I don't know what to say. By halfway through the first day, I discover I needn't have worried about what we would talk about with the baby preventing us from seeing movies. When you have a baby around, the baby is the movie. We occupy an entire entertaining hour just on drool, non-narrative drool. Then there's the sightseeing. First stop, Ellis Island. The thing about going to Ellis Island is that it's a lot like going to Ellis Island. Perhaps to help you better understand the immigrant experience, they make you stand in line for the crammed ferry for an hour and a half in the windy cold. By the time we step onto the island, we are huddled masses yearning to be free. Our great-grandmother Ellen passed through here on her way from Sweden. We watch a video on the health inspections given to immigrants, walk past oodles of photos of men in hats and women in shawls. Though no one says anything, I know my father and mother and sister are thinking what I'm thinking. They're thinking about when we moved away from Oklahoma to Montana, how unknown that was, how strange and lonesome. I read a letter in a display case that says, "and I never saw my mother again." And I think of my grandfather, how we just drove off, leaving him behind, waving to us in the rear-view mirror. And here we are in New York, because here I am in New York. Because ever since Ellen's father brought her here, every generation moves away from the one before. It is curious that we Americans have a holiday, Thanksgiving, that's all about people who left their homes for a life of their own choosing, a life that was different from their parents' lives. And how do we celebrate it? By hanging out with our parents. It's as if on the 4th of July, we honored our independence from the British by playing cricket and nibbling on crumpets. Thanksgiving morning, my parents take Owen to see the Macy's parade while Amy and I start making dinner. Let me repeat that. My mother leaves while I cook, specifically cornbread dressing, a dish my mother has made every Thanksgiving since before I was born. To her credit, she has not inquired about my process since she phoned to ask me if she should bring cornmeal in her suitcase. As an Okie, my mom only uses white cornmeal processed by the Shawnee Company in Muskogee. She does not even consider my cornbread to be cornbread at all, because I make it with yellow cornmeal and-- heresy-- sugar. "You don't make cornbread," she told me in the same deflated voice she uses to describe my hair-- --"you make Jonnycake." I'm standing at the cutting board chopping sage, and it hits me what it means that she's letting me be in charge of the dressing-- I am going to die. Being in charge of the dressing means you're a grown-up for real. And being a grown-up for real means you're getting old. And getting old means you are definitely, finally, totally going to die. My mother is a grandmother, and my sister is a mother, and I have decided the dressing will be yellow this year, therefore we'll all be dead someday. Happy holidays! I have invited two of my New York friends to join us for dinner, and I was a little nervous about how everyone would get along. To my delight, the meal is smooth and congenial. My friends and I talk about the West Nile Virus killing birds on Long Island. My father counters with a lovely anecdote about an open copper pit in Butte that filled up with contaminated rainwater and killed 250 geese in one day. There's nothing like eating one dead bird and talking about a bunch of other dead birds to really bring people together. The next morning, right about the time Owen starts to cry while simultaneously my mother jams the bathroom door and my father's on his hands and knees prying it open with a penknife, a cloud passes over me. Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the impenetrable shield of melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable, hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freeze up, I can't do anything about it. Everybody in the family goes through these little spells. I just happen to be the spooky one at this particular moment. When people ask me if I'm the black sheep of the family, I always say that no, we're all black sheep. Every few hours they're here, I look over at my dad nervously crunching his fingers together. If he were at home for Thanksgiving, he'd be ignoring us and spending all his time in his shop. The thing that unites us is that all four of us are homebody claustrophobes who prefer to be alone and are suspicious of other people. So the trait that binds us together as a family, preferring to keep to ourselves, makes it difficult to be together as a family. Paradoxically, it's at these times that I feel closest to them, that I understand them best, that I love them most. It's just surprising we ever breed. The next day, we do the most typical thing we could possibly do as a family. We split up. By the time we all reconvene on Saturday evening, my ragged mother becomes so ambitious with her sightseeing that I can tell she's decided that she's never coming back. "You guys want to go to Rockefeller Center?" I ask. And she says, "yeah, because who knows when I'll be back again? Ditto the Empire State Building, because who knows when I'll be back again?" If any of you are visiting the Empire State Building, may I offer some advice? If you are waiting in the very long line for the very last elevator, and an attendant says that anyone who wants to walk up the last six flights may do so now, right away, and you are with your aging parents and a sister who is carrying a child the size of a fax machine, stay in line for the elevator. But if you must take the stairs, go first and do not look back. Otherwise, your parents will look like one of those Renaissance frescoes of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, all hunched over and afraid. So we make it to the observation deck, Brooklyn to the south of us, New Jersey to the west. Places that people fled to from far away. Places that people now run away from to make another life. It's dark and cold and windy, and we're sweaty from climbing the stairs. It's really pretty, though. And there we stand, side by side, sharing a thought like the family we are. My sister wishes she were home, my mom and dad wish they were home, I wish they were home, too. Thank you. OK Go. Act Two, Kodak Moments of the Dead. Not long ago, one of our producers, Starlee Kine, went to the funeral of a relative of hers in Los Angeles. There were four eulogies, and it was Starlee's grandmother, Goldie, who did a grand stem-winder of a speech, inspiring and moving and heartfelt. So Goldie finishes and sits back down between her 88-year-old sister, Viv, on one side and Starlee on the other. And then, on a big TV screen in front of the chapel, a video begins. The grandmother cannot believe it. She nudges her sister Viv, stage whispering, "have you ever?" On screen are pictures of the deceased. Black and white on the beach is a young man, a wedding shot with his wife, the obligatory goofy shot of him in a dress with his buddies. The photos were selected by the family and set to a musical soundtrack, which was also selected by the family. These being Jews-- my people-- as you might guess, there's only one real choice about the music, really no choice at all. Barbra. Auntie Viv audibly exclaims, "oy vey!" Grandma Goldie responds, "oy, Viv!" But here's the thing, people are crying. They're crying more than they cried during the eulogies. And later, after the burial, back at the house, everybody watches the video over and over. They laugh, they cry, they rewind, they replay. Barbra hasn't had a hit like this since Yentl. So I want to visit the cemetery where all this happens, where the cost of a grave or a crypt includes a personalized video to be shown at your funeral, to be posted for eternity on the internet, to be viewed on video screens scattered semi-tastefully throughout the cemetery grounds. This whole scheme is the brainchild of the impossibly young and impossibly handsome Tyler Cassidy and his brother Brent. They grew up in St. Louis, their dad was also in the funeral business, and they bought a rundown Hollywood cemetery three years ago, when Tyler was 27, and renamed it Hollywood Forever. Funerals, mind you, present the same questions that any anniversary or milestone presents. How do you mark the passing of time? How do you capture the span of a life so it can be commemorated and remembered? And Tyler says that the way that most American funerals address this question is with a ritual in technology that had not really changed very much since the Civil War. The big innovation during the Civil War was embalming. Embalming preserved a person's body for a week or so while you shipped them home from a battlefield. But during the Civil War, it became widespread, and it popularized this kind of funeral, the kind that we know today, where the body is dressed up and put on display during the service. You want to pump fluid into that body so it seems kind of life-like, pink fluid. And you want to paint the face. A mortician feels like he's succeeded if the family says, "look, he looks so alive." Whereas our enhancement to that is that you show video of the person, media, media that in some way has captured life. And that media is 100 times stronger than an altered body. Our colleagues rebelled at the idea of having any type of screen in a chapel or near a body. And yet they were holding tight to this tradition of embalming and face painting and extreme doctoring of the body to try and make it look alive. The moment we put a screen in there, from that moment on, there was always a huge increase in the emotion of that service. That's when you started to have everyone crying, that's when you started to have laughter, tears, celebration. That screen, once you put that in there, the whole thing changed. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Whenever you listen to this, you will hear the voices of your ever-loving mother and your dear father, normally known as Mom and Dad. This is a video made of a kindly and endearing couple named Dorothy and Lester Schaffer They're sitting on lawn chairs in their backyard. It's not bad. They're affectionate, they goad each other on, they are genuinely funny. We hear, for example, the story of how the Schaffers met, on a school trip to the zoo. Really. On the path between the bear pits and the monkey cage. Right between the bear pits and the monkey cage. Well, we started dating then. And every time we'd have a date-- It rained. --it rained. I used to call her "my raindrop." As it turns out, in deciding to make videos which somehow capture what somebody is all about to preserve for eternity, Tyler and his brother have accidentally stumbled on a rather difficult artistic project. You get a sense of the Schaffers on their video, but only because of their own force of personality. They're charming. Most of the videos made at the cemetery lack this kind of character, so much so that it reminds you just how hard it is to do, to capture somebody on film. At times, your heart goes out to the people in the videos. For instance, when they're asked by the filmmakers to leave a message to the future, you can almost see the flop sweat from the other side. What would you say on the spot, really? This next clip is from a video made by a 40-ish man, who's actually still alive, named Steve Goldstein, who was asked to leave a few words of wisdom to the future. I guess if I had to say something along those lines, it would be the most important thing in life is to learn to love each other, learn to get along, respect each other, respect each other's differences, appreciate your differences, celebrate your failures as much as your successes because that's how you grow. You can't succeed without failing. He continues with aphorisms like this for a while, ending with-- My life's been great. I have no regrets. I honestly have no regrets. Except for some mistake I made on a game show once, a long time ago. I could have won a lot of money. Aside from that, I have no regrets. Doing these, it's kind of like a robot. They come, they go. I do the next one. It's kind of like I'm a machine. I just do it. So our emotions are kind of gone. Norman Brown is one of three editors who assemble these videos at computer workstations in a big, high-ceilinged room on the cemetery grounds. The feeling part of the job is done by women, four women, who talk with the families, gather photos, and give shot-by-shot instructions to the editors. As video production goes, this is factory work. 90% of the videos are cut-and-paste jobs, just a series of photos which appear on screen for 10 seconds each with a pop song on the soundtrack, thrown together in a few hours after somebody dies to play at the funeral service. Often a family member narrates, explaining what the pictures are. Do people ever say, "well, my dad was a drunk?" No. Nothing like that. Nothing at all. "We had a hard time seeing eye to eye. We didn't always get along. I think they were disappointed in me sometimes." No, none of that. We don't get any, "oh, he was a drug addict, he was an unfit father." "He wasn't always faithful to my mom." No. We have no affairs. We've had none of that. They don't say, "yeah, he was a horn dog," or anything. Just everything is positive. Which seems, I have to say, completely appropriate to the occasion and the task at hand at any milestone event-- an anniversary, a birthday, a funeral, even a national holiday. I think we do not want the whole picture. I think we want a pretty picture. I don't we're dealing with honesty in this. This is not the whole. You've got to look at the purpose of, what is the purpose of your going to this funeral? At that moment, at that funereal moment, at that moment of death, we do want as much good as we can. And we do want as many good memories as we can. Tyler Cassidy says that it's hard enough to get through the death of someone we love. Of course this is what we want. Tyler and his brother have only been making funeral videos for a few years. And they definitely see it as a work in progress, something that they're still figuring out. But all this thinking about how you preserve memories has led Tyler to start collecting his own scrapbooks, documenting his own life. He keeps two of these photo albums in his office. And when I ask him to flip through the pages, he comes to one photo which leads him to tell this story. It's a story which starts off at a family vacation and ends up at this cemetery, at his job, at this video project. The photo is of a fishing boat called La Victoria, taken on vacation when Tyler was just a teenager. And that's my father that you can make out there. And unknown to me, my mother had found a letter from a girl I know. And she was writing this long plea to me to realize that I wasn't actually gay, because I had told her that I was gay. So for the first three days of this trip, everyone in the family was treating me as though I had died or something. They would just kind of not speak directly to me, and they were having difficulty looking at me. And so my mother concocted this plan to get my father and I on this all-day fishing trip in which he was supposed to ask me at a certain point. And so here we are, being all macho on La Victoria. He's supposed to ask you, "are you gay?" Yes, on this fishing expedition. Which was funny in itself because it's this Hemingway-esque test of manhood to be out here. And I actually was the one to get the giant tuna. I was reeling in the tuna. It was exactly as you see in the movies. It was really hurting my hands. And people are gathered around me, wanting me to reel this in and egging me on. And then I finally get it up, and it's this big, beautiful, huge tuna-- actually, the one in this shot-- that's almost human-sized. And it was gorgeous. And it falls on the floor, and everyone gathers around it and stabs it. And I shriek, "don't kill it!" And it seemed like this very telling moment. And I don't know if that answered my father's question. Tyler had moved to New York for college and stayed, partly to flee the family funeral business. Yeah. It was kind of ironic. I thought I was going to leave death finally. And a father's business who was all around caskets and death. And I went much deeper into the heart of death when I got there. I was gay, and I went there to come out, and New York seemed like a good place. But I arrived in 1988, which was kind of the apex or the heart of the epidemic. The AIDS epidemic. The AIDS epidemic. Everyone was in the mourning. Everybody knew someone who was dying. There was always the thought that we could be dying because everyone was. And so I think for a good six years, I was more obsessed about dying and death than I had ever been. And yet at same time, there's more people who didn't follow any type of tradition I had seen. Maybe some people threw a nightclub party, and that was in their will. You know, "I want you all to have fun. I want you all to dress in drag." Someone else had a dance ceremony, a poetry reading. The form kind of seemed broken. The form of a funeral? Of a funeral. And being broken, it was much more powerful and it served a purpose again. And I didn't ever think I was going to go home and return to the business, but it affected completely how I looked at it. You mean literally, you came to feel like the traditional funeral wasn't powerful enough to contain people's feelings? Yeah. Definitely. The traditional funeral in terms of clergymen, one eulogy, and some last rites of some sort. In Los Angeles, he couldn't have chosen a better spot for adding movies to funerals. The run-down cemetery he and his brother bought is where lots of luminaries from the first generation of motion pictures are buried-- people like Rudolph Valentino, Peter Lorre, Cecil B. Demille, Bugsy Siegel-- on a huge piece of land just next door to the Paramount Studios backlot. Just a short walk from where Norman and his colleagues edit these sort-of fake, sort-of real videotapes for eternity are the sound stages where the pleasingly sort-of fake, sort-of real worlds of Frasier and Moesha are filmed. As you walk through the cemetery, you see the intrusion of new technology here and there. Recent headstones made with photographs engraved right into the rock, made possible by a new kind of laser and computer technology. So far, it's mostly Russian and Armenian immigrants who go for this. A man named Simon King, in a jacket, no tie, stares out from his own tombstone with this bad-ass glare like, even though he has passed over to the other side, if you mess with him, he can still take you down. Not far from there is one of the video touchscreens, in the shade by a wall. You can call up any video they've made. And we choose a name. It turns out to be a young woman, maybe 30. As the song "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" plays, from The Lion King, photos flash by, 10 seconds each. Here she is in the hospital. Here she is in shot after shot with a baby that must be hers. Then more hospital photos, holding her baby, trying, trying to smile. It is impossibly sad, sadder than I can even convey to you here. There we are, in the bright Los Angeles sun, cars going by just yards away from us, a dead young mom on the TV, and we're mourning somebody we've never met. I think Tyler's right about all of this. I think if you were just walking by a stranger's tombstone and saw their name chiseled there on the rock, you'd never get this feeling. Coming up, it's my birthday and I'll lie if I want to. Or is it a lie? In a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, to commemorate our fifth year on the air, birthdays, anniversaries, milestones of all sorts, how we mark them, what they mean even when we want them to mean nothing. Our program today taped on our fifth anniversary tour of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. And I have to say that we are honored at this point to have a special birthday greeting for the show, recorded by one of my radio heroes, Terry Gross of Fresh Air-- --which incredibly is celebrating its 25th year on the air this year. It makes us just look like little kids up here. She recorded this special message for us from her studio at WHYY in Philadelphia. Five years, huh? I suppose after five years I was still all bright-eyed and optimistic. You know, kid-- [CIGARETTE PUFF] --after 25 years in this crazy public radio game, you see a few things. And you see a side of people you sometimes wish you hadn't. Don't get me started. The booze, the drugs, the crazy parties, the fundraisers. Five years, huh? Well, you've got a lot to learn still, I guess. Yeah, congratulations. Whatever. Hope you enjoy your cake. Thank you, Terry Gross, for that kind message. Act Three, Birthday Present. There's a hotel in Salt Lake City called The Anniversary Inn. Before this building became an institution devoted to commemorating years of marriage, the building was the Salt Lake City jail. Insert your own cheap joke here. The idea of the hotel is on an anniversary or a birthday or other big day, what we want is fantasy. There's a room with a drawbridge and a knight in armor, designed to look like Sleeping Beauty's castle. There's a hayloft room and a Swiss Family Robinson tree house and a Treasure Island suite. That one has a ship's mast and a crow's nest and sails stretching across the room. You walk the gangplank to jump into a jacuzzi. I bring all this up because I think of The Anniversary Inn as a testament to the difficulty of introspection. It's as if when a big, commemorative day arrives, the notion of using that moment to look back, to take stock, to try to gain a perspective on who we've been and who we are, that notion is so inherently difficult and possibly painful that many of us, we prefer to leave reality completely. Looking back, though, can be what we need more than anything. Russell Banks has this story. He is the author of numerous books. We are honored to have him. Please welcome him. It's about 10:00 PM, and I'm one of three, face it, middle-aged guys crossing South Main Street in light snow headed for a quick drink at the Greek's. We've just finished a 32nd degree induction ceremony at the Masonic Hall in the old Capitol Theater building and need a blow. I'm the tall figure in the middle, Warren Low. And I guess it's my story I'm telling, although you could say it was Gail Fortunata's story, since meeting her that night after half a lifetime is what got me started. I'm wearing remnants of makeup from the ceremony, in which I portrayed an Arab prince-- red lips, streaks of black on my face here and there, not quite washed off because of no cold cream at the hall. The guys tease me about what a terrific nigger I make. That's the way they talk. And I try to deflect their teasing by ignoring it, because I'm not as prejudiced as they are, even though I'm pleased nonetheless. It's an acting job, the 32 Degree, and not many guys are good at it. We are friends and businessmen, colleagues. I sell plumbing and heating supplies, my friend Sammy Gibson is in real estate, and the other, Rick Buckingham, is a Chevy dealer. We enter the Greek's, a small restaurant and fern bar, pass through the dining room into the bar in back like regulars, because we are regulars, greeting the Greek and his help, small comforts. Sammy and Rick hit uselessly on one of the waitresses, the pretty little blond kid, and make a crack or two about the new gay waiter who's in the far corner by the kitchen door and can't hear them. Wise guys. The Greek says to me, "what's with the greasepaint?" "Theatre group," I tell him. He's not a Mason. I think he's orthodox Catholic or something. But he knows what we do. As we pass one table in particular, this elderly lady in the group looks me straight in the eyes, which gets my attention because otherwise she's just some old lady. Then for a split second, I think I know her, but decide not and keep going. She's a large, baggy, bright-eyed woman in her late 70s, possibly early 80s. Old. Sammy, Rick, and I belly up to the bar, order drinks, the usuals, comment on the snow outside, and feel safe and contented in each other's company. We reflect on our wives and ex-wives and our grown kids, all elsewhere. I peek around the divider at her. Thin, silver-blue hair, dewlaps at her throat, liver spots on her long, flat cheeks. What the hell, an old lady. She's with family, some kind of celebration. Two sons, they look like, in their 40s with their wives, and a bored teenage girl, all five of them overweight, dull, dutiful. In contrast to the old woman, who despite her age, looks smart, aware, all dressed up in a maroon knit-wool suit. Clearly an attractive woman once. I drift from Sammy and Rick, and ask the Greek, "who's the old lady? What's the occasion?" "The old lady's 80th," says the Greek. "We should live so long, right? You know her?" "No, I guess not." The waitresses and the gay waiter sing "Happy Birthday," making a scene, but the place is almost empty anyhow from the snow, and everybody seems to like it, and the old lady smiles serenely. I say to Sammy and Rick, "I think I know the old gal from someplace but can't remember where." "Customer," says Sammy, munching peanuts. Rick says the same, "customer," and they go on as before. "Probably an old girlfriend," Sammy adds. "Ha-ha," I say back. A Celtics-Knicks game on TV has their attention, double overtime. Finally, the Knicks win and it's time to go home, guys. The snow is piling up. We pull on our coats, pay the bartender, and as we leave, the old lady's party is also getting ready to go. And when I pass their table, she catches my sleeve, says my name, says it with a question mark. "Warren? Warren Low?" I say, "yeah, hi," and smile, but still I don't remember her. Then she says, "I'm Gail Fortunata. Warren, I knew you years ago," she says, and she smiles fondly. And then everything comes back, or almost everything. "Do you remember me?" she asks. "Sure, sure, I do. Of course I do. Gail. How have you been? Jeez. It's been a while." She nods, still smiling. "What's that on your face? Make up?" "Yeah, been doing a little theater. Didn't have any cold cream to get it all off," I say, lamely. She says, "I'm glad you're still acting." And then she introduces me to her family, like that. "This is my family." "Howdy," I say, and start to introduce my friends Sammy and Rick, but they're already at the door. Sammy says, "so long, Warren. Don't do anything I wouldn't do." And Rick gives a wave, and they're out. "So it's your birthday, Gail. Happy birthday." She says, "why, thank you." The others are all standing now, pulling on their coats, except for Gail, who still hasn't let go of my sleeve, which she tugs, and then says to me, "sit down a minute, Warren. I haven't seen you in, what, 30 years. Imagine." "Ma," the son says, "it's late. The snow." I draw up a chair next to Gail, and letting go of the dumb pretenses, I suddenly find myself struggling to see in her eyes the woman I knew for a few months when I was a kid, barely 21, and she was almost 50 and married, and these two fat guys were her skinny teenage sons. But I can't see through the old lady's face to the woman she was then. If that woman is gone, then so is the boy, this boy. She looks up at one of her sons and says, "Dickie, you go without me. Warren will give me a ride, won't you, Warren?" she says, turning to me. "I'm staying at Dickie's house up on the heights. That's not out of your way, is it?" "No, I'm up on the heights too. Alton Woods. Just moved into a condo there." Dickie says, "fine," a little worried. He looks like he's used to losing arguments with his mother. The Greek and his crew start cleaning up while Gail and I talk a few minutes more. Although her eyes are wet and red-rimmed, she's not teary. She's smiling. It's as if there are translucent shells over her bright, blue eyes. Even so, now, when I look hard, I can glimpse her the way she was, slipping around back there in the shadows. She had heavy, dark red hair, clear, white skin, smooth as porcelain, broad shoulders. And she was tall for a woman, almost as tall as I was. I remember exactly, from when she and her husband once took me along with them to a VFW party, and she and I danced while he played cards. "When we knew each other, Warren, I was the age you are now." "Yeah, I guess that's so. Strange to think about, isn't it?" "Are you divorced? You look like it." "Yeah, divorced. Couple of years now. Kids. Three girls, all grown up. I'm even a grandpa. It was not one of your happy marriages. Not by a long shot." "I don't think I want to hear about all that." "OK. What do you want to hear about?" "Let's have one drink and one short talk, for old time's sake. And then you may drive me to my son's home." I say, "fine," and ask the Greek, who's at the register tapping out if it's too late for a nightcap. He shrugs. "Why not?" And Gail asks for a sherry and I order the usual, vodka and tonic. The Greek scoots back to the bar, pours the drinks himself because the bartender is wiping down the cooler, and returns and sets them down before us. "On the house," he says, and goes back to counting the night's take. "It's odd, isn't it, that we never ran into each other before this," she says. "All these years you came up here to Concord, and I stayed there in Portsmouth, even after the boys left. Frank's job was there." "Yeah, well, I guess 50 miles is a long way sometimes. How is Frank?" I ask, realizing as soon as I say it that he was at least 10 years older than she and is probably dead by now. "He died. Frank died in 1982." "Oh, Jeez. I'm sorry to hear that." "I want to ask you something, Warren. I hope you won't mind if I speak personally with you." "No. Shoot." I take a belt from my drink. "I never dared to ask you then. It would have embarrassed you then, I thought, because you were so scared of what we were doing together, so unsure of yourself." "Yeah, no kidding. I was, what, 21. You were, well, not scary, but let's say impressive. Married with kids, a sophisticated woman of the world, you seemed to me. And I was this apprentice plumber, working on my first job, away from home, a kid." "You were more than that, Warren. That's why I took to you so easily. You were very sensitive. I thought someday you'd become a famous actor. I wanted to encourage you." "You did?" I laugh nervously, because I don't know where this conversation is going and take another pull from my drink and say, "I've done lots of acting over the years, you know. All local stuff. Some of it pretty serious. No big deal. But I kept it up. I don't do much nowadays, of course. But you did encourage me, Gail. You did. And I'm truly grateful for that." She sips her sherry with pursed lips, like a bird. "Good," she says. "Warren, were you are virgin then, when you met me?" "Oh, jeez. Well, that's, that's quite a question, isn't it?" I laugh. "Is that what you've been wondering all these years? Were you the first woman I ever made love with? Wow, that's-- hey, Gail, I don't think anybody's ever asked me that before. And here we are, 30 years later." I'm smiling at her, but the air is rushing out of me. "I just want to know, dear. You never said it one way or the other. We shared a big secret but we never really talked about our own secrets. We talked about the theater and we had our little love affair and then you went on. And I stayed with Frank and grew old. Older." "You weren't old." "As old as you are now, Warren." "Yeah, but I'm not old." "Well, were you?" "What, a virgin?" "You don't have to answer if it embarrasses you." I hold off a few seconds. The waitress and the new kid and the bartender have all left, and only the Greek is here, perched on a stool in the bar, watching Nightline. I could tell her the truth or I could lie or I could beg off the question altogether. It's hard to know what's right. Finally, I say, "yes, I was. I was a virgin when I met you. It was the first time for me," I tell her. And she sits back in her chair and looks me full in the face and smiles, as if I've just given her the perfect birthday gift. The one no one else thought she wanted. The gift she never dared to ask for. It's a beautiful smile, grateful and proud, and seems to go all the way back to the day we first met. She reaches over and places her small, crackled hand on mine. She says, "I never knew for sure. But whenever I think back on those days and remember how we used to meet in your room, I always pretend that for you it was the first time. I even pretended it back then, when it was happening. It meant something to me." For a few moments, neither of us speaks. Then I break the spell. "What do you say we shove off? They need to close this place up and the snow's coming down hard." She agrees, and I help her slide into her coat. My car is parked only halfway down the block, but it's a slow walk to it because the sidewalk is a little slippery and she's very careful. When we're in the car and moving north on Main Street, we remain silent for a while. And finally, I say to her, "you know, Gail? There's something I've wondered all these years myself." "Is there?" "Yeah, but you don't have to tell me if it embarrasses you." "Warren, dear, you reach a certain age, nothing embarrasses you." "Yeah, well, I guess that's true." "What is it?" "OK. I wondered if except for me you stayed faithful to Frank. And before me." No hesitation. She says, "yes, I was faithful to Frank before you and after. Except for my husband, you were the only man I loved." I don't believe her, but I know why she has lied to me. This time it's my turn to smile and reach over and place my hand on hers. The rest of the way we don't talk, except for her giving me directions to her son's house, which is a plain brick ranch on a curving side street up by the old armory. The porch light is on, but the rest of the house is dark. "It's late," I say to her. "So it is." I get out and come around and help her from the car and then walk her up the path to the door. She gets her key from her purse and unlocks the door and turns around and looks up at me. She's not as tall as she used to be. "I'm very happy that we saw each other tonight," she says. "We probably won't see each other again." "Well, we can, if you want to." "You're still a very sweet man, Warren. I'm glad of that. I wasn't wrong about you." I don't know what to say. I want to kiss her, though. And I do. I lean down, put my arms around her, and kiss her on the lips very gently. Then a little more. And she kisses me back with just enough pressure against me to let me know that she is remembering everything too. We hold each other like that for a long time. Then I step away and she turns, opens the door, and takes one last look back at me. She smiles. "You've still got makeup on," she says. "What's the play? I forgot to ask." "Oh," I say, thinking fast, because I'm remembering that she's Catholic and probably doesn't think much of the Masons. "Othello," I say. "That's nice. And you're the moor?" "Yes." Still smiling, she gives me a slow, pushing wave with her hand, as if dismissing me, and goes inside. Driving home, it's all I can do to keep from crying. Times come, times gone, times never returning, I say to myself. What's here in front of me is all I've got, I decide. And as I drive my car through the blowing snow, it doesn't seem like much, except for the kindness that I've just exchanged with an old lady. So I concentrate on that. Thank you. Russell Banks. His story, "The Moor," is published in his latest collection of short fiction, The Angel on the Roof. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Todd Bachmann, Starlee Kine, Alex Blumberg, Blue Chevigny, and Jonathan Goldstein. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Erin Yanke. OK Go. Damian Kulash, the cynical one. Tim Nordwind, the happy one. Dan Konopka, the solid one. Andrew Duncan, the quiet, George Harrison type. You can listen to our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who says to us at the end of each and every show-- Yeah, congratulations. Whatever. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. And at our website this week, we held a contest for listeners to remix, re-perform or re-imagine Starlee Kine's break-up song from a few months back. Well, the polls have closed, the votes are in, the ballots are counted. The winners are now at thisamericanlife.org for your listening heartbreak pleasure. PRI, Public Radio International.
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All right, guys. We're here. Don't forget your stuff, OK? And Dylan, grab your snow pants. Here's a ritual that happens in millions of American families every day, parents dropping off kids at the babysitter's. Good morning. Good morning. Hi, sweetie. I haven't seen you guys in such a long time. Sarah, age 9, and Dylan, who's 6, are being left at a friend's house where there are two other kids, Elliott and Emma, and their regular babysitter, Cristiana, who meets them at the door, who hasn't seen them since before Christmas. These kids have known Cristiana longer than they've known almost anyone. Four years she's been their sitter, an eternity. Cristiana takes care of them after school every day. Cristiana knows everything about them. And their such old pros at being left with the sitter, they don't think twice about it. Mom leaves, no tears, no scenes. All right, bye. I love you. I love you, be good. Cristiana serves cereal to the four kids. Emma gets the Powerpuff Girl bowl. Sarah gets the Barbie bowl. And Dylan and Sarah fill me in on the differences between Cristiana and their other main babysitter, a college student named Natalia. She's not as cool as Cristiana and everything. Like if you want to get away with something, who is it easier to get away with, Cristiana or Natalia? Natalia. She doesn't really know the rules of our house. So then, I say we can drink coke, and then-- You say you can wear your clothes to bed all the time. Mom lets me wear my clothes to bed, for like half a year that you would do that at the babysitter's. And why do you want to go to bed in your clothes? Because then, I don't have to change. He doesn't like changing. He thinks it wastes too much time. With Cristiana, it's different. She's like a second mom. That's what she thinks. I think of you guys as my kids. Yeah. I know them, I've known them since they were also little. And I love them like that. Yeah, and these guys, I've just been seeing them growing up, and growing bigger, and learning things, and I'm just very, very attached to them. When a mom shows up at the house a little later to drop off yet another child, she doesn't use the word mom to describe Cristiana. Mom, that's her territory. The word she uses is aunt. How do you define this job, watching children for money? Well, today on our program, babysitters, and what exactly happens when mom and dad are out of sight. Our show today in three acts. In the first, an older brother babysits, and the younger brothers cower. Act two is about a day in 1988 when huge companies accidentally found themselves taking on a massive babysitting job because of snow. In act three, a brother and sister get a job babysitting for some children who do not exist. And before we say anything else about babysitters, first let's just have a little brief word, just you and me, about Mary Poppins. Mary Poppins, let's just say right here, she is the gold standard of all fictional babysitters, maybe of all real ones too. She is the one that all others are to be measured by. And the movie, Mary Poppins, it contains what is probably the classic song about babysitting. You remember, the kids in the film sing about what it is that they want in a babysitter. Let me just stop this right here. This is not exactly the tone that we are going for in today's radio program. Let's cut through the treacle. Music recorded for our program by The Dishes. Engineering by Elliot Dix and Mike Segal at Engine Music Studios. Which brings us to Act 1. Lots of babysitting is done by family members. In this first story, parents leave their kids in the care of their teenage son, but instead of acting as a surrogate parent, standing above sibling squabbles and rivalries, acting as judge and mediator, the teenage babysitter stays squarely in the center of those rivalries. But as ruler and king, now with no parental forces tempering his actions, Hillary Frank has this cautionary tale about what happened. The Perrys grew up in rural Idaho. When their parents went out, the oldest son, Doug, was left in charge of his four younger siblings. Doug was the kind of guy who ruled the last three rows of the school bus through a combination of force and psychological pressure. He told other kids that the bus driver signed an agreement, putting him in charge of the back of the bus. He wore a bomber jacket. He rode a motorcycle. Still, his parents thought he seemed responsible enough when it came to his brothers and sister. There was a lot they didn't know. If I had to be there tending to these dang kids, I was going to make it fun for me too, you know. Doug often subjected his three little brothers to what he calls bravery tests. He would do things like stuff them in a sleeping bag and tie them to a tree limb, or snap huge rubber bands at their skin until they stopped flinching. I really hesitate to tell this, because it could have been-- I mean, it's just-- well, anyway, we had this iguana, OK, this big lizard, about-- it was about three feet long. It died. Well, I was so attached to this thing that I, of course, didn't want to take it out and bury it. So I put it in the freezer and kept it. Well, this is a fun thing for all of us boys to take out of the freezer, and thaw out, and play with it, you know. And then we got tired of playing with it. And then we'd put it back in the freezer, you know, and we'd freeze it again. And after about a year and a half of this, we decided we needed a new bravery test. So we thought what can we do, hmm. I think we should boil and eat-- boil and eat the iguana. That would be the ultimate bravery test. Well, we put it in a pot. We brought the biggest pot my mom had, and we stuffed it in there, and boiled it, you know. Well, well, it's been boiling about five minutes, probably done by now. And we got the thing out, and honest to goodness, we ate some of that lizard. Oh, my god. I even ate some. Really? And they even ate some. What did it taste like? You know, at that point, it actually tasted kind of like sawdust. Doug did all the bravery tests he made his brothers do. He was right in there with them. But they were on their own when it came to one of Doug's long running babysitting pranks. I spoke with Doug, and with his youngest brother, Mike, who was the easiest target. They're 10 years apart. We were convinced that he-- we were convinced for three or four years of our lives, I think, that he could actually turn into a werewolf. We would walk out of the house and then you'd hear this-- [HOWLS] and it would literally stop you in your tracks. And you just knew he was out there somewhere. Again, here's Doug. We had a pasture in the back, and it was about maybe half an acre. And they'd go out clear to the back fence, and that's where they liked to sleep out. So this is the perfect place for me to stalk them in the night, you know, and sneak up, and be the werewolf. So I would kind of just crawl out into the shadows. And I could hear them out there talking. And I'd be sneaking up through the bushes, and I'd go-- [HOWLS] And I'd hear dead silence. And then I'd hear one of them go, Doug's a werewolf. Doug kept this up for years, and the kids began to dread it, whenever their parents went out, knowing something scary would happen them, until finally, it all came to a head one night. Mike was eight years old. The middle brothers were 11 and 13. Doug was 18. It began the way it usually did, out in a pasture surrounded by potato fields. Here's Doug. We had a full moon, which was wonderful. And I kind of got to where the moon was silhouetting me, and they couldn't really see me. And I stuck a bunch of weeds down in my glasses, so they were poking out all around, and then I kind of rose up out of the weed patch. And they could see the silhouette with all this, looked like hair, poking out, you know, so that convinced them. I mean, totally-- I was totally growing hair. I was completely a werewolf. So run for your life, you know. And we all, of course, knew that the best thing to do was to get out of our sleeping bags and run as fast as we could to the house because that was the sure shelter. What were you afraid that Doug was going to do to you? Well, it's just the whole idea of being chased around in the dark. And it's not like there was ever a lack of physical contact. I mean, he-- literally was a situation where you were scared for your life. And we knew that Doug was in between us and the house somewhere. And as we were running to the house, Doug was just sitting on the roof in a sort of a gargoyle position, just as still as the night, and just staring at us, watching us. And so we just kind of slowly, kind of just walked, underneath him and ran into the house. Well now, I'm peeking in the windows. I'm rattling the doors more. I'm trying to get in. And they're running from door to door, trying to lock all the doors up. And I was always right on their heels, as they made it to the door. And I made sure that I just didn't quite catch them, you know. And they would run in to slam the doors. Just about the time they thought they were all safe, I snuck over and took the breaker, I shut the breaker off to the house. And then all of a sudden, the lights go out. And it's pitch dark in the house. It was like this-- we're all going to die. I mean, it was just, they had no safe place they could think of to go, until one of them finally thought get to the car, you know, we got to get in the car and lock the doors. And as we were all sitting in there, looking around at each other, we realized that my brother, Steve, didn't make it out of the house. And then the next thing I know I'm in the house alone. Let's introduce another brother. This is Steve. Of course, my fear went out, you know, through the roof. And then, I see him look in, in the patio window at me. Well, I was still around back, so I thought, well, Steve is still in there. I could see in the darkness, I could see him rocking in the chair. Well, I'll get Steve. He snuck into the house. And he saw my brother, Steve, sitting on the couch. And Steve just said, I don't care, kill me if you want. And that was when I told him, you know, just kill me or whatever, be done with it, however you want to end it. I mean, I'm done. I don't think we ever played it again after that point. These days, the brothers are all quick to say that Doug was playing werewolf, that it was just a game. None of them carry resentment towards him. But when they were kids, clearly feelings were running a bit hotter. Around the same time that Doug had his little siblings convinced he wanted their blood, he got into a motorcycle accident that nearly killed him. He broke every bone in his face, one arm, and one irreplaceable kneecap. The force of the crash made the helmet, along with his scalp, shoot off his head. It took around 350 stitches to sew him back up. You know, when I came home from the hospital, I had my leg in a cast, my arm in a cast, I was in a wheelchair. My face was all banged up. And my brothers said, mom, we'll take Doug down the road in his wheelchair for a walk. And so he can have some air. And so she goes, OK. And I get in the wheelchair. They get me out on the highway and run as fast as they can, and then let go. And I'm like, [SCREAMS], you know, going down the road in the wheelchair, heading for the ditch. And just about the time I go in the ditch, they catch up to me and straighten me out and go again, you know. So this was kind of a get even-- get even with me kind of a time. And there was nothing I could do about it. And they had great fun with me that time, you know. I guess that, you know, I was expecting a lot of sympathy and poor Doug. And no, it wasn't that at all. It was let's get some revenge for all this. Revenge came in other forms as he got older. When Doug had kids of his own, to his horror, his oldest son, Corey, turned out to be exactly the same kind of babysitter that Doug had been. Doug would come home from a night out and find himself pulling Corey aside and saying things like next time, try and tie the rope a little looser around your brother's neck. Steve, the brother who told Doug, just kill me, is also a parent these days, of four daughters. And like Doug, he's had moments flashing back to the days when Doug babysat. I remember this one time, he came out with his box, and he said look what I found out in the street. And he opened this box, and he has a finger sticking up through the bottom of the box, where all you could see was this bloody finger in there. I mean, I freaked out over that for years. I still remember it vividly. Of course, after he saw how freaked out we were about it, he showed us how it worked. I did it to my own kids, if you can believe that. You did? You know. Why? Why would you want to freak them out like that? I don't know. I remembered it so vividly. And I thought, well that was-- and I think back on it, and I go well, it was kind of cool, actually, how he did it. So here I go, and I'm going to try it with my own kids, OK? And I lift up the box, and my oldest daughter just broke into tears. And I then-- I apologized all over myself for a week or two afterwards to her. I hope she's-- she's probably going to have as crappy a memory of that as I did when I seen it the first time, you know. Yeah, did you feel sort of like you were in Doug's shoes, like you knew what it felt like to be him? I catch myself wanting to tease them too, like he did, sometimes, in a fun sort of way. But my wife will go, you know, you're acting just like Doug. As an adult, Doug has gone to each of his younger brothers and apologized for how he treated them. But he also thinks if they'd been less aggressive with each other as kids, they wouldn't be as close now. I know families that have grown up more mellow than us, and they get along fine, and they're very civil, and they're very happy to see each other, but they're almost like when they see each other, they shake hands. And I'm like, give me a break. You haven't seen your brother for six months and you're shaking his hand? I mean, we're grabbing each other and bearhugging, and we're jumping up and down, and it's a whole different relationship as far as I see, like people who've been through traumatic experiences together, you know. Maybe that's why. You feel like you've been through that, and survived it all together. And so it creates a deep bond or something maybe. So I think we're closer because of it, actually. Did part of you know that when you were younger, that it might make you closer when you grew up? Well, you know, I think, maybe subconsciously it did, because after every time, you would feel somewhat closer. So I don't think as a kid you actually sit down and think if I do this, it's going to make me closer to my brother. You just do it if it feels that way, you know you just tend to do the things that make you grow closer together. And those are the things that we did that drew us together. So we continued doing those kind of things. When I asked the other brothers if they'd do it all over again, they all say they would. Yeah, absolutely. I loved my childhood. Even with all the terror and danger that was there, you would still do all of it over again? Absolutely, I look back on those years with complete fondness. Hilary Frank. She's the host of The Longest Shortest Time, a podcast about early parenthood. John Langford of the Waco Brothers and the Micons with John Rice on mandolin, in a song recorded for our show. Whatever we are paying them, it is not enough. And this brings us to ACT 2. On the day after Christmas, all across America, divorced kids shuttle from one parent to the other. If they fly, their babysitters are the airlines themselves. This is babysitting encased in corporate procedure and corporate language, kids flying without adults are called unaccompanied minors. Little ones get brightly colored tags pinned to their coats or hung from their necks. When you see them, it's hard not to feel bad for them and wonder what they're going to say about the experience someday when they grow up. Well, back in December of 1988, on December 26, divorced kids from all over the country got snowed in at O'Hare Airport here in Chicago. Susan Burton was one of those kids. Now old enough to tell the tale, she and her sister Betsy were traveling from Colorado where their mom lived to Michigan, where'd they'd grown up, and where their dad lived. Here's Susan. There were two types of unaccompanied minors on flights out of Denver-- divorced kids and skier kids. You could spot the skier kids because they always wore something to prove they'd been to Colorado. They had lift tickets fanning out from the zippers of their jackets, or baseball caps that said Vale. But since today it was December 26, we suspected that even the boy with the raccoon face tan, the kind you get from ski goggles, was like us, a divorced kid too. As soon as our flight left Denver, my thoughts turned to our layover in Chicago. Betsy and I loved the O'Hare Airport, with its shiny food court, and chain bookstores, and big glass atrium ceiling. It seemed like a beautiful new mall. When we landed in Chicago, it was snowing, snowing hard enough to shut the airport down. It was only the middle of the afternoon, and travelers were already reserving sleeping spaces by throwing their parkas over blocks of chairs. Even floorspace was scarce. And some people were stuck alongside the moving walkway. The mall had become a refugee camp. The departure board showed that our flight to Grand Rapids was canceled. So we went to a service desk, where an agent took our tickets and typed things into a terminal. Then she turned on her microphone and sent a cryptic message out over the PA. I have two UMs at the service desk, two UMs at the service desk. OK, the woman told us, someone's coming by for you. A second woman appeared and we followed her to a gray, unmarked door. She fumbled with her keys. I squeezed Betsy's hand. The door opened onto a room packed with kids, sitting on their winter jackets. There were dozens of kids, all kinds of kids. Some in small groups. The young ones conversing with stuffed animals. Others looking uncomfortable in dresses, or overheated in moon boots that had been too big to pack. Most of them were facing a podium at the front of the room, as if they'd been dropped off at the public library and were waiting for a reading by Shel Silverstein. At the podium, a steward put our names on the list. The woman standing next to him was wearing the uniform of another airline. It's strange to see people from different airlines mixing, almost like something that shouldn't be allowed. There were a handful of folding chairs in the room, and we found a free one near the center. I took the seat and Betsy settled on the floor beside me. She got her baby blanket out of her bag and began to sniff it. It seemed we'd never been around so many divorced kids at once. Back home, most kids had both parents. You'd forget you were different, and then you'd be at someone's house after school, and the dad would come home, and from the landing on the staircase, you'd see him sorting through the mail, talking to the mother in the kitchen. It was hard to explain why this was sad. As a result, all that most of our friends knew about our divorce was that my favorite video to rent was Kramer versus Kramer, and Betsy's was The Parent Trap. So now it was strange to hear kids talking about the things we kept for ourselves. A group nearby was engaged in a kind of divorced-kid one-upmanship. A girl wearing a sweatshirt with a Christmas tree patch said she saw her father only a couple of times a year. A boy lying on his stomach claimed that he saw his dad even less. They exchanged a series of anecdotes about stepmothers, and took a poll of who'd been the object of a custody battle. It seemed improper to talk so freely about these things. I had no way of expressing this at the time, but it felt like we were part of something on a grand scale. All these kids, here in Chicago, at the transfer point between mom and dad. Being babysat by the airlines was a lot like what you'd expect. Gate agents started in and out, consulting papers, and making shushing noises, and yelling out names from the podium. They seemed flustered, annoyed. Normally, their babysitting duties were small scale. They were good at shepherding kids along moving walkways, and doling out little pins shaped like wings. In the UM room, they reverted to the same crowd control techniques that they used in flight-- secure the doors, withhold information, and discourage people from getting up to use the bathroom. So we did what any group of fed up delayed passengers does. We started to generate our own information. In the late evening, a rumor filtered through the crowd that the reason some kids were being escorted away was that their parents were making a bigger fuss than the other parents. Where were those kids going? The question arose from those of us in the landlocked middle and travelled through the crowd. The answer was transmitted back to us by our intelligence forces stationed at the podium. Those kids got hotels. The rest of us would have to sleep here in the UM room. A divorced kid reacts to his parents' separation in one of two ways. As the rumor about the sleeping arrangements spread, it became clear who was the divorced kid who avoided conflict, and who was the divorced kid who acted out. Fart noises increased, crushed drink boxes began to litter the floor. I realized that when thrown with sufficient force, a Nerf ball could cause injury. Soon word came around that the system had changed, that our babysitters were mad, and they didn't care who your parents were or how many times they called. Now they were taking the good kids first. Immediately, Betsy lay down on her blanket. I took out the book in my bag, Catcher in the Rye. Within an hour, we were out of there. BY NOW IT WAS 1: 00 in the morning. Betsy and I, and a group of others, followed a stewardess through the dim halls. The metal gates were down over the entrance to the food court and travelers were sleeping in chairs. We would share a room with two other people. The first was a girl close to my age, who was wearing glasses with pink, plastic frames. I convinced myself that she was the same girl who had been in my line at swim camp years earlier, when my parents were still married. I didn't ask her because I didn't want to ruin it if it wasn't true. The second person was a stewardess, who looked about 30. She wore a lot of makeup and she was big-boned, packed into her uniform. She wasn't mean to us. But she was pretty standoffish. We settled into our room. When the stewardess went into the bathroom, the swim camp girl pulled me over to the window. The curtains were closed, but red light shone in from the parking lot. Will you sleep in the bed with me, so I won't have to sleep with the stewardess, she said. I looked over at Betsy. She was sitting on one of the two double beds in the room, sniffing her blanket. I told the girl yes. It just came out. Almost immediately I felt awful. When we lay down, I inched as far to the edge as I could, so that I'd feel nearer to my sister on the edge of the bed across the aisle. The stewardess came out of the bathroom wearing control top stockings and a lacy slip and got under the covers like that. I'd never seen a grown woman sleep in anything other than a flannel nightgown. I wondered if she always slept like that, or it was just because she had to get up early. Maybe this was what all stewardesses wore under their uniform. But maybe she just felt awkward. Or maybe there were rules about what you wore, that you had to keep covered. Or maybe she just didn't want her bare legs near Betsy. I saw Betsy shift under the covers and curl into a ball. I now felt certain that this was the worst thing I'd ever done to my sister. I wanted the strangers removed and my family restored. I hated the swim camp girl sleeping next to me. She wasn't from Michigan. She didn't have anything to do with my life. On these trips to visit our father, more than any other time, all Betsy and I had was each other. I thought of the kids in the UM room at the airport, the ones saying crass things about the saddest thing that had ever happened in life. And how reassuring it had been when I looked at Betsy, sniffing her blanket, the way she always had, the way I thought she would forever. Susan Burton-- in the years since that story was first broadcast on our radio show, a movie based on that story, about kids of divorce, trapped in an airport over Christmas, was released. It was in 2006. It was a kids' comedy directed by Paul Feig. It was called Unaccompanied Minors. - We have our own suggestions for the new nanny. Would you like to hear them? - You have my undivided attention. - Maestro, if you please. - If you wish to be our sitter, please be sweet, and never bitter. Help us with math and book reports. Might I add eat my shorts. - Bart. - Just cutting through the treacle. - If Maggie's fussy, don't avoid her. - Let me get away with murder. - The nanny we want is kindly and sage. - And one who will work for minimum wage. Coming up, how hard could it be to babysit kids who do not even exist? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, babysitting and what happens that mom and dad do not find out about. Today's program was first broadcast back in 2001. We've arrived at Act 3 of our program. This is a story that caught our interest because of babysitting, but then it ended up being about so many other things besides. A man in Florida named Myron Jones wrote us this letter. He said that when he was 16 years old, growing up without a dad in Buffalo, New York, he was allowed to stay out till midnight. He came and went as he pleased. Spent a lot of time in bars, actually. This was the 1940s. But his sister Carol, she had different rules, and she wasn't let out of the house at all, even though she was older than Myron. This story gets to babysitting in a big, big way. And I called him to talk about it. She had to say exactly where she was going, who she was going with. She could go to church dances, but only some church dances. It all had to do with protecting her chastity, really. If one were to ask your mother at the time, what would she have said? She said you've got to be more careful with the girls. Yeah. Spelled P-R-E-G-N-A-N-T. So my sister figured out a little scheme. She invented a family called the McCrearys. Said they needed her to babysit. And I remember when she first told me about it. She said listen, guess what I did, I made up a family. I said what do you mean? I made up this family I babysit for, they're called the McCrearys. It seemed clear once I got talking to Myron Jones that his sister Carol, might have a few thoughts about all this. And we gave her a call. She agreed to go into a studio and chat. She says if anything, her brother was understanding just how strict the mother was with her. She used to follow me. She had a friend. We called them Sam Spade and the fat man. And they would follow us. And then I'd go home, and she'd come in and say where have you been. It was-- it was really, really hard. She didn't believe anything I ever said. And were you a pretty good kid, good student in school? I was, you know, for a long time I thought that, oh, I was terrible. My mother started calling me a whore before I had any idea what the word was. And I couldn't look it up, because it didn't know it was spelled. I couldn't find it. Wow. And so, it occurred to me that if I had a family, a non-existent family, I could go, I could say I was going there. Carol started working out the details. Because whenever she babysat, my mother had to have the phone number so she could check up on her. So the man in the family was an FBI agent, working on a top secret project, so he could not give his phone number to anyone at all. He also couldn't let anyone but my sister, the babysitter, know just where they lived. It would have been dangerous for him to do so. So, how far did this go? How complicated did the story of the McCrearys get? It got very complicated. They had two kids. Michael was three and Laura was two. That happened to be the age separation between my sister and myself, but it was reversed. Sometimes the little boy in particular would try to test us. And I'd let him get away with it. But my sister wouldn't. And they had all kinds of toys, but not too many toys. And they liked their parents very much, loved their parents. They were easy, they weren't spoiled in any way. They sound like very special kids. Oh, yeah, they were great. They were like no kids I ever met really. I think, I think in many ways they had the life my sister wished that we'd had. I had them rent a cottage at the lake for the summer. So the McCrearys had a summer house. Yes. And did they require your services at the summer house? Yes, indeed. They knew that the kids would enjoy it so much more if we were there. And it was we, because both my brother and I always liked little kids a lot, you know. So my mother would accept this quite readily, you know, that they wanted the both of us out at the lake. It was wonderful. We had such a good summer. I mean, it was glorious. What would you do? Well, we just-- sometimes if we knew someone out there-- sometimes kids we knew would have cottages, you know kids used to get together and chip in, or their parents would have a cottage. Sometimes we'd just sleep on the beach, which was great. I'd love sleeping on the beach. I have to say every time you talk about the freedom you got, your voice becomes completely different. It's like you can still taste it. I still remember what that was like. It offered freedom that was just so wonderful to me. We really got all of this from our mother, this notion of fantasy people. Our mother had, from the time we were young kids, younger than 10, our mother had three people that she went to see. None of them existed, and we always knew they didn't exist. Really? Yeah. Who were they? One was a lawyer. And she wouldn't say what she was doing there, but she'd drop little hints. And what we were supposed to believe was that was making arrangements to put us in an orphanage. The second person she saw was a psychiatrist, which she pronounced psycholorgist-- interesting. And she went there because he would tell her that we were driving her crazy. I see. And the third person was a doctor, who told her she was going to die. And we had no idea where in fact she went, but she was never gone long enough to see anyone at all. So in other words, she would literally-- this wasn't just something she would say to you, well, I've been to a psychiatrist and he tells me that you're driving-- that you guys are driving me crazy. She would actually leave the house and go to her appointment. Yeah, she'd say-- she'd say-- she'd go for the door, and when we were young, we'd say where you going, Ma, because it was so unusual for her to go out, except to work. And she'd say wouldn't you like to know? Oh, OK. Is it your doctor? As we got older, she'd say, maybe. And so that was her game. In retrospect, where do you think she was going? I have no idea. I think she walked around the block a couple of times. So at some point, your mother must have wanted to meet them, right? No, she was-- shy isn't the word for her. But she didn't like knowing people at all. She didn't know the people next door. She didn't want to know them. So she was really deliberately isolated. But the McCrearys were far and away her favorite topic of conversation. My mother would ask questions about them. And then Carol would give her far more information and she asked for. Say more of what you remember of what she would tell her. Well, one was that Mrs. McCreary was very intelligent, and lovely, and very kind. She was my sister's fantasy of a mother. And she was my fantasy of an older woman who might fall in love with me, and with any luck at all seduce me. So wait, would you talk about it with your mom too? Yeah, my sister started that. I was a little uncomfortable about it. My sister said I think he's got a crush on her. And I would almost blush, uncomfortably, because I did. And then your mom would ask you questions. For example, what color hair does she have? No, she didn't ask questions like that. She never asked questions like that. So what would she ask? She'd say, well, I hope you act right over there. What do they think of you? And then the question she to this day asks, well, what do they think of your mother? And Carol would say, give the right answer, which is they think you're wonderful, mom. It was a way of having a conversation with her. And a kind of in-depth conversation. That's right. She liked to hear about fancy people. She imagined somehow that it would all rub off on Carol. That they'd be a good influence somehow. They'd be a good influence and there might even be some money in it. Carol also handled-- because she wasn't getting any money from babysitting, she said that Mr. McCreary was taking all the babysitting money and putting it into stocks and bonds. Wait, wait, hold it, just back up. Yeah, Carol knew she was going to ask, so she anticipated it. Carol said, before it could even come up, Carol said Mr. McCreary isn't going to pay me. He's going to pay all my babysitting money into stocks and bonds. My mother didn't know anything about stocks and bonds, and neither did we. But my mother knew that that's what rich people did. And it was over on the other side of town, the rich side of town. Right. My mother didn't know anything about that neighborhood. She was the oldest of seven children, grew up in a very really poor family. My mother had one friend who was middle class, who she'd met when my father was still alive. And she influenced my mother. And so did the people that my mother cleaned for. At the end of the summer, it was the last weekend. And that was near the real change in the McCreary time. Well, what happened at the end of the summer? We really were exhausted from our summer, from our real summer weekends. The strenuous work of having fun with your friends. Yeah, right. And those times when there was no cottage to go to, and we'd sleep out on the beach, and we were going home, and we headed up the back stairs. We always had to go in the back way. We headed up the back stairs, and we'd go to the second floor. And we could tell before we turned the corner that our mother was outside the door, waiting for us. And we turned, and there she was. And she looked ready to kill. She looked absolutely furious. She said well, where you too been? And I though, oh, god, she found out all about the summer cottage stuff. And Carol said, you know where we've been, ma, at the McCrearys. And my mother said, oh, yeah. Well, you're a couple of damn liars. I just got off the phone with Mrs. McCreary. She hasn't seen you in weeks. My brother and I agree, we didn't breathe. We thought, oh, my god, she's talked to them. And then as quickly, we realized, of course she didn't talk to them. Carol got over it immediately, and said, sorry, Ma. Nice try. We just left the McCrearys 10 minutes ago. Went in the house. She didn't say anything to us, we didn't say anything to her. And after that, we really stopped talking about the McCrearys. Did she often claimed that she had run into the McCrearys? Yes, that she'd talked to her, that she hadn't seen me. She did it so often. She believed this. It was amazing, but she never questioned these things. Why do you think she didn't question it? I think she wanted it to be true, probably as much as I did. It's interesting, when you invented-- when you invented them, it's as if you invented them in terms that would reassure your mom. Yeah, I probably did. I don't think that-- well, you know, it did. I'm sure it did occur to me that I wanted a family that would please her. Is that because-- is that because it would make her more likely to let you out? Or was there a part of it where you also were the kind of kid where you always needed to be reassuring her anyway? Oh, I had to constantly reassure her, always. I mean, it isn't something I talk easily about, but she really never liked me. That was the problem. Is your mom still alive? Yeah. So how old is she now? 94. How old are you? I'm going to be 70 in another 10 days. So have you ever come clean with her on this? Oh, no, never. Do you want me to make my mother look like a liar? In the sense, you already have. It's just a question of whether she's going to know it. Right. No, it never crossed my mind to do it. Are you serious? It's never crossed your mind? To tell her? No, never. Because she wouldn't be able to laugh about it, it sounds like. Not in any way. She might simply say that we were lying now, that there were McCrearys and we were just saying that for some reason. Does it make you sad that you can't have the kind of relationship with your mom, where now that everyone's an adult, you know, you can't come straight with all of it? No, my sister and I-- I think because of, because of going away to school when I was so young-- let me back up a little bit. When I was nine, I came home on a Saturday afternoon, and my mother said, I'm sorry you weren't here, because Father Sager, who was an Episcopal priest, was here visiting. And he found a very nice orphanage for you. And I said, but I'm not an orphan, Ma. She said, no, I know. I told Father Sager that. But he said, really you are, because I have to work all the time, and there's no one to take care of you. And I said, well, we take care of ourselves. And she said, I need to tell Father Sager that, but he said, not really. You go there, it'll be a good place for you. You go there. I was close to-- I was in my 30s before I understood why I went away to school when I was 10. I didn't have to. I could have not gone. I could have screwed up the test. I could have gone and gotten kicked out right away. I knew that. One of the things that our mother did with us, from the time we were very young. I can't remember before, but I know before I went to school, my mother used to say to us, when your father died, everybody told me to put the two of you in an orphanage. I didn't, and that was the biggest mistake of my life. So when the day came, I came home, and she said, Father Sager found an orphanage for you, what I really did was say, you've been threatening me with this all my life, and now, damn it, I'm going to go. Yeah. And it felt safer. I was scared as hell. I was one of two kids in the sixth grade. The other kid never showed up. I went to all classes alone for six weeks. And after six weeks, I went home. And I was-- it was late October, already dark in Buffalo, and around supper time. And I was walking down the street, and I loved my neighborhood. I knew everybody. I looked, and the lights were on, thinking it's warm in there. That's people-- that's Sonny Calucci's house. That's his house. They're in there. And I have a house too. I go to school now, but I have a house too. And I'm almost there. And I walked in the door, and I started to hug my mother. And my mother put out her hand to hold me back, and said, now, let me ask you a question. When you're up there at that fancy school, do you ever think about your mother, lying here in bed, crying her eyes out every single night? You ever think about that? Nah, you never think about anybody but yourself. And I literally from that moment on have never asked my mother for anything, never looked to her for anything. How old were you then? I was 10. Through the years, I have truly envied him that he has been able to do that, and that I have been unable to do that, not believing that I'm going to get anything from her. I know I haven't. But I have never, I haven't been able to this moment to just take her out of my life completely. How often do you see her now? Do I see her? Yeah. I'm now seeing her twice a week. I mean, I call her every night, which is all something to do with me. Because she doesn't know that I call her every night. Because she's becoming senile? Yes. What do you think you've gotten by being the one caring for her? One time, when I was 35, I lashed out at her in such a way, and told her how I felt about her, and she sat in a chair in the kitchen, and she was crying. And I had never even seen her cry before. And when I finally stopped talking, she said, I did the very best I could. And I thought, oh, my god, she did. Her best was so bad. Her best was so empty. But she couldn't do any better. I decided, and it helps me a lot-- I have a great aunt that I just adored, and her mother, my mother's mother, who was wonderful, and my great-grandmother, who I didn't know, but who adored my mother, my mother slept in bed with her, I thought I'm going to do this for the people that loved her, you know, all of the people that really loved this little girl, I'm going to do it for them. And it feels-- that feels fine to me. You know what you're describing is you and your sister going off and pretending to babysit for these imaginary kids. But in fact, you guys had a babysitting job, and it was for your mom. That's right. My sister was the chief babysitter. It's true. At the time, when you were kids, did you-- when you were kids, did you ever see it that way? Oh, we're taking care of mom. She thinks she's taking care of us, but we're taking care of her? Oh, yeah. There was a kind of humoring her, and placating her. And when I was about 10, she gave me a first baseman's glove, because I was going to be a major league ball player when I grew up. And she said, you tell people who gave you the glove? I said yeah. You tell them how much it cost? I didn't, but I said, yeah. She said, you tell them how long I had to work to buy that? I said, yeah. She said, you did not. Let's set the record straight. Here we go, you're on the radio. How long did your mother have to work to buy you the baseball glove? She had to work a week. That's a long time. Absolutely, I've thought about it since then. Have I ever given my kids a present that was worth a week's wages? No, I haven't. Mr. Jones, what would have happened if there hadn't been the McCrearys? The McCrearys seemed absolutely inevitable. I never thought about what would happen if they hadn't been there. Wow. They had to be there. I still think we would be in-- let's see, they would be 56, 57 years old now. I've wondered where they're living, how they're doing? Where do you picture them? I picture them doing very well. And kind of dull now. Really. Yeah. I don't picture them as being terribly interesting. They're more conservative than their parents. But nice, pleasant, good people. Where do you think they're living? I'm afraid I think they're living in Florida. They are, not too far from where you are. I may run into them in the store. Myron and Carol said there was no way their mother would ever hear this story on the radio. And the fact is she never did. The story was first broadcast in 2001. She died at the age of 95 in 2002. After she died, Carol told Myron this secret that she had promised her mother she would never tell him. It turns out her mom didn't actually buy that baseball glove for Myron. Their uncle bought the glove. And when it arrived at the house wrapped as a gift, Myron's mom intercepted it, gave it to him, and pretended it was from her all along. Carol lives in California. Myron, who was a model of grace and good humor in that interview, died in 2011 at the age of 80. Lovely man. Today's program of our show was produced by Alex Bloomberg and myself, with [INAUDIBLE], Jonathan Goldstein, Starlee Klein, Julie Snyder, and Aaron Yankee. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Production up for today's show by BA Parker. Quick program note, a couple weeks ago, we had an excerpt from Jon Ronson's new podcast, The Butterfly Effect, on our program. He has been one of my favorite interviewers anywhere, a wonderful writer. And his podcast has just been released. If you want to hear it, it's an audible.com/butterfly. Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He still asks me after every single show, you tell them how much it cost? You tell them how long I had to work to buy that? You did not. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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So we have a new president. But after the recount mess in Florida this fall and the Supreme Court decision that ended the election, some people are having a hard time moving on. Why? Why can't they just let it go? Eric Potter drove to the inauguration to protest with his wife and kids, though he has never protested anything before. Never before. And what about this is different? The Constitution has been subverted and people don't seem to care. Were you Gore supporters during the election? Not strongly. Are you still mad? Extremely. If he's the rightful winner, I don't have a problem with him in the White House. But I don't believe he's the rightful winner, and we will never know that. We should count all the votes, and that hasn't happened yet. Republicans simply do not understand this. They think the Democrats were being divisive and unreasonable during the recounts and it's just galling that they won't let it go now. Get over it. I mean, there's nothing that they can do. Get over it. Do you think there's any fair basis to anything they're saying about the Florida recounts? No, it was such a farce, the whole thing was. Counting, recounting, counting, recounting. We could have gone and recounted all of the United States. And states that Bush just barely lost, we could have gone and recounted those. There have always been people at the extremes of the political parties who are really bitter, who are just furious at the other side. But as this election dragged on for weeks this fall, it seemed like more and more people got caught up in those kinds of feelings. And now where are those feelings supposed to go? On inauguration day, 40% of Americans still thought that George Bush had not been legitimately elected as president. That's a lot of people. I think they're so divisive that even saying it's a lot of people out loud is seen as divisive. When I interviewed Democrats, the thing that most of them say is that it's not that they want to throw George Bush out of office at this point. Feelings do not run that high. It's more like they still have these moments of surprise when they happen to see him in the newspaper or on television. Like, right. He's President. It's real. On the other side, a Republican named Chris Robling, a former election commissioner here in Chicago, says that since Florida, he feels a little chill between him and his Democrat friends. Democrats can be so arrogant when it comes to Republicans. They can look down on them, and it's only gotten worse. He took a tape recorder and talked to his friend Kathleen about it. How does this affect your view of somebody like me? That I'm a Republican and that I was for this guy and that I was for what happened in Florida? You told me you weren't for what happened in Florida, you said you were ashamed of how he got elected. I'm for the fact that he ultimately won. Of course you are. Republicans were for power at all costs. That's a creepy, nasty, vicious attitude. So am I creepy, nasty, and vicious? Yes. I have thought that about you since I found out you were really a Republican. Yeah, there's a really creepy side to you. There is, I'm sorry. I'll probably have fewer and fewer Republican friends because I don't seem to be able to get over it. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our radio program, moving on after the election. Democrats trying to, Republicans urging them to. Urging them with such vehemence that you get the feeling that they're not entirely over the Florida debacle either. Our show today in five acts. Act One, You're Not the President of Me, in which we examine the non-intersecting realities of the two sides in the political spectrum right now. Act Two, a Brief History of Republican Time. Writer David Brock gives us the inside story of how we got to this point of bitterness exactly. And it is not pretty, my friends. Act Three, Bedroom Politics, in which a happily married couple suddenly gets politics-- different politics-- making it hard for them to move on now. Act Four, Let Us Reason Together, in which we try to get each side to understand the other in the Supreme Court Case Bush v. Gore. Act Five, What Would You Know Who Do? A chat with an African-American minister in Florida who is trying not to be mad about the election because it is against his religion. Stay with us. Act One, You're Not the President of Me. Back when president Clinton was being impeached, at least Republicans and Democrats agreed on the basic facts-- he fooled around with an intern and he lied about it. The only dispute was over whether this was an important violation of the law. In Florida-- and who thought it would ever be possible for anyone to say this-- in Florida, things were much more bitter. Partly because the two sides did not even agree on the basic facts of what was happening. It was two entirely different pictures of the world with very little overlap. Here is Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, a self-described liberal, telling the story of the recount with David Horowitz of Salon Magazine, a self-described conservative. Jonathan Chait starts. Statistically, you can prove without a doubt that Al Gore would have won Florida if it were not for faulty machines. Now from there, you can argue-- Wait wait wait, how can you do that? Well, there are several ways to do it. The best is the way the Miami Herald did it, which is they did a precinct-by-precinct analysis and simply looked at how many non-votes there were in each precinct. And then they found that Gore would have won by 20,000 votes. So for each precinct you say OK, all these people whose votes we do know, they split this way. This many for Gore, this many for Bush. Let's just ascribe to the uncounted ballots the same proportions, and then you get your number. That's exactly right. So if you do that, you know that Gore wins. And this is indisputable. This is statistically as sound as anything can be. The only reason that there's this big hoopla on the left is because Al Gore set out to steal the election after it was over. There's this line about, let's count every vote. Al Gore didn't want to count every vote. What about the Republican counties in Florida? There were six times as many as there were Democratic counties that didn't get their votes counted. By focusing on four counties in Florida, which are overwhelmingly Democratic, where Democrats controlled the judging process and the whole process, that's just a prescription. A prescription for a kind of civil war. Because what could Republicans do? They had to stop the Democrats from manufacturing a vote. If you acknowledge that Gore would have won if it were not for faulty voting machines which, again, is indisputable, then the worst thing you could say about Gore is that he's trying to steal what was already rightfully his. Now, it may be the case that the physical evidence for resolving that problem in Florida is not strong enough. It may be the case that dimpled chads aren't clear enough marks of a voter's intent. But I guess I would have two answers to that. First of all, you might as well try. Number two, anyone who's actually seen a ballot in Florida-- which I have-- would, I think, conclude that a dimpled chad is an attempt at a vote. We've had a few these ballots floating around our office and we've tried to play with them. And none of us has been able to create a dimpled chad unless there's something blocking the ballot. Now the reason that's important, people might forget, is that the democratic theory of why you have dimpled ballots is that something blocks the ballot. Either it's misaligned in the machine or all the chads that fell through in the machine built up to the point where it's blocking the hole and you can't punch the chad cleanly through because something's behind it. The Republican theory is that voters were putting their stylus down on the Gore hole and then changing their mind by the thousands. But if you look at one of these ballots, you realize it really can't be done. If you're able to punch through, you can't create a dimple. So the fact of the dimple being there is evidence of an inability to punch through to the chad. When the votes were counted, these people bent the ballots, popped the chads, and they just attempted it in front of the whole nation and it didn't work. Do you think there could have been a way to get a fair count of these dimpled chads? No. The only fair account is the machine count with all its unfairnesses, if that's not too paradoxical. Machines, so they make mistakes, it tends to be distributed evenly or, at least, blindly. There's no way to hand count and make it fair, because it's subjective. Well, I think people should just let it go. The election is over. You can't, in a country of 300 million people, adjudicate this ad infinitum. You just can't run a country that way. There is no actual count. That's what people have to understand. I really think this is the worst thing I've ever seen happen in politics, as long as I've been following it. I guess I regard Bush as illegitimate. I think about it every time Bush says something like, even though I won by a narrow margin. Well what if you lost? What if it was a negative 500,000 margin? Stop with the saying this is an illegitimate president. He got 49 million votes or something. It was a very close election, it could have gone either way. And start participating in a constructive process to bring the sides together. David Horowitz, his new book is called The Art of Political War, and Jonathan Chait of The New Republic. Hearing them side by side reminds me of a conversation I had at the inauguration last week with a World War II vet, a Republican donor from Michigan named Robert Brown, who I ran into right by the reviewing stands at the White House. So you don't understand their arguments at all? No, I don't understand them at all. I don't think they were valid at all. I'm sure they wonder, as I wonder, I wonder what goes through their mind to think as they do, and they wonder what goes through my mind. Do you think politics are getting more bitter? Oh yes. Terribly so. And is that a bad thing? Is that worrisome? Very worrisome to me. I don't know where it's going to end. Fortunately, I don't have to see too much more of it. You do. You'll have to see a lot of it. Now there's a reassuring thought. And maybe you can learn to live with it. I'm not sure I can learn to live with it. But I guess every cloud has a silver lining. And at my age, I don't have to live with it too much longer. That's right. The one comfort in dying someday is knowing you never have to watch Crossfire again. Indeed it is, Act Two, A Brief History of Republican Time. So how did we get to this point where politics is so bitter? David Brock has a particular view of this. He used to be a right-wing journalistic hitman. First, he wrote an investigative book about Anita Hill. Then he was the very first reporter to mention Paula Jones by name in a story, which led, you could say, to her going public and suing Clinton, which led to him lying in a deposition-- lies which later became grounds for his impeachment. Brock published an apology to Clinton. He is uniquely situated to give a first-hand history of recent politics. The vein-popping conservative backlash Americans witnessed after the 2000 election is rooted in the war over judicial nominees that began in the late 1980s when Presidents Reagan and Bush tried to roll back decades of socially progressive court decisions by confirming conservative judges to the bench. In Republican eyes, the Robert Bork nomination was the same as the Clarence Thomas hearings. Attacks, lies and misrepresentations. They vowed revenge. Newt Gingrich was in on the tone-setting war from the start. Writing shortly after Bork's defeat, he promised to fight the Democrats quote, "with the scale and duration and savagery that is true only of civil wars." Gingrich and the people around him were not conservatives in the original sense of the word. They were radicals who consciously adopted the street fighting political style of the '60s for their own ends. In the early '90s, Gingrich's posse hung out at the Capitol Hill row house of Grover Norquist, an anti-tax lobbyist whom The New Republic once called the Che Guevara of the Republican revolution. At Norquist parties, where conservatives convene to drink kegs and grouse about the latest liberal outrages, I ran into former Reagan and Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund, and many of the figures you saw kicking and screaming on TV about the stolen election. The integrity of ballots was the last thing I ever thought this crowd would get worked up over. Norquist kept a pet boa constrictor named Lysander Spooner, after a turn-of-the-century anarchist. A majestic portrait of Lenin graced Norquist's living room wall. Incongruously for such a right wing crowd, Peter Paul and Mary tunes played on the stereo. I asked Norquist about this once and he told me it was OK, since the '60s left wing was being destroyed. After the Cold War, Gingrich and company candidly recognized that the Cold War's demonizing, us-versus-them worldview could still be useful. They just turned it against their domestic enemy. Now it was the Democrats they called unprincipled, immoral, and un-American. The shift from one enemy to another culminated at the Republican National Convention in 1992 in Houston, where RNC Chairman Rich Bond stood on the convention floor and said, of the Clintons and their supporters, we are America. Those other people are not. Republicans have never forgotten that in 1992, the ballots cast for Ross Perot combined with those cast for George Bush constituted a majority of the electorate. In their minds, the will of the people clearly favored conservative leadership. On election night in 1992, then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole went on national television and denounced the Clinton-Gore ticket, which had won with 43% of the vote, as illegitimate. That made it possible to say and do anything to stop them. And boy, did we try. The American Spectator, for example, spent $2.4 million looking for dirt on the Clintons, including sending me to Arkansas to chase down outlandish stories linking Clinton to drug running and murder. I'd come back telling them the stories weren't true. They'd figure out a way to publish them anyway. Riding a wave of anti-Clinton sentiment, the Gingrich revolution swept into power in 1994. In came a generation of right-wing rabble-rousers whose politics seemed based as much on raw emotion and invective as conservative ideals. The radical right wasn't pretending to be outraged at Clinton for dramatic effect; the rage was real, even when they knew they were stretching the facts to make their case. Beginning with the famous election night party that Laura Ingraham and I threw to celebrate the 1994 election, my house in Georgetown became the center of social life for the revolution. The highlight of my dinner parties was always a dramatic reading from Gennifer Flowers's steamy book, Passion and Betrayal. Here's a typical passage. "Yes, I found Bill Clinton incredibly sexy. I can still remember the way he had of staring at me. He did more than just mentally undress me. He was visually seducing me, and he made sure I knew it." When Gingrich's extreme anti-government agenda fell flat, furious Republicans fought back. GOP congressional investigation staffers, together with friends of mine who worked for Kenneth Starr, quickly generated charges, counter-charges, conspiracy theories, and rumors designed to depict the Clintons as criminals. After I introduced Paula Jones to the world in the pages of the American Spectator, I was one of the right wing's golden boys and I was in the thick of it all. We were on a mission. Among Clinton's foes, tempers boiled over as the promised indictments failed to materialize and Clinton won reelection handily. Tired of running down dead ends, I bailed out soon afterward. But the right never stopped believing that the Clinton-Gore administration was a depraved, criminal syndicate. In the fall of 1997, months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, I attended a dinner given by the American Spectator. The subject of discussion that evening was how to build support for an impeachment resolution, introduced by representative Bob Barr of Georgia. John Fund from the Wall Street Journal said it was quote, "not a matter of law but of political will." The Republicans saw their subsequent failure to remove Clinton from office as a historic defeat, but they didn't blame themselves. In their minds, they had simply been outmaneuvered by the oily Clinton-Gore spin machine, tricky lawyers, and the liberal-leaning media. And they would do everything they could to ensure that nothing like this ever happened again. This is the political backdrop for Florida's recent drama. And it explains why Republicans so quickly concluded that Florida Democrats were colluding with Gore to steal the election, and why they were so adamant about drawing their line in the sand. It also explains why, during the recount, polls showed that 75% of Democrats would have accepted Bush as president, but barely 60% of Republicans would accept Gore. During the disputed recount and in the months since, when the mainstream press talks about what happened in Florida, the story it tells, the story that's become the accepted version of events, is that the Democrats and Republicans behave the same as each other. That their actions were morally equivalent. I don't think that's true. Inside the courts, they might have fought with equal fierceness and self-interest, but outside the courtroom Bush and his allies showed a willingness to rely on rhetoric and tactics that the Democrats didn't. Bush's top strategist, former Secretary of State James Baker, portrayed court decisions that went against Bush as partisan and illegitimate. Republicans charged that Gore could not pull ahead without cheating and stealing. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay decried a theft in process and George Will referred to slow motion larceny. Republican morality czar William Bennett said a Gore victory in Florida would be illegitimate. Former Senator Bob Dole suggested that Republicans might boycott a Gore inaugural. During the controversy over military ballots, Bush spokesman Marc Racicot, the governor of Montana, all but called the Gore forces unpatriotic, saying that they had gone to war against the men and women who serve in our armed forces. There's no equivalent on the Democratic side to all this. The Gore team was under orders not to attack the Republicans or impugn the integrity of the judicial process. When Gore spokesman Chris LeHane did otherwise and called Katherine Harris commissar, the Gore staff was ordered not to let it happen again. Perhaps most disturbing were reports of Republican violence. Democratic officials in Florida said they were kicked, chased, and shouted down by Republican protesters. In Miami Dade county, an angry mob of Republican operatives, organized through Congressman Tom DeLay's office in Washington, stormed the recount center at a critical juncture. New York Republican Congressman John Sweeney commanded the troops to shut it down, according to the Wall Street Journal. When the demonstrators later held a Thanksgiving Day party, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney called in and joked about the disruption. Again, there was no equivalent to this on the Democratic side. Now that the dust has settled, everyone seems to be proceeding as if none of this nastiness ever happened. I can't forget, even if I want to. Watching Bush take the oath of office as James Baker and the Supreme Court looked on, it was hard not to think of the ugliness that had got him to this point, and it's hard to believe that we've seen the last of it. George Bush ran as a different kind of Republican-- a uniter, not a divider, and certainly not a hater. Then came Florida. Last week I couldn't help notice a photograph in the New York Times of conservative strategists planning to support the nomination of John Ashcroft for Attorney General. And Ashcroft doesn't exactly fit anyone's notion of unity or inclusiveness. The meeting was being run by Grover Norquist, the Gingrich protege with a pet boa constrictor. I wondered if everything I had seen on the right in the '90s was just a prelude to what's about to happen. David Brock. A version of this story appears in the issue of Talk Magazine, which is now on newsstands. Brock is writing a memoir of his years in the conservative movement and his break from it. It'll be out in the fall. Act Three, Bedroom Politics. When it comes to political fighting, there is no more intimate a space than a marriage, where you have to get along, where you have to figure out how to move on and get over disagreements. Scott Rayson is a corporate lawyer and his wife Carrie is a social worker which, you might think already is a recipe for political fighting right there. But in fact, they have always voted together in 10 years of marriage. They both supported Bill Clinton. And then something changed. At some point over the summer, I believe we were eating dinner one night, and Scott said, you know I think I'm going to vote for Bush. And the only other time in our marriage that I have been that caught off guard was years ago. We have three little boys. And when the second one was about a year old, I started lobbying for a third child. And I would swear we'd had that conversation, that if things went well, we would try and have three children. And finally one morning Scott sat down and took me by the shoulders and he said, I'm not sure you listen to me anymore. I'm not sure I want another baby. And it felt like the ground shifted under my feet. It was one of those marital moments where you think, oh, this could be a problem. And in the same way, he said it in the same way, he said, I'm not sure I want to have another baby. He said, I think I might vote for Bush. Was it one of these moments where you just felt like, do I know you? Oh, sure. I think we watched Al Gore's speech, his acceptance speech, and our reactions to it were very different. And that's the first time it became obvious that TV was going to be a problem for us. So as election season unfolded, would you watch, for example, the debates together? We weren't able to do that. We watched them in separate rooms. So what room were you in and what room was he in? Usually I sent him down to the-- there's an old TV. We have two televisions in our house. There's a television that's down in a sub-basement that the children use as a playroom. So you would banish him to the sub-basement? He was banished. Yeah, I mean there was-- maybe a self-imposed exile is a better way to put it. And I'd go down in our playroom and watch and she'd be in the kitchen watching. And you could hear the two of us talking at the TV at just the opposite times saying just the opposite things. Were there moments between you when there was just an air of tension because of politics? Yeah, there were several times. When it really first dawned on me that we can't just accidentally be watching this coverage in separate rooms, was one night at dinner and she just slammed a plate down in front of me and she just said, so tell me why is it that you're going to vote for George Bush? I was still struggling to make him change his mind. And I really did work very hard. And you see, I'd been successful in the past. So it was really hard for me to accept that I couldn't convince him, in some way, that what he was doing was wrong. My whole premise was well, the election will be over on the first Tuesday and we can get back to norm. And it didn't. It went on for another month. You know, in our life together, typically you meet a couple or you meet an individual. And typically, Scott and I will like that person or not be terribly impressed or interested in that person for the same reasons. You kind of agree about people. We agree about people, we agree about so many things. And somehow on this, you're not agreeing? Right. For me, it generated a lot of anger with him. And I just didn't get it. And did it get such a rise of you because you felt like it wasn't Bush, per se, because it said something about Scott? Yes, oh yes. And what did it say about Scott? That he had kind of, in front of me somehow, become conservative and I wasn't aware of it. And what does it mean to you to be conservative? Well, that's a good question. What it means to be conservative for me is that you look out for your best interests, first and foremost. And I don't believe that that's a good way to live. And I don't live that way. I don't know the right word, really. I'd say I felt a little insulted by all of that. Why would she think that poorly of me, when she knows me as well as she does, over this candidate? And I just realized that I wasn't going to be able to talk to her. And that's when I just decided that it's really for the best to really just not talk about it. Carrie, I understand at some point, your husband Scott got invited to the inauguration? Could you tell me the story of that, please? Well what happened was Scott made what I would consider a pretty hefty contribution to the Republican party. And what we got immediately was the most outrageous mail. We got so much mail from the NRA. Really out-there mail from people about, you know, let's tar and feather Clinton. And I would just pile that up on the table every day and tell him he had more mail. So then he gets this great, huge envelope for the inauguration and all the parties and everything. and so I propped that up especially for him to see. But he would never have gone. Really? He didn't have any interest in going at all? No. He's not political that way. He's not involved in politics that way. Well, I would love to have done it. I had my little inaugural invitation and was gleefully reviewing it. And she just found it disgusting. So I didn't even suggest the possibility of going. So you didn't even try to talk your wife into this? Oh no, wouldn't even have dreamed of it. Not a chance. Does she know that you might have wanted to go at all? No. I mean, I didn't say anything about it. It seems like the two of you have the kind of marriage where you haven't had an issue before where you just put it aside and said, OK, we're not going to talk about this anymore. And now you have one. Your first one. Well, yeah. That's right. And I guess if you're going to have one, it's not a bad one to have. From the outside, we hear about these marriages, people with differing political views-- The Mary Matalin, James Carville marriages-- and it all sounds so lovable and cute. No, I don't think it's been cute. And I don't think I've been very lovable at all, and I haven't viewed him as being terribly lovable through all of this. Well, I've seen Matalin and Carville plenty of times together on television and, I don't know if you ever saw them together during the aftermath of the election, but it looked awful. I'd never seen Carville so quiet. She just looked hostile at him. Are you worried about these next four years together with Bush in the White House? No. Between the two of us? No. Because we really do-- we work through things. I am dreading the next election. I think the midterms are going to be bad enough. But four years from now, I think it's going to be several months of being banished to the playroom. I'll have to get involved in some big deal that takes me to Botswana or something so I just go off and work for a couple months. Scott and Carrie Rayson, in Nashville, Tennessee. Coming up, a love supreme, a hate supreme, we go back once more, slowly, to a certain five-to-four court decision. And this time, we really, really, really use our brains. In a minute, for Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today, one week into the Bush presidency, we bring you stories of people trying to move on after our bitter national election recount imbroglio. I don't even know what that word means, but I feel like this is my one chance to say it. We've arrived Act Four of our program. Act Four, Let's Reason Together. When the Supreme Court handed down the decision that ended the election, it came and went in a day. There was a flurry of commentary, some of it from people who are usually very evenhanded and calm about the court, like Jeffrey Rosen, who appears on ABC News and on NPR sometimes, who teaches law at George Washington University Law School. He was saying things like-- I don't want to be hyperbolic, but it's safe to say that this is the most outrageous decision that those of us who consider ourselves moderate in the legal academy have ever seen. The most temperate scholars are literally at a loss for words to try to explain this decision, which was so ill-reasoned that it's impossible to view it as anything but political. Was it really this bad? If so, there was a feeling among those of us who put this radio show together, that we wanted to understand exactly what was wrong with this decision. And more than that, we wanted to believe that there is a reasonable case to be made for the decision. Thinking anything else is just too harsh. So with some distance on the decision and some time, we assembled four constitutional experts-- two for and two against the decision-- to explain it. We figured if we had these lingering questions about the whole thing, a lot of people probably did. Here's what we learned. There are really just two parts to the decision. The majority first says that the recount in Florida was violating principles of basic fairness under the equal protection clause of the constitution. Then it sets out a remedy to fix that. We'll take these one at a time. First, the equal protection Argument Here's Mike McConnell, one of the leading conservative Constitutional experts in the country. The argument is really quite simple and common sensical, which is if there's to be a statewide recount, it has to be done on fair and equal terms with some kind of an objective standard for deciding what counts as a vote. The Supreme Court goes into great detail about all the unfairness in the way that the Florida Supreme Court was allowing the recount to happen. The unfairnesses include which votes got recounted and which didn't, whether the people doing the recounting were properly trained and fair, whether there was a fair way to challenge a result. Some counties counted dimpled chads one way, some counted them another way. Palm Beach County switched standards. There were reports that different teams within a county sometimes used different standards. The Florida Supreme Court's decision was a mishmash of standards, which almost made it impossible that there could be a fair count in Florida. In fact, even people who have big problems with the Supreme Court decision agree that there are all sorts of unfairnesses built into what the Florida court did. The question is whether these unfairnesses are so bad that one could conclude that the Florida court had actually left the realm of normal judicial interpretation, leaving aside Florida law entirely, leaving aside impartiality, and committing what the Supreme Court calls, scarily, a non-judicial act. Only then can the US Supreme Court intervene. I was not a fan of the Florida Supreme Court's decision. Again, Jeffrey Rosen. The justices had gone too far in changing the counting standards and imposing a new deadline. But even people like me, who have questions about the Florida Supreme Court, can't claim that it was lawless beyond the realm of reasonable debate. It was based on a series of judicial precedents in Florida, going back to the early 20th century. In contrast, says Rosen, the Supreme Court's decision cites a few precedents. But they either do not support the case or, sometimes, precedents seem to go against the decision in Bush versus Gore. For instance, in the past conservatives on the court have said that you have to prove that discrimination is intentional before it is a real violation of the equal protection clause. Indeed, in the affirmative action and civil rights cases and the voting rights cases too, they'd gone to great lengths to stress that voting systems that had the inadvertent effect of diluting the voting strength of African American voters but were not intended to disadvantage African Americans are not Constitutional violations. The conservatives told us again and again, in cases like the Mobile case, that you need intentional discrimination. No one is claiming here that the different counting standards-- whether imposed by the court or by the Florida legislature-- constitute intentional discrimination. I try to run through each method of interpretation. I'm literally at a loss to defend this decision. Even legal experts who support this Supreme Court decision agree that the precedents cited by the majority don't really say much that backs up the decision. Again, here's Mike McConnell. I don't think that this case is decided on the basis of precedence. I think it was decided on the basis of a pretty common sensical understanding of fairness. That when you're going to have a statewide recount in a single jurisdiction, that they have to count all the votes the same way. Here's Greg Sisk from Drake Law School, another supporter of the decision. In my view, if most people actually read this 12-page decision and looked at the listing of the problems with the unfairness of the approach that the Florida Supreme Court had set up, that we would reach a consensus-- yeah, that's not a very good way to do things. And the only thing that we'd be left to decide is, is it unconstitutional, then, to do it that way? In the end, there is simply a great divide between the people who support this decision and those who impose it. And at one level, the divide is not over the reasoning in the decision. The divide is over whether or not they see the Florida court's recount as being profoundly flawed and deeply unfair. If they do, then they conclude that there was enough of a problem to justify the very unusual step of the Supreme Court jumping in. If they don't, then the logic of the decision dissolves. This comes up over and over when you talk to the two sides. Take two of the arguments against the decision that you've probably heard on the news at some point. Critics said that it was grotesque for the Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount on equal protection grounds when the point of the recount was to give equal protection to the unfortunate voters who lived in districts with inferior, less-reliable voting equipment-- the punch card ballots. Critics also said that the US Supreme Court put the Florida court into a kind of Catch-22 situation. Here's how this works. The Supreme Court first told Florida to be careful, not to change the rules of the election after election day. Don't go in, don't muck around with the law, that would be unconstitutional. So the Florida court refused to set a statewide standard for counting ballots because that might be seen as altering the law. Then the Supreme Court spun around and overturned them, saying no, you should have imposed a statewide standard in the interest of fairness. Faced with both of these criticisms, supporters of the equal protection argument are unmoved. Because, again, in their view the bottom line is that there were just grave problems with the Florida recount that the Florida court needed to fix. If, on election day, some voters faced worse voting equipment than others, well this recount scheme-- in their view, impossibly biased towards the Democrats in a few select areas that had been hand-picked by Gore, this scheme would not make things any fairer. And if the Florida election law was so vague that it was impossible to invent a fair, statewide standard for a recount without changing the law, then it's better to just shut down the recount. And what's the loss? After all, recounting in a biased way is no better than not recounting at all. Again, Mike McConnell. There was good reason not to order a recount at all. But if there was to be recount, it ought to be a fair recount. For the Florida court to order a recount that was systematically rigged in favor of one candidate was just unjustifiable. Let's move on to the second part of the Supreme Court decision. Once the Supreme Court decided that the Florida recount violated the equal protection amendment of the Constitution, what should they do about it? Conservative legal scholar Mike McConnell says that he agrees with the court when it comes to the equal protection part of their decision. But that's it. The weakness in the opinion has to do with the issue of remedy-- that if the problem with the Florida Supreme Court's decision is that in order to recount under unfair, unequal, arbitrary chaotic standards, the proper remedy would have been to send it back to the Florida court to conduct the recount under fair, consistent practical standards. It would have been better for the US Supreme Court to leave it up to the state to do that. Normally when people are being treated unequally, the way you treat them equally is you raise everybody up to the fair level. Liberal legal expert, Pam Karlan of Stanford Law School. So if these ballots were going to be counted in Broward, then you'd count them in Palm Beach. And instead, what the Supreme Court said was in order to solve the potential inequality, don't count any of these people's votes, even though there are large numbers of ballots that weren't counted the first time around on which it's absolutely clear what the voter's intent was. And the Supreme Court stopped that process, leaving a lot of voters as disenfranchised as if they'd never gone to the polls in the first place. The Supreme Court, of course, stopped the Florida recount on December 9 and then handed down its opinion on the 12. The opinion said that because there wasn't enough time at that point to do a fair recount, they would call it a day. The state would go to George Bush. In his dissent, Justice Breyer points out that the majority decided that there was no time for a recount without any evidence on the court record that the recount could not have been completed on time, by December 18, which is when the electoral college would meet. Breyer writes, quote, "the majority finds facts outside of the record on matters that state courts are in a far better position to address," end quote. So what was the majority's argument for declaring it over on December 12? Well the majority doesn't say much about it at all. Except that December 12 was the date that the Florida court was shooting for as the deadline for finishing the vote. Greg Sisk thinks that this was not only reasonable, he says it was the most sensible way to do it. First of all, the Florida Supreme Court had been saying all along, since their initial decision, had always been operating on the assumption that December 12 was the deadline. And the reason they reached that conclusion, the Florida Supreme Court did, was this. There's a federal statute that provides that if you, as a state, want to appoint electors in a way that they're not subject to challenge by Congress as having been improperly selected, you have to make your selection by December 12. And the Florida Supreme Court had assumed all along that the legislature, of course, would have wanted Florida to take advantage of that safe harbor provision. Dissenters point out that the December 12 date is an arbitrary one, and not part of Florida state law. If states miss the safe harbor deadline, they can still get their votes in. Pam Karlan. Obviously, if you can get it done by December 12, that's the best. But it's hard to say that Florida would prefer an inaccurate count on December 12 to a more accurate count on the 15 or the 18. Or in a case like Hawaii in 1960, they didn't get their votes in until early January. Professor Sisk, I have to say after speaking with four different scholars about this decision, I sort of despair that people will see eye to eye on this. I know, I think that's probably right. I think this is one of those cases that often one goes out the same door you came in. I wonder if the very best thing to come out of a discussion like this is that people on each side will understand that the other side has a reasonable argument and might vilify each other a little less. People are so mad at each other. Well, this was one of those things are brought out some of the worst in terms of partisanship. One cannot imagine a more disastrous way to end an election campaign. People were more passionate in favor of their candidate after the election than they were beforehand. That is so true. Do these discussions convince anybody of anything? Speaking completely honestly, I came to this as a Gore-leaning voter, wanting to be persuaded by the majority on the Supreme Court. And in all honesty, I have to say, I did not find their arguments convincing. But I can say now that I see why they think they're convincing. Maybe that's something. Act Five, What Would You Know Who Do? Richard Harris, a Reverend from Belgrade, Florida says he doesn't even know how many days and weeks he spent registering voters for this fall's election. Oh god, to be honest with you, I stopped counting long ago. But we started out, actually, about a year ago. We reached out through churches, reached out through civic groups, fraternities, sororities. And we actually got out and beat the bushes. We went down where I live-- When you were saying that, I was picturing guys fishing and you all just walking up to them. That too, and believe it or not, we did that. We have a marina and a pier in our community. And we did that, too. Oh yeah, we went up on the pier and we actually did that. As a matter of fact, if we happened to be going somewhere and someone was fishing off one of the canals and bridges there, we actually stop, hey, you a registered voter? They'd give us a thumbs up. We'd slow down, give us the thumbs up sign. I mean when we were in the supermarket. It became such a part of us. When we're in the supermarket or in line at the bank, or whatever. If you saw someone, we'd register them right on the spot. Do you have a count of the number of people you all registered? Personally, maybe around 1,200 or so. And I'm sure it was more than that because I stopped counting at one point. You personally registered 1,200 people? Oh yeah, definitely. Come election day, the number of African Americans who voted in Florida broke all records. It rose 50% over the last presidential race. But over the course of the day, Reverend Harris witnessed some of the problems at the polls, which have led to civil rights hearings. He saw police at a polling place asking voters for ID. He saw polling officials from poorer districts unable to get through to state officials to confirm voter IDs. There were people who were thrown off the voter roles because of a faulty list that the state of Florida bought, which incorrectly identified over 8,000 people as felons, who aren't allowed to cast ballots, according to Florida law. You could feel it. Certainly by 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon, you could really feel that there was something definitely wrong. It had gone wrong and you could just feel it. And by the time the polls had closed, there was just this uneasy feeling when I left to go home to watch the results. Something you can't put your hand on at the time, that's how I felt. Something is not right, it's just not right. Can I ask you honestly? As somebody who's trying to stay positive about this entire experience, did you have moments, as a man watching the election results and what happened in the weeks after, where you felt yourself just getting angrier and angrier at the Republicans? And angry, perhaps, in a way that you didn't feel entirely comfortable with as a man of God? Actually, what I really felt was a questioning of my spirituality, to be honest with you. How can I sit back and just let this go like this? How can I accept these people as decent and human when I'm looking at them and I'm beginning to see-- tell you what bothers me. I listened to this on the testimony on the Ashcroft confirmation on my way up here to Atlanta. That's what bothers me. When you try to ram Ashcroft down our throats, knowing he's controversial, knowing there's a great majority in this country, the public, who does not want him to be there, who is really frightened by the possibility that he will be confirmed. Then it says to me if you're going to be a president of compassion, as you have identified yourself-- you can't just say, I'm a compassionate president and then you've got your staff who's not. That's not going to work. I have a friend who watched Bush become president, and she wanted Gore to become, and saw the way it had happened. And she was remembering how, in 1992, I think it was, Dick Armey, Republican, stood up on Capitol Hill and referred to Clinton as "Your president." And she said she just doesn't want to become that. She just doesn't want to hate. And she says it's hard not to. I tell you what, she's absolutely right. I was at a basketball game last night at a college. And I'm going to be totally honest with you, when the National Anthem was playing, I sat down. I didn't get up. I couldn't. Something just held me down. It was very interesting and coincidental that the flag was directly-- there was a Confederate flag on one side, the state of Georgia flag on one side off to my left a little bit, but directly over my head was an American flag. So everybody in the gym turned around and looked. And I'm sitting right up under the flag, not moving. But something was-- I just couldn't get up. And what was that something? To be honest with you, the only other time I felt like this was when I was beaten-- in segregation, the colored and white water fountain. And I stopped for a long time. Because what that flag symbolized for me at that particular point in time, this was not my country. And with no real rights. And that's the feeling that I'm getting now, that we have no real worth in their eyes. And that's what bothers me. And I have to pray real hard and ask God for forgiveness, not to dislike to the point where it turns into hatred of other people who were diametrically opposed to what's right. I figure what's right, anyway. And some of the sinister things they did, I have to forgive them. I have to. I have no choice. I have to forgive them so we can move on and the healing can start. And how's that going? I'm almost at the point where I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. You remember that? Sure. That's where I am right now. If you want to know what my secret prayer is-- my secret prayer is no longer a secret once I tell you this-- is that President-Elect Bush will have a change of heart and will see that he has been given an opportunity to mend a lot of fences, to make a real difference, that he can really change some things in this country for the better. And really prove to people and say, I just did that to get elected. And then really go ahead and do something for the good of the country. That's my prayer. That's my prayer. Reverend Richard Harris. Our program was produced today by Starlee Kine and myself, with Blue Chevigny, Jonathan Goldstein, Julie Snyder and Alex Bloomberg. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Erin Yankee, our production trainee. This is her last show with us. Erin, we are sorry to see you go. Musical help from John Connors and Chris Lygan. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who says regardless of party affiliation-- There's a really creepy side to you. There is, I'm sorry. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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When we were weak, we told ourselves we were strong. And sometimes, if we were very weak, we told ourselves we were very, very strong. I mean, unquestionably, I was by far the most loathed member of my class, I think, you know? Being a pasty, unathletic kid who was weird-looking and probably seemed overly eager, so, you know. And I had friends that would come over on the weekends to play, but then at school, they would ignore me and pretend like they didn't know me. And so when he was little, Chris Ware spent a lot of time thinking about superpowers. He drew superheroes over and over, trying to get them right. He always wondered where somebody could find a radioactive animal like the one who bit Peter Parker and turned him into the Amazing Spider-Man. Once or twice, he thought he might be developing his own real superpowers. There was one morning where I was standing under the shower. And of course when you get in, immediately, because you're so cold, the water is extremely hot by contrast, you know? So you have the cold water turned up, and as you stand in there, you get used to it, and you turn the cold water down. And I was in there for a very long time. And I remember turning the cold, and it wouldn't go any farther. And I thought, that's weird. It must be stuck. And I turned it more, and it wouldn't go any farther. And I realized I was standing under completely hot water, but it felt fine to me. It actually felt warm, almost cool. And the longer I stood there, it felt cooler and cooler. And the only explanation I could come up with is that I had developed the ability to withstand extraordinary heat. And of course we'd just run out of hot water. But at that time, I didn't know that that happened. I thought hot water was an endless commodity. His first crush was Batgirl. Even now, he says, if he just sees the colors of Batgirl's costume-- just the colors, no image at all, just the colors-- his heart still skips a beat. He invented own superhero called the Hurricane, who could shoot blasts of wind from his hands and was drawn with huge, manly muscles. He made a Hurricane costume to wear. Red T-shirt with a black circle with an H on it, a mask that his mom made for him, a yellow cape. There were a few times where I actually came to school with bits of a superhero costume secreted under my school uniform. I guess, I don't exactly know why. I guess I thought it was like it was going to give me some sense of power or something. But of course then I had gym class, you know? You have to change your clothes, so. I don't know what I was thinking. There was one time I actually-- this is sort of peripherally superhero-- but I'd actually drawn circuit boards on pieces of paper, like the Bionic Man, the Six Million Dollar Man, and I'd actually taped them on my legs to look like real circuitry exposed, as if I had mechanical legs or something like that. And I guess I vaguely thought that somebody would catch a glimpse of it and think, wow! Look, he's bionic! Some of us, we spend a long, long time hoping that we're more than what the world thinks of us. And so of course we're drawn to these stories of these mild-mannered guys who, under their clothes, wear a costume in secret, with powers nobody suspects. And when we get older, it all seems-- well, it all seems ridiculous. It all seems really, really dumb. Chris Ware went on to draw cartoons for his living. But these cartoons that he draws now are like novels, about real people. And when a Superman type shows up in one of these cartoons, it's always somebody trying to con kids with a costume and a cape. He is always a disappointment. It's just more interesting that way. I think he's more like a real dad that way, I guess. And the more I draw him, the fatter he gets, too, and the more bald he gets, I guess. And if you were Superman, too, you know, what do you care what you look like? You wouldn't be all handsome. You'd eat whatever you felt like, you'd take whatever you wanted, and you'd end up looking really terrible after a while, I think. If I was a superhero, I think I would probably-- I mean, who's going to criticize you? Well, today on our radio program, Superpowers, four real life stories about how easy it is to be caught up in the dream of them. Act One, The Invisible Man Vs. Hawkman, the story of one man, two superpowers and one big question, a question, my friend, that we all can face equally. Act Two, Wonder Woman, the story of a kid who decided to take steps to become a superhero, systematic, thorough steps that took her years, well into adulthood. Act Three, the Green Team of Superhero Boy Millionaires, Beppo, the Amazing Supermonkey from Planet Krypton, and the Man from Sram. In this act, an inquiry into superheroes-- and there are many each year-- that just never caught on. Act Four, The Wonder Twins, the story of two 12-year-old boys in Burma, guerrilla fighters, who had entire armies believing that they could stop bullets and summon the dead, and why so many people believe them. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. As the supervillains say, "Silence, miscreant! Our program has begun." Act One, Invisible Man Vs. Hawkman. Well, we now present a kind of super-contest for you, beloved super-listener, between two ancient superpowers, two of the superpowers which have fascinated humans since antiquity. And actually, this is kind of a super Rorschach test. John Hodgman has been conducting an unscientific survey, posing for people a very simple choice. Flight versus invisibility? This question is only for you. Whichever you pick, you'll be the only person in the world to have that particular superpower. You can't have both. Which do you choose? I started wondering about this a few years ago. I'd bring it up at parties, dinners, wedding receptions. It was more interesting to ask than where people worked or where they went to school, and clearly more fun to answer. Like a magic word, shazam, flight versus invisibility would instantly change an evening's character, opening passionate conversation and debate. But what surprised me more was how quickly everyone would choose, as though they'd been thinking about it for a long time. Everyone knew exactly which superpower they wanted and what they would do with it. Their plans weren't always flashy or heroic. In fact, they almost never were. If I could fly, the first thing I would do is fly into the bar, check out what's going on there, fly back home. I would attach my baby to me and fly to a doctor's appointment at 11:30, fly right back. And then I think I would fly to Atlantic City. I would imagine, like, if it got around that I had the power of flight and it was a rare type of thing, I mean, there would definitely be flight groupies. I would imagine. So they're going to be just like, oh, yeah, I just slept with the flying dude. You know? People are just like, oh, score. I'd go into Barney's. I'd pick out the cashmere sweaters that I like. I'd go to the dressing room. The woman says, how many items? I'd say, five. I'd go into the dressing room. I'd put those five sweaters on. And I'd summon my powers of invisibility in the dressing room. I'd turn invisible. I'd walk out, leaving her to wonder why there's a tag hanging from the door that says five, and no person inside. So you'd become a thief pretty quickly. Immediately. Until I had all the sweaters that I wanted, and then I would have to think of other things to do. Typically, this is how it goes. People who turn invisible will sneak into the movies or onto airplanes. People who fly stop taking the bus. Here's one thing that pretty much no one ever says-- I would use my power to fight crime. No one seems to care about crime. I don't think I would want to spend a lot of time using my power for good. I mean, if I don't have super strength and I'm not invulnerable, then, I mean, it would be very dangerous. If you had to rescue somebody from a burning building or something like that, you might catch on fire. Just having flight I don't think is necessarily quite enough, because you don't have the super strength. I'd still be weak when I got there, I guess. I don't fight crime now, and people without superpowers do. Sure, in theory, yes. But you know, I'm not a-- I mean, what can I do with this? Either one of those is, you need a whole package. There's not much you can do with any one thing. I'd go to Paris, I suppose. That's not being a superhero. Well, maybe I could be a Going to Paris Man, that sort of a superhero. Going to Paris Man is not a superhero. And I have to say this drove me crazy a little bit. We are, after all, talking about superpowers. Why not take down organized crime, bring hope to the hopeless, swear vengeance on the underworld, if only a little bit? I proposed a variety of sample scenarios along these lines, such as, how would you handle a mad genius taking over the Empire State Building, or a group of terrorists hijacking an overseas flight? And what I learned is, some people should simply not be fighting crime. Well, first thing that occurs to me is, like, I would sneak up behind them very low with a knife that they didn't see and slice their Achilles tendon. Oh, no. I'd somehow shove a sock in their mouth or something like that, and wrap some tape around their mouth, so that they can't yell out. It might not be a sock. It might just be some napkins or something. I can't keep all of this in my head. I'd have to keep a bag full of stuff with me. Knives. Socks. Tape. Do you think you'd be tempted to enlist a teenage helper? Um. You know, I think a helper would be good, a helper with a complementary power. There's no others, anybody else with superpowers. Oh, it would just be a teenager hanging around me? No. People who consider invisibility always want to know, do I have to be naked? People who choose flight want to know, how fast? Almost all asked, who would win in a fight, Mr. Invisible or Flying Man? And so I had to lay down some rules. Invisibility means the power to become transparent at will, including your clothing, but anything you may pick up is visible. Flight means the power to fly at any altitude within the earth's atmosphere at speeds up to 1000 miles per hour. But even then, they start looking for loopholes, hidden catches, superpower fine print. They start negotiating their dreams with me. Now, when you're flying, if you're flying at 1000 miles an hour at 100,000 feet, are you comfortable? Do you get very cold? Let's say I'm in this room and I'm invisible. And I'm walking around this apartment and I'm invisible. Do I have to be completely quiet, or you guys will, like, hear my footsteps? Because that's a pain in the ass. And also, someone has to let you in. Can I carry someone? Can somebody go on my back? Can you carry someone on your back now? Little people. Little people, yeah. Then you can carry little people on your back. Done. Flight it is. This is all part of what I call the five stages of choosing your superpower. Sometimes this process occurs in just moments. For example, subject A, a tallish man with glasses, wedged into a cramped barroom corner, begins as they all do, with stage one, gut reaction. Initially, I would think perhaps invisibility. Next comes stage two, practical consideration. Because you have the ability to walk around work, perhaps show up at one point, and perhaps like go away for a little while, and turn invisible, and then come back and listen to what they say about you. You have the power to spy on your exes. And that would all be enlightening and fun and, in fact, a little bit perverted. And-- You hear that doubt in his voice? That's the beginning of stage three, philosophical reconsideration. That would-- I believe it would immediately turn into a life of complete depression. You wouldn't be able to really share it with anyone, you know? And I know there'd be some problems with, like, the perversion thing. Stage four, self-recrimination. Invisibility leads you-- leads me, as an invisible person, down a dark path, because you're not going to want to miss out, when you're invisible, on-- you know, no matter how many times you've seen a woman naked in the shower, you're going to want to see it again, because there's always a different woman, right? And there's like a lifetime of that. And that's not acceptable behavior, no matter whether you're invisible or not. And finally, stage five, acceptance. Yeah, I'd have to go with flight. So who chooses invisibility and who chooses flight? In my experience, though there are lots of exceptions, men lean towards flying, women to invisibility. And many brood anxiously over their choice, switching from one to the other and back again. And that's because, more than the ability, say, to burst into flame or shoot arrows with uncanny accuracy, flight and invisibility touch a nerve. Actually, they touch two different nerves, speak to very different primal desires and unconscious fears. My friend Christine chose invisibility. One superpower is about something that's obvious, and the other is about something that is hidden. I think it indicates your level of shame. How do you mean? A person who chooses to fly has nothing to hide. A person who chooses to be invisible wants clearly to hide themselves. Do you feel that you want to hide yourself? I want to-- I'd like to not-- I'm not going to answer that question. It all has to do with guile. Wanting to be invisible means that you're a more guileful person. If you want to fly, it means you're guileless. And I think the reason that I'm so conflicted about flying versus invisibility is that I have guile, but I really wish that I didn't. Flight is the hero-- selfless and confident and unashamed. And invisibility, the villain. Almost everyone I talked to called invisibility the sneakier power. Flying is for people who want to let it all hang out. Invisibility is for fearful, crouching masturbators. First of all, I think that a lot of people are going to tell you that they would choose flight, and I think they're lying to you. I think they're saying that because they're trying to sound all mythic and heroic, because the better angels of our nature would tell us that the real thing that we should strive for is flight, and that that's noble and all that kind of stuff. But I think actually, if everybody were being perfectly honest with you, they would tell you the truth, which is that they all want to be invisible so that they can shoplift, get into movies for free, go to exotic places on airplanes without paying for airline tickets, and watch celebrities have sex. Anyone faced with this choice, in their heart of hearts, will choose invisibility. Yes. Or they have this sort of inflated, heroic, mythical concept of themselves, and that, in fact, they're not really giving it very much practical thought. In the end, it's not a question of what kind of person flies and what kind of person fades. We all do both. Perhaps that's why, when I put the choice to myself, I'm hopelessly, completely stuck. At the heart of this decision, the question I really don't want to face, is this. who do you want to be, the person you hope to be, or the person you fear you actually are? Don't rush into it. Think it over. Which would you choose? John Hodgman in New York City. Act Two, Wonder Woman. OK, what are the ways to create a superhero? Gamma rays. Space alien abduction. Prison experiment or a NASA flight gone awry. And then there's the idea of a list. Is it possible that a to-do list is powerful enough to achieve this incredible result? Kelly McEvers met somebody who tried. We met in a bar in Flagstaff, Arizona. I'd just moved back from Cambodia and I was going out for one of my first beers back in the States. Not long into the first one, I notice this Amazon of a woman with huge blond and red-streaked hair and frosty lips, wearing a short red tank dress and at least 50 bracelets. She's six feet tall and showing a lot of leg. People at the bar swivel their heads to watch her every move. She stands next to me to order a drink, and in this throaty voice says, "What are those?" pointing to my cigarettes. I tell her they're Cambodian. Her eyes light up and she shoots out a long, tan arm, and points at a table in the corner. She orders me there. Before I can say no, I'm following her to my seat. She tells me she's an international private investigator, a bounty hunter, and a bail bonds enforcer, and that her name is Zora. I sit there for hours listening to her. Within a week, she takes me to Las Vegas. We drive there in her red Mustang. As always, there's a Colt .380 under the driver's seat and a .45 Megastar in the trunk. In Vegas, we skip the casinos and head straight for the male strip clubs, where Zora drops at least $200 on lap dances from buff guys with names like Roman. Her getup is the same as before-- teeth, hair, jewelry, and the ubiquitous tank dress, which, I realize, is the best way to show off her tattoos. One is this big circle with blue and white swirls in it, kind of like a bowling ball, on her left shoulder. Every guy she meets asks her about it, and when they hear her answer, they sometimes propose marriage. Turns out the tattoo is a magic globe she holds in her dreams. And in these dreams, it gives her superpowers. Ever since I remember, I've had the dreams. And they're very vivid. But it varies. It usually involves fighting, sometimes with guns, sometimes with superhero powers. Lightning from my fists and all that. And I usually have super strength, and I can fly, and I have all those things. And it's my most common set of dreams. And it varies. Sometimes it's medieval, sometimes it's futuristic, sometimes it's present day, sometimes it's like a guerrilla war in Latin America. Can you describe that Zora to me, the Zora in dreams? Very powerful athletically, but beyond the rules of nature that this world allows. It's a six foot five and long, like almost impossibly long silver hair. This sort of otherworldly quality to her, where her voice did not sound normal. It sounded, like, almost musical. And it became something that I aspired to be. I aspired to be this sort of superhero, this sort of person who would fight for a cause. That was my motivation in life. Ever since I was 10 or 11, I decided that that was my goal. Zora took the dreams seriously. So seriously that at the age of 12, she sat down and composed a list of some 30 skills she needed to learn if she wanted to become as close to a superhero as any mortal could be. She even gave herself a deadline-- to master these skills by the time she was 23. I don't know what's in these. Zora pulls out the old spiral notebook that was her diary at the age of 13 and turns to the inside back cover. There's the list. Wow. Why don't you go ahead and read it. OK. The list included martial arts, electronics, chemistry, metaphysics, hang gliding, helicopter and airplane flying, parachuting, mountain climbing, survival-- Throughout her teens and 20s, each time she started a new diary, she would update the list and write it in the back of the book, each one with the same format, each one titled "The List." Weaponry, rafting, scuba diving, herbology-- yes, I, studied that-- CPR, first aid and mountain emergency kind of medicine. The list also includes bodybuilding, archery, demolitions, and explosives. She wanted to learn how to hunt animals and track men. Major physical conditioning. And the most incredible thing about all of this is that Zora accomplished nearly every item on the list. Throwing stars and compound bows and throwing knives and-- yes, it was a very interesting pastime. To keep up with the goals set by the list, she sped through school. Starting in the seventh grade, she began completing entire school years during the summer term and finished high school by the time she was 15. She got her BA at 18, a master's at 20, and completed the coursework for a PhD in Geopolitics by the time she was 21. She wanted to live like Indiana Jones, spending half her time in the classroom and half her time saving the world in the jungles of Peru. Item number four-- camel, elephant riding. Evasive driving and stunts. When you're a kid, you have these romantic visions of what you'll be when you grow up. But how many people are so diligent they commit their dreams to paper and make it their life's work to achieve them? How many keep a list, amending it, adding to it, ticking things off as they go along, well into their adult lives? After finishing the course work for her PhD, Zora decided to quit school, disappointed at the lack of cliff-hanging adventure in her doctoral program. And since superheroes who live in the real world need jobs, she decided to seek employment at the only place that would allow her to put all the skills from the list to use. Zora wanted to become an agent in the CIA. And so began a rigorous application process. Interviews, psych exams, a three-day lie detector test. After that, then they sent investigators out to interview me, interview my neighbors, interview ex-boyfriends, interview friends, ex-friends, former colleagues, people I worked with, people I used to work with. They threw a question out in the middle of an interview. So what would you do in this situation? If you were driving down the road, and you had one of your native agents with you, someone who's going to give you some information, and you were in a third world country somewhere, and you were driving a car, and you accidentally ran into a dog, and people have been out playing in the street, children in the street, they see their dog get killed, and they get upset, and they rush towards the car, what do you do in that situation? You don't want to draw attention to the person who's with you. So what I said was that I would tell my agent to get down lower in the car, and I would get out of the car and draw the attention to myself, and try to appease them in some way, either by giving money, more likely. And that was an acceptable answer. That was a good answer to them. At the time, when I was going through the process, it felt like everything was coming together. And I had not felt so much joy probably ever. Did you tell them about your dreams? Absolutely not. I would tell them that I had a sense that I could combine the whole street smarts intellectual, the education with the sort of adventure personality. And I was actually told that I had the perfect personality for it, and that I would do really well. It was like the fruition of my life, that it was going to be the step into the next-- you know, where I would be using all that list in preparation for the next phase, which would be to actually put it into practice. About eight months into the interviews, Zora got a letter saying she'd been rejected. She appealed over the next year and a half, partly to find out why they'd turned her down, but the best they could do was to tell her to try again in a few more years. In the end, the CIA wouldn't take her, and they wouldn't even tell her why. Probably it took me more like two years to recover. I was a basket case. I was just down. You know? I would have to work. I couldn't concentrate. Sort of slump down, staring at the wall. I put my whole life into examination, all the years of preparation. Most of us give up our dreams of superhero adventure when we're adolescents. Zora was only getting to it at the age of 27. Here she knew how to fly a helicopter and survive in the wilderness, but for what? She devoted a lot of time to thinking about why she might have been rejected by the CIA. Maybe it was all those months she spent with right wing militia groups, doing her doctoral research. Maybe she shouldn't have told the CIA how she ended up in a clandestine IRA club one night while on vacation in Ireland. Maybe the CIA didn't like the fact that her father, a professor at the University of Minnesota, is an outspoken Serbian nationalist. Or maybe it was simply her own fault, that she couldn't turn herself into a superhero. I had violated the agreement of the list, violated the agreement that I made with myself, that I had not become what the archetype was, that I'd become something lacking. The point being that my mythology should have guided me better, and it felt like such a final thing. So Zora remade herself. She had been virtually isolated from other people since she was 15, when she started actively pursuing the goals on the list. Her parents were happy she was so busy, because she had no time for boys. But now she started working for a woman private investigator. One day when she went to court, she wore her first pair of pantyhose, because she was told it would help her look more feminine. Soon after, she was schooled in the sheer power of lipstick, a short skirt, and a supermodel runway walk to control the minds of others. These days she works for an international private investigation agency that handles these kinds of cases. Child abduction, retrieval of custody, reverse stings, occult and ritualistic crimes. Those tend to be really interesting. I like working on those. Anti-terrorism, kidnap protection and return, counterintelligence. She's happy doing this work. In a typical case, Zora's agency sent her on a mission to Mexico to do what's known as a reverse scam. The agency was hired by the family of a young woman who'd recently traveled there and fallen in love with the man she planned to marry after knowing him for only 10 days. The family suspected some sort of con. Zora contacted him, pretending she was looking for a girlfriend who used to work with him in the travel industry. She took a photo of a classmate with her to begin the scam. I sort of played the distressed American student going to a Spanish school. And he invited me on a couple of dates, and asked me to come back for the bullfight. What did you wear? I wore like a little itty-bitty skirt and a little tank top. I made it seem like I had plenty of money, and that interested him. He kind of perked up at that. He never mentioned, the whole time that I ever spent any time with him, he never mentioned that there was ever a woman. I found him to be pretty emotionally open and a very romantic guy. But I honestly felt that he probably was not in love with her, that he was taking this as an opportunity to live in the United States. And that was the report I gave. Before Zora set out for Mexico, I rode with her to the airport. We were late and hurrying through the terminal, just 10 minutes to spare, when she did the strangest thing. She sat down in a chair, far from the gate, and wouldn't move. I told her she was going to miss her flight, but she didn't budge. I sat down next to her. She said she was scared. About the case? About which disguise she might wear? About being found out? No, she said. She said she was afraid that when she got to Mexico, people wouldn't like her. The next time I was at her house, I hadn't noticed before, but I realized her bookshelf was packed with advice on how to build confidence. Titles like Princessa: Machiavelli For Women. Books like that aren't really so far from the idea of keeping a list, having an ongoing plan for self-improvement, believing that if you just put something on paper and stick to it, you can change. Zora still has her list. But while the old list was all about being perfect and saving the world, the new list is very different. I need to learn how to play tennis and golf. And my new list is windsurfing, tennis, golf. I need to develop some kind of talent. Like, I need to learn how to sing properly, or to do some kind of comedy or sketches, acting. I need to learn how to act. Oh, I need to learn how to sing like Billie Holiday. She doesn't take the list so seriously these days. There are no deadlines. She puts things on the list and later decides not to do them. It's not a grand mission anymore. Now it's just a list. Kelly McEvers. Billie Holiday imitator David Sedaris. Coming up, exactly what Superman knows that Jigsaw Man doesn't, in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Superpowers, and how easy it is to get caught up in the dream of superpowers. We've arrived at Act Three. Act Three, The Green Team of Superhero Boy Millionaires, the Amazing Supermonkey from Planet Krypton, and the Man from Sram. My friends, they come in waves, 100 a year or more, whole armies of them. I'm talking about new superheroes created by the comic book companies. It is rare for any of them to last more than a few issues. The website Gone and Forgotten is, as far as we can tell, the authoritative archive of these failed supersouls. The guy who runs the site, under the title "Your Humble Editor," is Jonathan Morris. He says that the few great superheroes have some common sense things going for them. One, they have powers that make intuitive sense. Two, they have a reason for fighting crime. Three, their stories have a human touch to them. You can relate to them. He agreed to come into the studio with a stack of some of the comics that do not quite measure up to those super-standards. I'm trying to find a very good one. I've brought a ton of comics with me. Let's see. We've got Captain Marvel, who is one of the characters featured on the website. His amazing power is that he can split, by which we mean his limbs fall off and then flail around. Hopefully, I imagine-- What? --beating up the criminal. I'm not kidding. He says "Split!" His arms, legs, and head fall off, and he screams, "Yow! I popped apart!" And with the word "Zam," he returns to normal, and he's flying into action. I don't even know why. That is one of the most disturbing things I've ever heard. This company had a number of characters who shared their names with pre-existing characters. They had a Plastic Man who appeared in this very issue, in fact, but he was nothing like the famous Plastic Man. Which was always an embarrassment to him. He'd be ordering online, or he'd-- Gets his mail all the time. Exactly. He'd make a reservation at a restaurant, and then he'd show up, and they're like, oh, we thought you were the other Plastic Man. And there's even a point where he hears people yell "Plastic Man" on the street, and he's long past the point where he's thinking, maybe they mean me. No. He knows they mean the guy in the red. I did bring all the Prezes with me. Prez? Prez. The first teen president of the United States. A rather earnest young man named Prez Rickard becomes-- and with a name like that, how could he not? He becomes the first teenage president of the United States. This is the issue right before he has to fight vampires, too, which was not a responsibility I was aware the president had. But apparently, it's rather important. Now, what is his superpower? Like, what kind of president does he make? Well, he kind of fits in that Doc Savage-Batman mold, where he's mostly a very well-trained human. He's taught by his-- I hate to say this-- his stalwart Indian companion how to develop the all-important Indian tracking skills. And thanks to his Indian companion Eagle Free's menagerie of animals, he learns several animal skills, helping teach Prez Rickard to be fast as an antelope, swing like a monkey, fight like a bear, I guess. You know, I've always thought that the United States presidency would be so much more effective if the president had the powers to communicate and control the animals. Well, if there's one thing that Prez proves, it's that there's nothing that the president couldn't solve with two fists, an Indian companion, and a small army of birds and elephants. If you were to explain to people the characteristics of a bad comic book superhero--? There are obviously a lot of ways you can screw up. One of the ways is to just overdo it and cram the elements of the character down the readers' throats. One of the characters was Bee-Man and everything about him was bees. His full name was Barry E. Eames. He was attacked by mutant bees which were sent to earth by space alien bee people. And he himself became a mutant bee person who had bee powers, and lived in a hive, and ate honey, and stole gold because gold looked like honey. And he could sting you. There was nothing bee-related this man refused to do. If you meet somebody at a bar, you start talking to him, and you realize, he only has one interest in life-- that's exactly what Bee-Man was. Everything would have gotten back to bees. You start talking about what you watched on television last. He'll say, you know, I saw an interesting show on bees. You know how there's certain stores, like in a neighborhood, and no matter what business moves in, they always fail? There's just one after another after another? Are there certain powers that when people try to give them to people, it's just inevitably a formula for failure? There's one power that never survives on its own, and they always end up enhancing it. And that would be shrinking. Now, why would that be? Because that conforms to the rule of, there's something intuitive about that that anybody can understand. You get small. There is something intuitive about that. But then you also realize that, all right, you're small. Now I can take you. And usually the power that they'll add is what kind of thing? Like, what kind of things will they add to the little guys? Well, usually the one they get is, you get to keep your full human strength. They like to give them something relating to being small. Ant-Man has the ability to control ants. And again, as I say it, I realize that's probably not much better. Well, I was going to say, like, yeah. He's as strong as a guy, and here are some ants. He would just invade the picnics of supervillains. Do certain comic superheroes come out of particular moments in the nation's history? Positively. That's another thing that really works against a character, is when they're tied in too tightly to a fad, or tied in too tightly to something that is identifying an era. There's a character created in the '70s, but who was supposed to be a retro character from the '50s, name of 3D-Man, to help hook up on the 3D movies that were a craze in the '50s. Terrible. Flat character. Nothing going on. And when you say 3D-Man, what was his power? He had a magical pair of glasses and had the strength of three men. And that's it. He was as strong as three people, as fast as three people, whatever that means. Probably three times faster than a human being. They always describe it as something as "so much as three men," but I don't see how he can be three times as-- or have "the agility of three men." There's just three guys who are agile. It doesn't make any sense. I have a little trouble with 3D-Man. Part of the problem with just naming off the superheroes or going through their powers is that, on the face value, there's not a superhero who doesn't seem silly, because you have to get to a point where the man's wearing a costume and he's driving around fighting crime. Then where does the line come where they rise above that? Do you have a theory on this, about what makes a good one and a bad one? I have sort of a half-formed theory. I know that one of the things that really helps a superpower get over with the audience, get over with the readers, is if it's something they can apply to their normal lives, perhaps by way of fantasy. And that's, I think, why super strength, super speed, invulnerability, or just general toughness are often so common. If you can get on the court with it, get that super accuracy, and get a slam dunk from midcourt, and really just school over somebody, then that's probably a superpower you want. But when you start getting into powers like one character who had magnetic eyes of superpower, which is a little too esoteric to even understand. Yeah. I don't even understand it. What does it mean? "Magnetic eyes of superpower"? Yeah. In his first appearance, he announced that he had magnetic eyes of superpower. They would illustrate little beams coming out of his eyes, making metal things shoot right at them, which would be terrible in a room full of forks. Jonathan Morris, who brought a few of his 15,000 comics into the studio. Search the internet for Gone and Forgotten and you'll find his site. Act Four, The Wonder Twins. You may have read or heard something of this story, how in a civil war in Burma, the Karen people's guerrilla army, God's Army, had these two twin boys with them starting when the boys were just nine years old, Johnny and Luther Htoo. Finally, they came out of the jungle, smoking cigars and looking much younger than their 12 or 13 years. But for a while, many people believed that they had superpowers. Jason Bleibtreu reported on them in Burma. He says there was actually a legend that preceded their appearance. The legend of the twins had to do with Burmese mythology. And the mythology was, when the Karen people, which are an ethnic minority, when things are really tough for them, twins would appear. The twins would have magical powers and they could save them from bad, from evil things. And what superpowers did people believe they had, Johnny and Luther? The twins at one time claimed, and also their followers claimed, that the twins were able to command ghost armies. Each twin had 200,000 to 300,000 soldiers that they could command. And when the fighting got tough, they could call on these ghosts and the ghosts would come to support them. Other mystical powers were things such as bullets would bounce off of them, or if they were struck by shrapnel from a landmine, it would bounce off of them. Jason, in the course of your reporting, did you meet people who claimed to have witnessed the twins using any of these powers? Oh yes. Certainly. I met several people, many people. They told the stories about, during meditation, the kids would be meditating with the twins, and all of a sudden, they'd open their eyes, and there would be an old man sitting there. And it would be the body of an old man, but inside it would be one of the twins. Another one was, they're going into battle. So one of the twins took his weapon, his M-16, pointed it to the ground, and he fired 20 rounds. Later that day, his troops came back and said, we killed 20 soldiers. He says, yes, we killed 20 soldiers because I fired 20 rounds into the ground. So I understand that, in the course of your reporting, you visited with the twins, is it twice? While they were still out fighting? Yes. I visited with God's Army several times. And when you would ask the twins directly, you know, do you have powers, let me see the powers, would they answer directly? Would they say, yes, I have these powers? Or would they talk around it, you know? They would talk around it, and I would push and push and push, and I would get answers like, yes, I have magical powers. But those powers only come out in desperate situations, like when we're in battle. I just can't bring up the magical powers just to show you. What was their affect? How would they respond? Were they embarrassed? What would they do? I'd push with questions, and then they would get irritated. They would get angry. Several times Luther lifted up a machete and would threaten me with it. I could hear him through the translator. I would get the translation. He would say stuff like, "This guy's bothering us, isn't he? Isn't he really bothering us now?" I don't think I like this guy." And so what were they like? Luther was quite shy, fidgety. He seemed to lack much attention and strived to get attention. Johnny is more confident and outgoing. Both of them were treated like kings. Both of them rarely walked on the ground. Most of the time, they were carried on someone's shoulders. It's interesting. So then, in their own little world, they were sort of superheroes. Oh, certainly. One of the kids would bark out, "I want to smoke," and they would run out and they would grab the cigarette and light it. He would want a lighter, they would run and grab a lighter. He'd want something to eat, they'd run off and get him something. He wanted to be lifted up, they would lift him up. He wanted down, they would put him down. They would bark out commands, and most of the commands would be adhered to. How do you think it affected them? Did you get a sense of that? Certainly Luther, he wanted attention. He was a boy who needed to hug. He was a boy who didn't have his mother around, didn't have his father around. There were no mother figures in the camp. They didn't want women there. And it just seemed like he wanted some affection. He would go from soldier's lap to soldier's lap, and he would just sit in the lap of the soldier. Or he would come up behind the soldier and he'd quickly put his hands around him and give him a little hug . At the point when they surrendered to Thai troops, they wrote a letter to their mom, and the letter said, "In Burma, we were very hungry, but now we have food. The Thai army is looking after us. It is a nice life here. We want to stay with you. We miss you, Mommy." Yeah. They didn't enjoy being in the mountains, on the run. It was a tough life. They weren't well-nourished. And yeah, they missed their mother and they missed their father. Do you think that the way the twins came to power in this group, that a part of them believed that they might have magical powers? It's very difficult to say. They believed that they were special. They were treated special. I don't think that Johnny or Luther believed that they had magical powers. I don't know. If I were young child, and I were told that there was this legend that I and my twin were going to come and that we would have these special powers, a part of me probably would believe, well, I don't have the power right now, but maybe, in some circumstances, I could. Yes, you have a point there. And it's quite possible. But I don't think that they believed that they ever did something magical. Nor do I think that they were psychotic. I think that they were part of a con. When you say a con, you mean a con by whom, perpetrated on whom? God's Army, this group of the Karens, were down and out. They needed some type of miracle. They needed people to believe them. I believe that they created Johnny and Luther, claiming that they were gods, so that they could con people into fighting for them and they could intimidate their enemies. It's interesting. First they try to win through politics, and then through arms, and then when arms fail, they have to go straight to myth. Yes, it's true. They were desperate. They don't have anything left. They don't have that many fighters. They don't have resources. They don't have many weapons. And it's a desperate act by a group of desperate people. Did it work for a while? Yes, it worked for a while. And then the Burmese forces were intimidated by them and scared of them, and believed this. So yes. And they gathered a lot of support amongst the people in the mountains. Jason Bleibtreu, speaking to us from Bangkok, Thailand. Our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself with Blue Chevigny, Jonathan Goldstein, and Starlee Kine. Senior producer Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Elizabeth Meister runs our website with production help from Todd Bachmann, Annie Baxter, and Jane Golombisky. Musical help today from Mr. John Connors. If you'd like to get a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. Look us up in the book or call 312-948-4680. Or you know you can get tapes from our website, where perhaps in an economically unsound decision, we also make it possible for you to listen to our programs for free at www.thisamericanlife.org. There you can also find, this week, a cartoon by Chris Ware, who I interviewed at the beginning of the program today, a cartoon about superheroes and their power over us. It's really just beautiful. Chris, by the way, is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who told me back when he hired me-- You have the ability to walk around work, show up at one point, and perhaps, like, go away for a little while, and turn invisible, and then come back and listen to what they say about you. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Father Jim Kastigar isn't exactly sure what he and his parish did to get on the bad side of town hall, but he's pretty certain that their meeting with the town president was the turning point. His parish is filled with Mexican-Americans, and they had some complaints about the way the local police were treating them. They presented these complaints to the town president at a big meeting in the church and it got pretty heated. The town president got mad at them. They got mad at her. There must have been 500 people there, and they booed. They actually booed the woman. In most towns, that would be the end of it. No big deal. Not in Cicero, Illinois. Next thing Father Kastigar knew, town hall refused to give the church permit to hold its annual Way of the Cross procession at Easter, a Mexican Catholic tradition they'd held peacefully for seven years. They fought. They got the permit. Then came the tamale dispute. The church youth group was going away on a retreat and they needed to raise some money to do it. So they stayed up all night making tamales in the home. And they were out in front of church, selling the tamales, asking for a donation for the youth group retreat. So I'm just, after mass, I'm still vested. Come out in front. As I was greeting people and standing on the front porch of church, a policeman comes up. Says, have to give you a ticket, Father. I said, what for? I was quite surprised, actually. And so the ticket read, "For running a business without a license." So I went to court with a lawyer, just a friend. The hearing officer said, "Well, you know, you're right. There's nothing in the ordinance that says this, you need a license. But they clearly meant it to be in the ordinances. But it isn't. So even though it's not there, you're guilty." Then the lawyer that was helping me asked if it would be necessary for a seven year old child selling lemonade on the street in Cicero to have a business license, and the answer was yes. The youth group didn't give up. They decided they wanted to get a business license to sell food, fair and square. This meant hepatitis shots and a TB scan and special training course on food sanitation. They did all that and applied for a license. Just one hour later, they say, an inspector showed up at the church and told them they couldn't get their license until they put in a third sink and some other improvements. Then there was the parking problem. The public school near the church had always left its lot open on Sunday morning for people to use when they went to mass. That is, until the city cut off access. The director of the school, the principal, told me there was an anonymous phone call saying that people were driving through too quickly, very quickly, in the school lot on a Sunday. And my room is right above this parking lot, and I'd never seen anybody drive quickly through it, so I thought that was kind of strange. There was another anonymous phone call which said that someone on Sunday morning and bumped into the fence, done damage to the school property. Well, even the principal himself told me, Father, I don't see any damage at all. But you know, can't do anything about it. We have to close the parking. So they closed the lots. They said the parking lot was not sound, structurally sound, for parking cars. Which seems kind of strange, since it's called a parking lot, and because the teachers park there every day. The garbage trucks, big, heavy garbage trucks go across. It certainly seems that the parking lot is fine. The city of Cicero insists that it is not targeting the church for political reasons. The timing of these incidents is a coincidence. That the town president, Betty Loren-Maltese, is a Catholic herself, and would never wage war via city inspectors. But longtime residents are skeptical of these kinds of explanations. Leo Satos moved to Cicero when he was a kid. I can put it to you simple. Hitler had the SS. Communists had the KGB. Cicero has the code enforcement. OK? Cicero is like the Twilight Zone. I mean, these are not things that our normal towns in Illinois-- you know, it's not the same in other communities. Ray Hanania was a newspaper reporter who went to work for the town as press secretary for three years. In other communities, when you get mad at the mayor, you have a dispute with them. You don't go home worrying about whether you're going to get sued, or whether someone's going to come pounding on your door and inspect your house. You have a disagreement. You move on. And even some people end up being friends. In Cicero it's like, you know, you cross the line, that's it. Cicero is just different. For most of the twentieth century, there were direct links between town hall and the mob. Most of the twentieth century, town hall didn't hesitate to strong-arm anybody. If city officials decided they didn't like you, you obeyed, you suffered, or you got out of town. And then finally Cicero row that into a fight that it had trouble winning. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Cicero, Illinois. The story of a town in a bubble and what happens when the bubble pops. And let's say before we go any further that Cicero is just over the border on Chicago's west side. And although officially it is called a suburb, what it actually looks like is just another West Side Chicago neighborhood. Working class families, brick bungalow houses. For decades, Cicero was this place that did not want outsiders moving in. That fought violently against blacks and other minorities coming from town. And then at some point, the outsiders came anyway. In a sense, this story today is a kind of worst case scenario. You have a town connected to the mob, notoriously racist. So what happens when the town starts to go through the kind of demographic changes that are happening everywhere else, all over America? What happens when people of other races start to show up in large numbers? Well, what happened in Cicero wasn't just that the town opposed it, kicking and screaming and fighting every step of the way. Though they did. It's a lot more complicated than that. Just a few weeks from now, the first week of April, 2001, the town will hold elections. The same Republican political machine that has run the town for decades faces a Hispanic challenger who the machine is likely to defeat, despite the fact that three-fourths of the town is now Hispanic. Today we explain how that is possible. Stay with us. I am joined in this very special edition of our program by Alex Kotlowitz, who will be co-hosting the hour. He is the author of the books There Are No Children Here and The Other Side of the River, and he's an occasional contributor to our program. Welcome, Alex. Hi, Ira. So Alex, our plan here is that sometimes we're going to do these stories together. Sometimes we're going to trade off between us. Why don't you take us into act one? Sounds good. Act One. Untouchables. To understand how Cicero handled an influx of Hispanic outsiders, you have to understand how the town traditionally dealt with conflict. And to understand that-- I know this might sound strange-- we have to talk about Al Capone. Al Capone moved to Cicero in 1924, when Chicago decided to crack down on the mob. In Cicero, he rigged elections with a combination of violence and kidnapping. He installed and controlled the town president. He owned the police force. He made Cicero into a safe haven for his businesses, which at the time employed hundreds of people. However the outside world might see Al Capone, people in Cicero remember him fondly. He was all right. We didn't kick him out of Cicero. Here's a lady I met after mass one Sunday at Father Kastigar's church. Sophia Bannick. He took care of the poor. I mean, he didn't keep all the money for himself. He'd give out the Thanksgiving baskets, food baskets and that, to the very poor families. And so he helped out a lot of families. Here's Christy Berkos, who once was a town lawyer in Cicero, and for a period the town president. I do remember Al Capone, way back when. I was probably five or six years old. He'd get in a little gangway right off of Cicero Avenue and Cermak, and all the kids would gather there, and he would throw change in the air, and all the kids would scramble for all the change. He did it quite often. You could be traveling in South America or Europe and people would do the international sign of Cicero. The fingers like machine guns. Rat-a-tat. That's right. Again, the town's former press officer, Ray Hanania. You know, this perception that I would encounter all the time in Cicero was, the mob did a good job of running the city. They cleaned the streets. And when the mob was in control, we got our garbage picked up, our taxes were low, crime was down. No, it was! It was, like, amazing. People would say this? People would actually say this? Yeah. I mean, all the time. And still do. The town's connection to the mob didn't stop with Al Capone. It continued straight through to the present day. In the '90s, the town of Cicero overpaid a mob-connected insurance company $4.5 million. And investigation is still ongoing. In fact, there's been a continuous string of investigations and indictments for decades. Five indictments this year alone, including a few town officials. In 1951, Cicero became notorious for something besides Al Capone when an African American family moved to town, a Chicago bus driver named Harvey Clark with his wife and kids. They kicked off a three day riot in which white mobs entered their apartment and destroyed it, pushing a piano through the wall. Police watched but did nothing. The governor had to call out the National Guard. There were other incidents as well. By the '60s, the town was known as the Selma of the north. Of course, lots of towns and neighborhoods in the '50s and '60s tried to keep blacks out, but in Cicero, they succeeded. Blacks were allowed in Cicero between six in the morning and six at night. Working hours. After that, you know, you're not welcome anymore. Leo Satos and his brother Victor remember how in the '60s, they and their buddies would be hanging around on the street and police would come by and then send them on little missions. Oh, sure, many times. I mean, we were just sitting around [UNINTELLIGIBLE] at the tractors, and there's two officers come and say, oh, listen, you guys. There's a black person over-- well, they didn't refer to them as black then. But they'd say, yeah, on 56th and Roosevelt. And it's after six o'clock. And our job was to physically escort them out of town. You know? With rocks, bricks, stones, whatever. You know? And if we didn't, well, we'd end up in jail for illegal gathering or whatever. Loitering. Yeah. And that'd be the end of story. Talking about the black people. We've always had them. Again, here's Sophia Bannick, one of the Catholic ladies I met after mass. Walking down 14th street. Remember, we had National Malibu. They all worked there. They used to go into our stores and ask the butcher to make them a ham sandwich or something. I have a friend who had a tavern. They used to go and have a drink and cash their checks there. And they walked up and down. We thought nothing of it. In fact, we'd even say hello and everything else. We were never taught to avoid them or shun them or something. Do you think it would have been different if they had moved on the block, though? Well that, yeah, I think so. Yeah. In the summer of 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Chicago after his successes in the south and he staged marches in Chicago neighborhoods, that weren't far from Cicero. But when he threatened to march in Cicero, county officials warned that it would be a "suicide mission." That was the phrase they used. As recently as the 1980s, a federally monitored effort to desegregate Cicero failed to lure black families to town. Around that time, a run-in between a police sergeant and one of the few African Americans who had moved to Cicero resulted in 1980s-era mandatory human relations training for the entire Cicero police force. Long-time civil rights activist Cal Williams helped organized the session. When we got there, most of the people who came in with blue T-shirts with the lettering "Cicero Police and Proud of It" across them. Except for the sergeant. And he had his own separate T-shirt. And it said, "Police Brutality-- The Fun Part of Police Work." And that was their message to us. So this was the environment the Mexican-Americans moved to when they arrived in Cicero starting in the 1970s. Hostile residents, hostile officials. And this is where our story really begins. Act Two. The Inevitable. It was economics that finally integrated Cicero, succeeding where protest marches failed. By the '70s and '80s, old Cicero was disintegrating on its own. Industries shutting down, grown kids moving away, the older generation dying off. Mexican-Americans wanted the houses and realtors needed someone to sell them to. After all the violence when blacks tried to move in, if you ask longtime residents why they felt Mexican-Americans were acceptable neighbors, they often just kind of shrug and reply, well, they weren't black. Having said that, for the first wave of newcomers, things could get pretty rough. This is Frank Aguilera, whose family moved here in the '70s. First thing they did to my house was burn my garage, killed my dog, and put a swastika on my doorway. Killed the dog? They poisoned him. And that was within how soon after-- In about a week after we moved to Cicero. About 25 years ago. Why did you decide to stay? Well, I was a child, so I had no choice. Why did your family decide to stay? Well, they liked Cicero. You know, they bought their first home. And it was the American dream, owning their own house. 1980. Just a fraction of the town was Hispanic. By 1990, it was a third of Cicero. In the 2000 census, Hispanic residents make up 77% of the town. Drive on Cermak Road and when you see today is a clean, prospering community whose businesses are mostly Mexican. Groceries and banquet halls and banks, with just a handful of aging storefronts that say things like "Dumpling Capital of USA." But as this population shift happened, the old guard that ran the town did everything possible to hold on, which included all sorts of things that no other town anywhere seemed to have ever tried. The person behind most of these efforts was the current president of Cicero, a woman named Betty Loren-Maltese. She's had such a visible profile in Cicero that most everyone there now simply refers to her as "Betty." Here's how she came to power. She was once married to a city official named Frank Maltese, 19 years her senior, who also apparently worked as a bookie for a mobster with the unhappy name Rocco Infelise. In 1990, Frank Maltese pled guilty to mob-related gambling charges. But he hadn't started to serve his time when the then-town president died. Frank Maltese was the heir apparent, but facing prison time, he had his wife appointed to the job. She had also been working in the city government. He died the same year she took office, in 1993, and she named the town's public safety building after him. We were unable to determine if it is the only government building in Illinois named after a convicted mobster. The white constituents of Cicero feared that having Mexican-Americans in town meant Hispanic gangs were coming to town. And in fact, in some neighborhoods, there some new gang activity. Betty Loren-Maltese put in place a series of ordinances that was so aggressive that in fact they were were found to violate the United States Constitution. First there was a measure to limit the number of people who could live in any one residence, apparently aimed at big Hispanic families. Then a measure that would seize the cars of suspected gang members and one that would evict gang members from town. The city start suing the parents of kids who were in gangs. Ray Hanania worked for Betty Loren-Maltese starting in 1993 and described the kind of debates that would surround these ordinances. One of the ideas we came up with was when you arrest a street gang member, put them to some public use. Make them sweep the streets. Make them clean windows. Make them scour the graffiti off the garage doors. It seemed like a great idea. And Betty just needed to take it one step further. She wanted to make them wear a pink apron. And the logic was good. I mean, when you think about the logic-- she wanted to embarrass. She knew that the power of street gangs wasn't just being a member. It was the peer pressure and intimidation. So put a pink apron on them and let your tough friends see you sweeping the curbs. It wasn't exactly a good idea, because I remember it went into the board meeting, and I know a lot of us argued against it. But again, you know, she has a way of prevailing over everything in Cicero. One of the candidates running against her brought a pink apron to town hall just before the election and said, yeah, I like the idea of the pink apron. Let's start with your husband, who is a street gang member, too. And just kind of the whole town board meeting just kind of erupted into pandemonium. Everybody yelling, and this pink apron being waved in the air, and Betty screaming at the guy, and the guy screaming at her, and you know, the police intervening-- it was just a mini 1968 Chicago Democratic riot. In putting together today's radio program, we tried a number of times to get an interview with Betty Loren-Maltese, but were always turned down by her spokesman, Dave Donohue. Generally as a rule, she just doesn't give interviews. Is she giving any interviews during the campaign? I mean, she's running for-- Not so far. We asked for a copy of her schedule. Maybe we could watch her at a fundraiser or meeting with the town committee. No, we were told. They don't give out her schedule because of threats on our life. Over the last four years, she's had so many different ordinances and civil lawsuits filed against gangs that they've become very angry, and they've taken it out on her in terms of threats against her and her family. When is the last time-- how often does that happen? I don't really talk to the police chief about it much. He takes it all in. And a lot of it has been turned over to the Attorney General and the State's Attorney, as well. So we checked with the Attorney General and State's Attorney and they told us in fact, no one's reported any threats on her life. Which brings us to the real reason she doesn't do interviews. She's got a 99% name ID rate in this town, and like a 70% approval rate. She doesn't really enjoy the media spotlight, and she doesn't need media attention to win her election. Under Betty Loren-Maltese, Cicero cops would stop Mexican-Americans for ordinary traffic violations and demand to see their green cards. Town hall ordered a bank that flew the Mexican flag to lower it. Police broke up a baptism party with tear gas. When David Niebur moved to town to run the police department in 1998, this is what he found. You know, officers were shaking down Hispanics on a regular basis. I learned within just the first couple of days that the quote unquote "Gang Unit" was arresting Hispanics, sometimes 25 to 30 people at a time, and their crime was standing on a corner. There was absolutely no probable cause whatsoever for the arrest of the Hispanics, other than they were Hispanic. Here's Niebur's story. It's a brief one, but that's only because his stay in Cicero was brief. He'd actually been brought in by Maltese to reform the police department, or at least that's what he'd been told. Then came his undoing. He found some evidence suggesting that the towing company that does the town's towing might be selling stolen cars. And he told the FBI. The company, Ram Recovery, also happens to be one of the largest contributors to the town president's campaign fund. Betty Loren-Maltese publicly called Niebur a "nitwit" and fired him after just four months on the job. The police department shipped Niebur his personal belongings. One item was a statue of a policeman holding the hand of a little boy. This was all in styrofoam, peanut-type thing wrapping. But the head of the police officer had been twisted off and laid nicely inside with the rest of it. When we asked Cicero spokesman Dave Donahue why Niebur was fired, he said it wasn't because he was cooperating with the FBI, but because he simply mishandled town documents. What David Niebur did, in a misguided attempt to either make himself look better or to ingratiate himself with federal officials, decided to turn over all the original towing records to them without making a copy. But in a case like that, wouldn't it be a simple matter just to get the Feds to make copies and send them back? It would've been. And the town attorney was going to do that. And he specifically told Niebur, I believe, well, just hold on. We're going to make a copy and then we're going to give it to him. And he, of his own volition, decided to turn over all the original records that could have been copied, and it caused a very serious problem at town administration. No, but I mean, once the town found out that he had turned over the originals, couldn't they just go to the Feds and say, you know, make us copies and send these back? It doesn't seem like that serious a thing. I don't know if they give you back records after they've gotten them. You know, I couldn't tell you that. The towing company, Ram Recovery, was never indicted and has denied any wrongdoing. When I meet with real estate agent Armando Gonzales he tells me a series of horror stories about how the town of Cicero seemed to target his real estate firm with all sorts of rules that they didn't apply to other realtors. Rules that cost him literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. this company went from being the largest real estate firm in town-- 48 sales agents in a huge office space-- to being run out of Cicero, nearly bankrupted. We did not know how to respond to the problem that we had. But agents were having problems with inspections, with us not being able to get compliance. In the room where out there was, we were in trouble with the town. So people didn't want to give us business anymore. When Armando Gonzalez to Cicero to court, a judge ruled that in fact he had been treated differently from other firms. So why did town hall single him out with such a punitive treatment? Gonzalez's lawyer suggested it was because he was Mexican-American, and, more than anybody, was building a new wave of low-cost homes for Mexican-Americans. Though town hall was hoping to slow the Hispanic migration to town this way, it doesn't seem like a very effective strategy. Perhaps he just wasn't doing business the Cicero way. On the witness stand, Gonzalez told the story of how he needed a certain town permit once and was set to meet with one of Betty Loren-Maltese's advisors who told him, he'd get the permit, but he should be sure to take care of Betty. He sent her flowers. Presumably this was not enough caring. Maltese's spokesman, by the way, denies that this happened, and the town is appealing the case. Whatever the truth is, Gonzalez's problems with the town, like David Niebur's, don't seem to be only about race. And this is part of what makes all this so complicated. At some point, it seems, town hall decided that it didn't matter what race ended up living in Cicero. What mattered is that they played by Cicero rules. Those rules, Gonzales says, are remarkably familiar for someone like him, who grew up in Mexico. This town that's made life so hard for Mexican-Americans, he says, actually runs a lot like the old one-party government in Mexico. I mean, it's like a government that shouldn't exist in this country. I don't know why these things keep happening in this town. It seems like somehow they are untouchable. They do whatever they want. The one difference between the sister of government and the old PRI party that ran Mexico, he says, is that in Mexico, after 70 years, people voted the old guard out. Why that hasn't happened in Cicero in a minute from our own PRI, Public Radio International, when our program continues. Moreno was well-connected. It looked like the first time an Hispanic candidate could win. So town officials introduced a referendum lengthening the residency requirement to run for president from a year to year and a half. This would have kept Moreno out of the race, and it so alarmed a federal judge that he knocked the referendum off the ballot, and then told the town that for the next five years, federal monitors would be sent to Cicero to watch over every election. Then on December 15 of last year, Moreno and his wife were coming home from a late night party in Chicago. He claims they were tailed by an unmarked Cicero police car, and as they entered Cicero, they spotted another cruiser parked with its lights off right on the border. We did both simultaneously say, they're going to stop us. They're waiting for us. I was given field sobriety tests, passed those tests. Four and a half hours later, I found I was charged with a DUI. I asked to take a breathalyzer. I was declined. Police officers indicated to me I "got to do what I was told to do." Quote. You know, they claimed that it was a random stop. I drive a black Navigator with MORENO plates. You could smell something foul in that whole incident. I mean, that incident baptized me into Cicero politics. This was a smear campaign. Moreno made it easy for opponents. Because of a previous DUI conviction, it's actually illegal for him to drive at night at all. As Betty Loren-Maltes's spokesman Dave Donahue happily points out. He said he was framed. But you cannot get framed for driving on a revoked license. Either you were driving on a revoked license or you weren't. And that's why, to this day, he still-- you ask him, were you driving that night? He says he won't answer. He refuses to say. And that's true. We asked him. Did I read, is this true, that you weren't supposed to be driving? That's assuming I was driving. That's one of the things we won't discuss because we want to keep them thinking. Just to be clear, under the terms of when you're allowed to drive, was it legal for you to drive at all after 7 PM that night? Assuming I was driving, absolutely not. Regardless, the Attorney General didn't see enough in the case to prosecute Moreno. And in February, the Maltese campaign tried another tactic which led the local news that night. Political rivals of Cook County Commissioner Joseph Mario Moreno first accused him of beating one of his ex-wives and failing to support their child. Citing 1974 divorce files in which a Diana Moreno claims a Joseph Moreno subjected her to repeated mental cruelty. We will no longer accept a fallen leader anymore. It is hurting our community. It will hurt our youth. And it will hurt everyone. Problem was, they had the wrong guy. As Moreno told reporters at his own press conference later that day-- They're greatly mistaken. That Joseph Moreno in that '74 divorce case is not me. In the hands of the right candidate, such a blatant and botched attempt at character assassination could be spun into political gold. But Moreno hasn't really capitalized on the opportunities handed him. What's more, Moreno is rather soft on specifics about what he'll do for Cicero. He means a lot more on the big general statements about how it's time to elect an Hispanic. When we asked him why he's campaigning for this job, here's what he said. Why am I doing it? I guess I'm the chosen one. I have no idea! It needs to be done. And I think Cicero is long overdue for this change. When they started saying, well, we need a change-- the change is too late. It's too late. The change has been in process. The change happened. Frank Aguilera works for Betty Loren-Maltese. And he says compared to when he first moved to Cicero, things have indefinitely improved. This is nothing. I mean, I was jumped many times 25 years ago. And the police looking at me while I'm getting jumped 25 years ago because I'm Mexican. We met Aguilera area back on primary night in February at Betty Loren-Maltese's primary victory party. Yellow balloons everywhere, a buffet of chicken and mashed potatoes. About a third of the room was Hispanic. At one of the tables were members of the Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce in Cicero. They told me that they debated for a long time who to support in this election, and that it was a close vote between them. But in the end, they decided on Betty. They like the idea of an Hispanic candidate, but they just felt Moreno wasn't up to the job. Luiso ?] [? Heller ?] owns a travel agency and is treasurer of the Chamber. He says sure, the police in Cicero could use some sensitivity training. Sure, some things at hand could still be improved. But he likes that Betty Loren-Maltese keeps a tight rein. He likes the clean streets and the crackdown on gangs. You know what? We knew that Cicero was tough, and that is the reason we moved here. When you talk to the Mexican-American homeowners, obviously they like the security that they feel with the current administration, with so many cops. They moved into a town looking for a better way of life, and obviously they moved in because they thought that Cicero, it's more secure than Chicago. You know? I mean I grew up in 26th street, and I know what that is. And I moved into Cicero, because I looked in the area, and it's-- sure, you know, the cops are tough. You know? But really, realistically, that is what I want. Betty Loren-Maltese's is campaign slogan is "She's Tough Because She Cares." It's actually this combination of toughness and caring that's new about her politics. At some point in her tenure, it must have become clear that she'd never stay in office if she only responded to the flood of Hispanics with hostile ordinances and punitive policing. To those old-school Cicero tactics, she's added the more modern approach of maintaining power by sharing it, or at least seeming to share it. And so today in Cicero, there's an odd mix of hostility and accommodation all happening at the same time. She's helped build five schools for the new Hispanic families in town. There are lots of Hispanic faces at town hall. Three of the four town trustees are all Hispanic. Maltese's assistant is Hispanic. And she just announced a minority set-aside program funneling public money to minority-owned businesses. And before she takes the stage at her own victory party, there's this. Town trustee Ramiro Gonzales gives a speech. He thanks the campaign workers, threatens gangs who supposedly disrupted voting, and concludes with this. [SPEAKING SPANISH] Betty! Gracias. People yell "Betty" and "Viva." And then there she is. We finally see her in person. Betty Loren-Maltese, looking a bit like Elizabeth Taylor during the John Warner years. Middle aged woman in black pantsuit, heavy black mascara, long eyelashes, a crown of teased, swept-up air. Given the ham-handedness of her attacks on Moreno, she handles the crowd and the press-- there are a half dozen TV cameras present-- like a seasoned political pro. She has a certain charisma. Incredibly, one of the first things she does is actually thank the federal monitors who came to town to keep an eye on her. I want to thank the outside agencies, especially the federal monitors who came in. Because I know it was a tedious task for them, and I'm sure they did not want to be here. And I hope they continue to remain with us, because I think they'll see that the problem is not with the Republicans, but-- Not long after, she reads the day's lopsided voting results to her fellow Republicans. Republican ballots cast were 7,499. Democrats were 3,798. Well, come on. I mean, it is a democracy! In the end, twice as many people voted for Maltese in this primary as for all the other candidates in both parties combined. The measure of what a long shot this race is for Moreno will be her Democratic opponent in the general election in April. Well, if the media wants to leave, we can party. And I'll tell you again, I was never afraid against Mario running. I was afraid of him driving. Moreno's only chance is if he could bring thousands of new voters out to the polls, something no one in Cicero has ever done. Meanwhile, Betty Loren-Maltese has amassed a million dollars to spend on the campaign. A huge amount. A crazy amount by any standards for an election in a town that you can drive from end to end in just ten minutes. Thank you. And viva Cicero! Act Four. They Say Our Love is Here to Stay. A town like Cicero, what it produces is insiders and outsiders. And just as some people can become addicted to being on the inside of a system, you can get addicted to the rush of trying to bring the system down. This next story is the story of somebody who got stuck doing that, inadvertently, for a long, long time. Then he tried to get away, but that turned out not to be so easy. Alex tells the whole story. A warning to our listeners that there is a possibly questionable word hidden somewhere in this story. This past October, Dave Boyle and his wife Nadine moved back to Cicero after being away for 10 years. "I have unfinished business," he told me. Let me first, though, fill you in on Dave's first tenure in Cicero. He moved here in 1983 and accidentally stumbled into town politics. Early one morning on his way to a contracting job, Dave drove past Mr. C's, a bikers' bar on the corner. Some guys were standing around outside drinking, and there on the sidewalk lay a biker who had been stabbed to death. It was shocking. Dave wanted the bar shut down. So he went to see the town's deputy liquor commissioner, who was also a police officer. He was told to back off. Many of the taverns were connected to the mob. And he told me that not only is there nothing I can do about it, but if I did anything about it, not only would they kill you, Boyle, but they might kill me. And that's not going to happen. So you just go away. And even say it that nice. So you go to this assistant liquor commissioner, and tells you, if it were me, I probably would say, OK, fine. [INAUDIBLE] or else I'm gone. I just thought-- well, basically, I thought [BLEEP] you. You're not going to-- I'm Dave Boyle. I walk upright and I ask the police officer to the right thing. And he told me, the mob won't let you do it. And I thought, what kind of pussy are you? A word here about Dave Boyle. He's a Vietnam vet and is built like a rugby player. Under different circumstances, Dave might have been a barroom brawler. He's loud, curses lots, likes to brag about what a good fighter he is. In short, the perfect person to take on Cicero. In fact, it's hard to imagine any other kind of person being willing to take on the town. At the time, Cicero still had a whole thriving district full of strip joints and prostitutes and bars that stayed open until 6 AM. Dave fought to get Mr. C's shut down, and then went to the police department, and in his typically belligerent way, ordered them to close down five other bars. 12 hours later, my garage blew up with my cars and all my tools. You say that it blew up. Yeah. They blew it up. You mean it caught fire? Yeah. Caught fire. That's what it did. Yeah. It caught fire. It was just a fire. It was a coincidence. It took about 10 minutes to burn the whole thing to the ground, cars and all. As you've probably observed about Cicero by this point, it doesn't like to be told what to do. Especially by outsiders. So you can imagine then how angry the town leaders were when Dave and his wife collected enough signatures for a referendum to shut the bars at 2 AM. Then the referendum passed by three to one margin. But nothing happened. The then-town president ignored the vote, which transformed Dave into a kind of minor celebrity, with stories about him in the newspapers and on TV. He was talking with the FBI. So what might otherwise have been a fairly small matter, the time bars should close, suddenly became quite big. Dave and Nadine soon found a dead snake slung over their front porch railing, and the police harassed Dave, arresting him or threatening to arrest him, some 11 times. It all took over their lives. And it all got to Nadine. I didn't talk to my friends anymore because I felt so weird. I felt different than they did. They were having babies and, you know, decorating their houses with Laura Ashley things, and building a-- [INAUDIBLE] burglar bars. Yeah, cleaning up burglar bars and cleaning up ashes from the garage. It was a completely different life, and the only people who seemed to understand us were reporters, and people from the crime commission and the FBI. And other people from Cicero. Here's how far it went. Dave made not one, but two bids for local office. But his bluntness and go-it-alone style didn't exactly win him votes. At one point, he posted a sign in the town president's office saying "Future Office of Dave Boyle." He lost both elections. After seven years of fighting town hall, Dave and Nadine decided it was time to go. Friends felt they were run out of town. And though Dave says it wasn't the case, it was. They were beaten down, drained, both emotionally and financially. And Nadine, quite frankly, just wanted to get the hell out of there. So they moved to Houston, Texas in 1990. Fast forward 10 years later. Dave's now a lawyer. He suggests to Nadine that hey, maybe they move back. Nadine balks. So Dave promises Nadine, look. I won't get so involved this time around. They buy a brick bungalow this past October and Dave soon wanders into town hall and sees some old faces. I was at the town hall. I can't remember the exact date, but I was at the legal department a month, month and a half ago. And I was handing some papers in. And I look to my right, and there I see Tony Accardo. And he looked at me like he'd just seen a ghost. And I said, Mr. Accardo, good morning. And I approached him. I went to shake his hand. And he was the head of the buildings--? He was the head of the building department. And many of those guys have fallen on hard times here recently. He made the sign of the cross in front of me. You're back! Oh my god! And he made a quick side of the cross. He says, thank god I'm retired. You can't get to me. Dave notices changes in the town. The strip joints are gone. The bars finally close at 2 AM. Lots of people everywhere speaking Spanish, which he likes. But the town, he learns, is still up to its old tricks. When he and Nadine settled on their house, they were asked to sign a document which would give the town the right to search their home for housing code violations any time it wanted. They do that every Mexican that buys a house in this town. And well, just look around who's buying a house in this town. They're Mexican people. They don't read English. They got three earners to pay off one mortgage, and they're all going to live in a house. And they're all signing these affidavits that give the police, anybody from town hall, the right to enter their house without notice and without a warrant. Dave insisted the town change the wording of this document, which they did that same day. And that got the ball rolling. Soon he got involved in the upcoming elections, working for a candidate who's opposing Betty Loren-Maltese. For Nadine, as you might imagine, it all began to feel familiar. He said it's going to be different this time. I'm a lawyer. None of those same things are going to happen. Don't worry. I won't get involved in politics. I won't run for office, and I certainly won't use our money to do it. And-- I haven't used any of our money! Except what I gave away. So I caved. I did. Well, you've been back now for three months. Has he kept his word? Since October. About not getting--? About not getting back involved. He hasn't quite kept-- He's a lying mother [BLEEP], isn't he? I told him once, when he was starting to get involved with this recent campaign, I said, Dave, I see you going down that whirlpool. It's taking you down again. And he actually pulled back a little bit. He did. Not much, but he did. I asked Dave what his next move is. "I'm going to build an attached garage," he tells me. "No, how about in terms of the town?" I ask. He smiles and says, "That's part of it. I have to apply for a permit," he says. That's his plan. Say bad things about the town president in public and then apply for a permit. These days one of the most interesting things about Cicero, despite everything we've told you this hour, about town hall antagonizing its own citizens, is this. If you actually walk the neighborhoods and talk to people about how they're getting along with their neighbors, most people seem to be getting along just fine. You hear lots of stories of older white residents who were wary at first, but then warmed up. There's still rough moments, but things seem way more civil, way more friendly than you would expect, given the town's history. Alex put together this story about three neighbors. Here's another way to measure the changes in Cicero. We met a woman named Loretta Rivera who moved to town back in the mid-'80s. She found it to be so hostile to Hispanics that she and her family moved out. Five years later, after more Hispanics had settled in Cicero, she tried again. This time it was easier. Loretta told me about two of her neighbors, Annie and Nancy. Both of them white, both of them longtime Cicero residents. She considered one of them to be very accepting, and one not accepting it all. But the reality may be more complicated than that. Here's Loretta with one of the women, Annie Ryder, in Annie's kitchen. They're close friends, even though Loretta, now a a second grade teacher, is 40, and Annie, a widow, is 74. Loretta is explaining to Annie what it was like the first time she and her husband Conrado moved to Cicero. I told you about when we used to rent on 53rd Court, the Polish guy that almost got into a fight with Conrado. His big problem was that we were parking in front of his house. No, you never told me. I never told you that? It was Christmas Eve and he was a little tipsy. And he came out screaming at us, telling us, you know, you should go back to your country, why the hell are you here? You shouldn't park in front of my yard. I pay taxes. You don't pay anything. And I remember Conrado, because being so angry-- I mean, I had to literally grab him, because he was going to hit the guy. And I remember Conrado, out of frustration-- he didn't even know what he said. His English was very broken. And I remember him telling him, you Poland, go back to Polish, or something. He said, you even said it wrong! You don't say it that way. And he also, again, blamed us, you know. That that's why Cicero was in such a bad rut, because ever since Mexicans started moving here, we were ruining the town, and blah blah blah. This town has been ruined so many times! It's like oh, forget it. We usually talk about how the newcomers assimilate to their new environment. But as I listen to Annie and Loretta, I was struck by how it was Annie who assimilated to the newcomers. Did she tell you we used to walk every morning at 6 o'clock in the morning? 5:30. There were [UNINTELLIGIBLE] 5:30. Did you learn any Spanish? Yo no se. She learns it and then she forgets it. I remember when we first started walking, remember, we made a deal? Every week I was going to teach you a new word. And then the next day I would ask her and she would go, huh? Ah, forget it! And then we would come and have coffee. Of the 12 homes on Annie's and Loretta's street, seven are owned by Hispanics, five by whites. It wasn't that the white homeowners who stayed were necessarily more tolerant than those who left. But some of the older folks have lived here all their lives and just didn't want to go, despite frequent appeals from realtors. I remember getting something in the mail. Something about, if you're not comfortable where you live, if you fear for your safety, call this number. We'll sell your house. Oh, I called up that time. I called up the realtor. It was blockbusting. And you called the realtor? And what did you tell him? I yelled. I said, you're doing the same thing as the blockbusters that did it on the West Side. Exactly the same thing. That stuff really-- to my mind, it's goofiness. You know, it's just somebody's out to make a buck, is what it is. When I first met Loretta, and I asked her about her Anglo neighbors, she volunteered a story that happened when she first moved in 12 years ago that clearly still bothers her. And it involves the other older white woman on the block, Nancy Chauvlin. Nancy is 70 and has lived in Cicero her entire life. Nancy has actually been friends with Annie since she was 18. In fact, Nancy found Annie her house. Loretta remembers Nancy making comments to the effect that the quality of life in Cicero had declined since Mexican-Americans moved in, that there was more of a gang problem. And she would look at me like if it was my fault. And I would tell her, Nancy, we're not all the same. Just like in every race, there's good apples and bad apples. Do you see my kids in gangs? You know? But I don't think I ever really-- how can I put it-- made her understand. So I went to visit Nancy, whose home is just three doors down from Loretta's. And I was kind of surprised by what I found. I'm perfectly content here. And I have to say this. We see a lot more flowers getting planned around here than what we do with the old timers. We [? see, too, ?] they're planting gardens and fixing houses up. And a lot of the homes were let go by the older people. They weren't caused by the Hispanics moving in and destroying them. They were already unkempt buildings, and now the Hispanic people have come in, and many of them are really trying to fix things up. It turns out that Nancy helped Dave Boyle close down Mr. C's, the bikers' bar, going door-to-door with petitions, and she raised $600 from neighbors to rebuild Boyle's charred garage. For Nancy, like Annie, this was her home, and so it never occurred to her to move. Have you learned Spanish at all? I took one course of Conversational Spanish at Morton College. Went back for the second course, they didn't have enough students, so they didn't have the course. I used to go in one little store over here when I was taking the course. And a greeting in Spanish is "Hola!" Like "hello." Every day I'd go in the store, and before I walked in I thought, I got this right this time. And I go in and I go, "Halo!" And they just cracked up. No, that's wrong. It's like, here she comes again, you know? Have you acquired a taste for Mexican food at all? Oh yeah, sure. I make my family stuff. My son-in-law is Mexican. I couldn't ask for a better son-in-law. And his family's wonderful. Do you speak any Spanish with him? No, and he doesn't. And I told him, when the kids were little, I said Al, teach your kids Spanish! But he didn't want to do that. Can I be real straight with you for a moment? It was curious to me, but I talked to Loretta-- Finally I got up the courage to tell Nancy that Loretta thought she had some hostility towards Hispanics. I don't know why she'd even think that. The only thing I can think of is they have a dog, a chow dog, and when he was a puppy, they used to let him run wild all the time, and my daughter picked up twice, he almost got hit by a car. We heard the car screech, and there was Jenny picking the dog up. And she yelled at Loretta. And she said, keep the dog in! He's going to die. Because we had a chow and we loved it. But that's only incident I can think of. Nancy doesn't recall making the kinds of remarks that Loretta complained about, though she does remember telling Loretta that there was a gang problem, and a lot of the Hispanic people don't keep tabs on their children. This is where we get into the area where she and Loretta may never see eye-to-eye. Nancy doesn't see statements like these as offensive. She just thought they were statements of fact. Before the gang kids weren't here, now they were. And there were young kids hanging on the street corners late at night. From Loretta's point of view, it was clearly offensive. Though it's not as if Loretta is angry at Nancy. Wary is more like it. And maybe, they both said to me, when the weather warms, and they're hanging out in the backyard, they'll have a chance to talk. Or maybe they'll run into each other at Mary Queen of Heaven, the church on the corner. And this is Virginia Diaz-- Which brings me back to Annie. One Sunday I attended Mary Queen of Heaven with her. We walked form the sacristy to the choir loft-- but not very far, but a 20 minute journey with Annie, who stops to say hello to everyone in our path. This is Armando Herrera, and he can't sing-- The best good-looking guy-- You can't sing. Well, you don't want me to, that's why. There's something remarkably easy about Annie, and it's what I think, in the end, so drew Loretta to her. Annie has for 30 years been a musical director at the church. The organ is located in the balcony, at the rear of the church. And from there, Annie, perched on a wooden piano bench, has watched this row change. On Sunday, she plays organ for the English mass at 8:30, and then for the Spanish mass that starts right after. Annie, can you understand the sermon? I can get the gist of it. Want to know what the gist of it is? The basic gist of it is, I give you a new commandment. Love one another as I have loved you. That's the basis. This church's congregation once was all white. On the morning I was there, at the English mass, there were maybe 150 worshippers spread out in the pews, all, as Annie joked, over the age of 90. At the Spanish mass, the pews filled with a thousand people, mostly families. Some couldn't find seats, and so stood along the walls of the church. Over the years, Annie has learned the Spanish hymns. The changes in Cicero, as Annie will tell you, haven't made the town better or worse. They just are what they are. Annie now has her hair done by a Mexican-American, because quite simply, it's the closest hair salon. It's just around the corner. The last time I saw her, she was talking about going to the traditional Quinceanera celebration for Loretta's younger daughter. It's being held at a place in Cicero called the European-American Hall. Some things change more slowly than others. Well, our program was produced today but Blue Chevigny, Alex Kotlowitz, and me, with Alex Blumberg, Jonathan Goldstein, and Starlee Kine. Senior producer Julie Snyder. Production help form Todd Bachmann and Annie Baxter. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, you know, who used to visit Cicero and say things like, You won't be sorry for letting me in, Mr. Vettori. I'll shoot square with you. I'll do anything you say. I ain't afraid of nothing. No, he isn't. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio international.
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You know, if you think about it, the idea of April Fools' Day is just absurd, a day set aside in which we're allowed, basically, to admit that it's fun to deceive each other. This notion, this idea, is so profoundly disturbing that we have to quarantine it into its own day on April 1. But April Fools' Day is for amateurs. The biggest liars, the most disturbing liars are the people who lose their grip on what the truth is and cannot even tell they're lying. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, with April Fools' Day approaching, an hour of stories about deceptions perpetrated by compulsive liars. Portions of these stories have aired on NPR'S Morning Edition years ago. They get replayed here on Chicago's public radio station every April 1. Our contributing editor Margy Rochlin and I produced them. Margy narrates. I've been talking to a lot of people about liars lately. Here are two things I've noticed. One is that everyone has a story about some nut in their past, not just a liar but a compulsive liar, somebody who told so many incredible stories about themselves that eventually people came to wonder if the liar even knew what was real. The other thing I noticed is how vividly people remember these stories. Maybe it's because something so basic was violated by the lies, some basic trust. They remember the details because they're still trying to sort it out. He had the most unbelievable eyes. He didn't have an affect that hinted at the desire for me to believe it. They were like this blue-gray, but they changed color. He had an affect that said, I believe this. You could never tell he was lying by his eyes. He was so sincere. She had shark-like eyes. He is a very charming person, and I think a lot of compulsive liars are charming people. Sharp teeth. I mean, I think that he believed everything he told you. He passionately, firmly believed. When she laughed, her eyes didn't laugh. Her whole face laughed, and she made the sounds of laughing. But she herself didn't laugh. Sometimes you know you're being lied to, but at first, you don't take it that seriously. You rationalize to yourself that everyone has their eccentricities. Maybe this is a temporary condition. Maybe they're just troubled. Maybe you can help them. People kept saying to me, this guy's this. This guy's that. This guy's this. Can't you see that? And I was so busy protecting him that I said, OK, I'll show you what a good guy this is. I'll marry him. We went out, and we were together for a couple of years before we got married. And he would tell me these things, and things just kept not adding up. One of the instances that I can think of is that one day, my ex-husband came over. And he was crying, and he said that he was really upset. And he told me that his mother had died. And I gave him tea and sympathy for weeks. We didn't even really leave the house. Then he moved in with me, and we started getting letters from where I knew his mother lived with his mother's initials on it. And he said, well, my mother had nine brothers and sisters, and this is coming from my aunt. And my aunt has exactly the same initials that my mother had. And one day, I just opened one of those letters. And I read it. It was like, "Dear son." And it didn't say, "Dear son, I'm writing to you from my grave." "Dear son, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Love, Mom." Hmm, this is interesting. What about these letters? "Well, these letters were written to me before she died." "Oh! She postmarked them from purgatory, wherever she is." Oh, boy. He would get these boxes from somebody back east. And he said, this is somebody who was very close to me. But then getting nosier, nosier, nosier, I found a letter from her, because you can't hide everything. And here was this woman who said that in fact she was his wife. And how was he doing, and she was worried about him, and when was he going to come see her. And then he disappeared. Then he showed up again. And he said that he had been involved with the mob and that he had to get out of it, and he really wanted to clean up his act. And I knew that he wasn't smart enough to be involved with them. But in fact, where did he go? And I wouldn't hear from him, and I wouldn't hear from him. I was becoming more and more worried and more and more concerned. And I felt like he had somehow been victimized and that was what was making him tell these lies. And he showed up with nothing. A few weeks later, he got a box from the woman in Maine. And there were some of the clothes that he had left with. Hmm, this is interesting. You tell me you're in Chicago trying to get out of being with the mob, and they have you locked in a room. Well, he said that this woman was like a mafia princess. [LAUGHS] Which I really thought was perfect. Married to the mob. Real life. And that she would go to Maine to buy clothes, and her father was wealthy. I don't know. The story was so cockamamie. And I thought, if you're a mafia princess, why would you want to buy your clothes at L.L. Bean? The one thing that I did not feel that he lied about is that he worshipped the ground that I walked on. And he would say, I think you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. And whether that was a lie or not, that was the kinds of lies you want to hear. When I figured out that he had had who knows how many other lives, complete lives, one of the things that I realized is that he would create a person, and if that person didn't work, that he would just leave that person, leave that body, leave that location that he was living in, move to a new place, start with a new person, and build a whole new life and say, hmm, maybe this person will work, maybe people will like this person, maybe I'll like this person. Sometimes you want so much to believe somebody, even if you know that they're a liar, that you try to keep from putting them in a position where they're going to lie. So you don't ask them anything. Then the only reason to ask a question is because it becomes like a comedy routine. It's like, what kind of story will I hear if I throw this question out? And sometimes when I would be in a sick mood, I would do that kind of stuff, just to hear, hmm, I need a little story. When our second baby was born, he couldn't handle it, and he got into drugs. And I would say to him, the only way we can work on it is for you to admit to me and not lie to me and tell me, I have a problem. And he would say, I don't. And I'd say, you do, and you're lying, and tell me the truth or leave. I think that what I noticed the most from the hour that he left was that I just kept sighing. I would just go [SIGHS] I couldn't talk to anybody without sighing. I was just so relieved. People would say to me, well, you know, he's wrapped up in drugs, and he's not thinking straight. Do you think that he might come and hurt you? And I thought, maybe he's taking on yet another life. And he's gone through too many lives, and he is going to, in fact, come and kill me and kill the kids and disappear. And that was the only time I thought, suddenly all these lies, it's scary. I felt a lot of fear, and I didn't sleep. I didn't sleep, and I had bars put on all my windows and all my doors. It wasn't funny. It wasn't something I could deal with. And it wasn't something I ever wanted to deal with again. One of the things that is very important in all of this, and why I sound calm, is that I really didn't love him. I wasn't in love with him. So that was my own lie. So I was lying too. I was saying, yes, I love you. Yes, I know it doesn't seem like it, but, yes, I love you. It would come out of mouth because you don't want to say to somebody, no, I don't love you, but I want to stay married. And so it was my own lie too. In that self-deception, in thinking that I could make this work, that was the biggest lie of all. And it isn't other people's lies that they're going to tell me in my life. What I just have to constantly keep working on is not lying to myself, not deceiving myself. And it's difficult. It's really hard. Psychiatry, we're told, is a science. And given the fact that lying is so common, you'd imagine that someone had thoroughly disassembled this personality disorder, figured out why some people's reasonable truth mechanism gets jammed between gears. So we called up these two experts to find out what they knew, psychologist Paul Ekman, a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, and Brian King, a psychiatrist at the UCLA School of Medicine. Dr. King has surveyed the published psychiatric material online, and here's what he says. It's quite remarkable. There's been relatively little attention devoted to it. If you look at the world literature over the past 100 years, you come up with maybe 70, 80 cases. There's been very little research on compulsive liars because they don't come into your office. They don't seek help, and they're not interested in cooperating in research. And there's nothing in it for them. And as for the scientific research that has been done, the results are pretty disturbing. For instance, studies have shown that most people cannot tell when they're being lied to. That's true even of people who are specially trained to detect liars. Then there are the case studies. It's hard to offer a great deal of hope to anyone who's intimately involved with a compulsive liar, because there's very little reason to believe that they're going to change. Some people have written that lying is something that is very difficult to treat, that in order to have a treatment response, you have to have someone who is able to live with the truth that therapy is based on the ability to tolerate and explore the truth. I would categorize myself as a liar. Even in the safe confines of a therapist's office, you're still tempted to lie. In fact, you guys here have no idea whether or not I'm making this up or not. No one can be exactly certain as to why some people become compulsive liars, but the two motives that are most likely are the power motive, the compulsive liar who lies because they want to control you. You see this in early adolescence, where kids will lie solely for the reason of demonstrating that they can beat the old man, that they can put one over on their parents. Well, some people never grow out of that. It becomes a game. In one particular store, they refused to give me a cash exchange for a particular piece of merchandise. I told them I was joining the Marines in the next couple weeks and being shipped off to Saudi Arabia. That was an instance where I thought, well, this would be kind of funny. Maybe there is a little bit of a charge that comes with the successful telling of a lie, the rush of duping someone else, particularly someone who is perceived to be more powerful than you are. Probably more common than that is the compulsive liar who's like the name-dropper, but the name-dropper taken to the nth degree. One day I heard him telling somebody his father was the CEO to Ford Motor Company. They are trying to impress you. Sharky started telling me all these things, how she had this uncle, and the uncle was the president of 20th Century Fox and that she had worked there as a film editor. They get our attention. They get our interest. They get our admiration. And in a sense, you might think of them as being addicted to that type of admiration. For some reason, I seem to really seek approval from people, especially women. And generally, people will believe what they hear. And once I get that approval, whether it be, yeah, let's go to bed, let's have a relationship, let's have a drink, or just a smile, that was enough. That was my fix. Again, like an addiction to anything, be it alcohol, be it gambling, whatever, the drive is that the next time I engage in this behavior is going to be the one that's fulfilling. You really feel almost like you're protecting yourself, because if this person knew what I was really like and what my real desires were, they would be running like hell. When you look at the histories of these people, very often they come from childhoods where they were traumatized from situations where you would expect a young child to develop a sense that they didn't matter, that there was something wrong with them. And some compulsive lying may reflect attempts to rewrite history. If I can get this person to believe that I do have wealthy relatives and that I was pampered as a child and so on, maybe I can get myself to believe it too. Take this story. Most of it unfolds in one of those dorm rooms that's claustrophobically dinky, 10 feet by 12 feet, only enough space for two identical single beds, two identical desks, two identical dressers, one narrow window which doesn't open very far. It's the kind of room where interior decorating means a poster-sized blow-up of a New Yorker cartoon. And the walls, they came that way-- green, lime green. And in this room at a small college in Nebraska live two guys who are just getting used to a new social hierarchy. They're in a world where it's possible to live with someone you're not that close to. I never considered him my friend, really. He was my roommate. He'd grown up in this little, tiny, tiny town in Nebraska. As it will become clear later, he had lied to me in telling me that he didn't actually grow up there. He'd grown up off in Boston, exotic, distant Boston. It was when he started talking about Boston that things really started getting strange. And the story was something like this, that his father was an executive for a company that made satellites. He never told me the name of the company. It was an important international corporation in Boston. And they lived in Boston, just down the street from the Kennedy estate. And as a child, he used to play with the Kennedy children. He told me that the first time he met them, it was by sneaking into the Kennedy estate through the hedge. He snuck in and found the kids in the backyard and got to know them. I don't really remember the names, but he knew all the names. And he would describe their personalities to me. His best friend in the group was one of Robert Kennedy's sons. Eventually, about the time he was in high school, his father found out that he had a serious heart condition, and he couldn't work anymore. He had to quit. And not only did he have to quit, but he had to get away from this fast lane, high society lifestyle. So his father had decided to move the family back to the small town in Nebraska where he had grown up. So that was how he explained why he was in this small town, because on weekends, he would often go home to this small town to visit his parents. He often used to tell me that he would go to Boston on weekends in his father's private plane. He told me that he was being supported by the Kennedys, that the Kennedys were paying for him to go to college. And I asked him the first question that I think would occur to anybody at this moment-- Ted Kennedy was the one who was paying for him to go to college. I said, if Ted Kennedy is paying for you to go to school, why are you in Nebraska? Why aren't you going to Harvard or Yale or someplace? And he said, well, I have to stay close to my father, because my father is so ill. That made sense. Although I could have said something like, well, couldn't your dad just send the private plane to get you at Yale or Harvard? I basically believed it, or at least never really thought it was worth my while to doubt it. And it went on that way for about five months, until one Sunday night, he came back. He'd been away all weekend. And he was acting sort of funny, kind of sheepish, but yet grinning a lot, as if he had a secret. I could tell from his behavior that it was the kind of secret that he wanted me to ask him about. So finally I said, what's going on? Why are you acting so funny? And he sort of grinned and laughed a little. He said, I did something really silly this weekend. I said, oh, what did you do? I felt like I was playing along. I really, by this point, had serious doubts about anything he said. And he said, I swiped my father's plane. I said, oh, really? You just took it, huh? He said, yeah, I took it, and I just went for a ride. And I said, really? Where did you go? He said, I went to Boston. I said, why did you have to go to Boston without your dad knowing about it since you go there all the time? He said, well, it was a surprise because it was Rose's 92nd birthday party, and I really wanted to go. And my father didn't want me to go. And then it was a few weeks after that that I ran into, one day on campus, a woman who was a mutual friend of ours. There wasn't a romance between them, but she sort of wanted there to be one. And she said, well, I went home last weekend to the small town that she was from. And in the public library, she just happened to come across city directories for every small town in Nebraska. In these city directories for these small towns, they list who you are, where you live, what your occupation is, all the information you'd want to know about this small town. And so she pulled down the city directory off the shelf from the town that he was from and looked up his name and his family's name. And it said that his father was an electrician's assistant, not a retired executive, not someone who worked for this big satellite company, but an electrician's assistant. And at that moment, the lie seemed very sad. I sort of felt like if I had confronted him, something terrible would have happened. He really just would have exploded, that he would have broke down, because someone would have kicked a big hole in this wall that he was trying to erect between himself and the truth. I was kind of scared, to tell you the truth, because once you learn that someone is capable of just completely deceiving you about who they are, where they're from, what their family is like, then you never know what's going to happen, because I found this out sometime before the end of the school year, so I had to live with this man. I had to sleep with this man in a small university dormitory room where my narrow single bed was about three feet away from his narrow single bed. And here was a man who would look at me with his eyes just glowing, with this very earnest, sort of frantically earnest look in his eyes, telling me about his father's job and how important it had been. I think he believed it. I think he really thought that he had done these things. You have to consider the fact that he was an only child. And have you ever been to a really small town? If you've ever been to a really small town and you're a different kind of kid-- it doesn't really matter in what way you're different. But there's a good possibility that while you're growing up, you might look around you and not see anybody your own age with whom you feel you have anything in common. He might have grown up feeling really lonely. And so how did he respond? He created this fantasy where he wasn't just friends with one kid, he made it sound like-- he would talk about going swimming in their pool where there would be a dozen of them running around. You can imagine them playing soccer on the lawn together. And there was this whole little community. You could definitely see the desire behind it. I guess I could see it because-- although the town that I was from was nowhere near as small as the town that he was from-- I grew up in an environment where I looked around me as a kid and just never really felt like there was anybody with whom I had much in common. At that time, I had never been to Boston either. And I went through a real Kennedy phase like a lot of kids do. I had a picture of John F. Kennedy on my wall, and the first biography that I ever read was a biography of John F. Kennedy. I even read Profiles in Courage. I'm asking each of you to be pioneers towards that new frontier. My call is to the young in heart-- If you're trying to embroider a life, a life in America, what myth are you going to try to hook yourself onto? Who are you going to pick on? It seems to me like the Kennedys might be most people's first choice of a myth. If I were going to pick one, that's probably the one I would pick too. In a way, maybe that's why I was so responsive to this. I could picture him at the wheel of his father's plane. I sort of had this picture in my head of him driving the plane. And when you think about flying from Nebraska to Boston, that's like a three-hour flight, I think. And you just sort of imagine him going over Iowa and Illinois and Ohio and Indiana. And I just sort of saw him in my head doing this. And then, maybe the Kennedys have their own airstrip or something. Did he go to Logan International Airport right in the middle of downtown Boston? If he landed at Logan International Airport, did he just park the plane there, and did Ted have a limo waiting for him? I thought about all these things. I just kind of played with the idea myself. So in a way, I guess I was having some fun with the whole thing too. You're listening to a special edition of This American Life, ah hour of true stories about compulsive liars. I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. More lies in a minute when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Most weeks, of course, on this program, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle that theme. This week, however, as April Fools' Day approaches, we are taking a break from all that to bring you this hour-long special on liars, compulsive liars. Margy Rochlin narrates. The fact is, people want to believe in lies. People want to believe compulsive liars. The lies they tell are usually appealing. And most lies told by anyone, most of them succeed because the person being lied to in some sense wants to believe in the lie. It's like you want to believe the magician. You don't want to believe it's a trick. And you could keep believing the lie forever, except for this fact. A compulsive liar is compulsive. They can't leave well enough alone. They keep adding to the lie. Pushing things to the edge. Maybe that's why you do it as a liar. Maybe it loses its punch when you've repeated the same story over and over again, and it's universally accepted. Maybe you have to embellish it a little bit so that it is interesting. Probably what's more likely the case is that, when your lie is believed and it doesn't solve your internal pain, that you have to crank it up a notch so that maybe this time, I'll feel better. Maybe this time I'll be acceptable to myself. And maybe that's what pushes people ever closer to the brink and ultimately to the point where their lies are preposterous. There's this thing that happens when you're involved with a compulsive liar. You go through this phase where you don't believe the things you're hearing, but you don't exactly disbelieve them either. You're in limbo. You think this person's nice, and the lies they're telling are so big that to think that they're lying would mean acknowledging that they're kind of crazy. So instead, you don't think anything. It's like this response that some animals have to danger called tonic immobility. When they're threatened and they can't get away, they just play dead. Their instincts tell them to stay motionless, and the problem is, once they've put themselves to sleep, it's hard to wake up. I loved my father dearly, and I didn't want to believe these things about him. So I would just try to put it in the back of my mind and not think about it. This teenager, she stayed in that limbo phase for about a year. Her mother watched it happen. My daughter went along with this thinking that her father certainly wouldn't lie to her, though I had definitely told her that she had to be careful of this kind of thing. Here's what happened. She had a $1,400 college scholarship and sent the money to West Point, where she was enrolled. But she quit after basic training and switched to this other college in Virginia. Her parents were recently divorced and broke. She was depending on the return of this deposit at West Point. It never came, never came. I didn't know exactly when the check was coming. I didn't know when they were sending it, because my dad was receiving all my mail. He kept telling her that the check hadn't come. My dad just kept telling me different stories. For months. When he would tell me reasons why the check wasn't coming to me, I had trouble believing it, but I let it slide. I thought he loved me so much that he wouldn't do anything like this to me. And I just didn't want to not believe him. But I probably should have. He told me that it was sent to my old address where my mom lived before she moved, and it had to be sent back to West Point to have a new check made. And then it was delayed up at West Point for some reason. He told her that he had had various calls with West Point and that they had said they were deducting certain amounts for uniforms. The check never came. Then another time happened where he said it was lost in the mail, and it never got there. And I didn't know what to believe. I was like, well, what do I say? But I didn't really think hard about it and think, oh, my dad's not truthful and he's this and that. At that time, I didn't think about that. I just didn't want to. My mom told me stories about what my father had done to her. I lived with this man for 19 years, and I knew that he lied. If he told me the sun was shining, I would have to look before I believed him. It got to that point. When my mom told me the situation about what my father had done, I had trouble believing what she was saying. I would agree with her, but deep inside, I didn't know exactly how to feel, because I was split in between them a lot after the separation occurred. I was the person in the middle. And I had to go in between the two. And I didn't know what to believe of what I was hearing. And I just tried to blow off anything I heard so that it just wouldn't affect me. Finally, he said, a check has come, and I have taken it to my attorney's office for safekeeping because there are thefts in our neighborhood, and I don't want someone to steal this check. So he had it locked up in the lawyer's safe. And I thought, I guess that's understandable. However, it's kind of stupid. But I didn't want to not believe him with it. Then he told me that the lawyer had to be called back into the military because of the Operation Desert Storm. They had to go back into the reserves. And he said that he was the only one who could open the safe. And I thought that was pretty stupid too, because what if he died? Who would be able to get into the safe then? There had to be someone who could open the safe. Either his partner or his secretary or someone could get into the safe. So I finally got too suspicious and thought it was a very stupid thing he was saying to me. And then finally I said, look, you really need to call the attorney's office. And I called the lawyer's office and found out that the man didn't even know about it. And he was actually at home, had not been sent away. And when he got on the phone, I was just like, what? I could not believe it. I was in shock. I mean, I almost had trouble talking to him, because I didn't expect him to be there in the first place. And I had asked him about the check. And he said he had never heard anything about it, and he hadn't seen my dad in a long time. It was just like a load just was put on my shoulders. And I just could not believe it. My whole body just went limp. So that evening, I called my dad. And I was crying on the phone. And I asked him what he had done with it. And he said that he had lost the check in the mail. And I just didn't believe him. Finally, I just got to the point where I just wasn't believing what he was saying. She called me, and she said, you were right. And she's crying on the phone. It's just horrible. I don't have to deal with him anymore. And that's what my younger daughter said. "This is worse for us than it even was for you, Mom, because you got away. And he will always be my father." And a man or anyone who lies like this is not in control. I don't think that he's in control. And that's the hardest part for me. I can't protect them. I was Daddy's little girl, and everybody knew it. And I loved him more than anything in the whole world. Every once in a while I think that this could not have happened and that it can't be real. And I don't want to think about it and admit that it happened. And sometimes I try to put my mind on other things and try not to think about it, but it's always there. And it is always digging at me. It just hurts. It hurts in your heart. I feel like a part of my heart was taken out when he did this to me. It's really hard to explain, but it just feels like part of me is missing now that I don't trust my father anymore. I'll never know why he did it. I don't think he'll ever admit it to me why. She was Daddy's girl. She is no longer. When the big lie comes down, it makes you question the fabric of all of your experiences. You don't believe anybody. You don't believe anything. And the lies act like a weird kind of antimatter on all of your memories. You don't know what to think about the past. It shakes up your view of the world as a safe place. So to restore some kind of order, you launch this private investigation. You make telephone calls. You look for clues in old letters. Then you combine the evidence with your own memories and start sorting everything into two different piles. There's a pile of real things and a pile of things that were totally invented. You think that if you can make this classification system work, then you can just throw out the pile of fake stuff, reconstruct reality, and go on with your life. The problem is, it can't be done. There's all these tiny pieces of data which don't make sense but are too important to discard. So as a matter of convenience, you start this third pile and you call it "don't know." So now there's "true," "false," and "don't know." And unfortunately, the "don't know" pile, it's where almost everything ends up. The best thing that could happen to me, the thing that would allow me to go to my grave probably more stabilized would be if he said, no, this is what the truth is really. This is what was true, and this is what wasn't. Sometimes you can spend years sorting out the truth. This woman runs a dance company. She had a fiance. He seemed to have a lot of money. They lived in an expensive apartment, and he bought her a car. They were together for three years. Then weird things started happening. Citicorp Bank called me to say when I was going to make a payment. And I said, you've got to be out of your minds. I hate you guys. You have investments in South Africa. You screwed over a bank account of mine a long time ago. I wouldn't have a Citicorp-- "Well, you have three Citicorp accounts." And they're, like, $10,000 overdue. So I call him up, and he's like, I can explain it. I'm like, good. He's like, send me the information. He has this way of talking to me that will calm me down and make it seem like everything you ever wanted could come true. And he also had this demeanor that, I'll take care of everything. Don't worry. I'll take care of everything. And I would believe that he would take care of it. I figured out later how he did all of this stuff and how easy it is for anyone to do. Once a week, you get something in the mail that says, you have been preapproved for a gold card or whatever. Most people just pitch those in the garbage. Well, he didn't. He filled them all out. And since we'd filled out one credit card together, he knew all my information. Your next-door neighbor could be doing it to you right now, and you don't know. There were three Citibank cards. They were starting repossession on my car. There was $8,000 on that. There was a gold card that had a $5,000 credit limit, and it was run up beyond its credit limit. All told, I owed, like, $65,000 to $75,000. I was making $26,000 a year. And I found out about all of this all in, like, 48 hours, because I found out that he had been seeing someone else. We had had this really tumultuous thing where he called me up in a total fried state, and I didn't know what was wrong. And I mean, he was an emotional basket case. It turns out he'd been dating someone in New York, and she dumped him. And he called me for sympathy. And he couldn't really tell me why he was so distraught. So I called him back. I asked him about it, and the whole story comes out, that he'd been seeing this other woman. He was madly in love with her. She had dumped him and had just gone to Australia to marry someone else. On the one hand, I'm being the good friend. "Well, how do you feel about this?" And then I'm like, "What are you, crazy?" I mean, I felt literally like someone had ripped my innards out, like my whole world was imploding, which is why I went to bed. Everything in the air was so heavy. It was too much work to get to the phone. It was too much work to put food in my mouth. It was too much work to get up, put my clothes on, and go to the office. And my friends said, you have to get better. Too many of us need you, which is always a good way to jump-start. Unfortunately, I'm one of these people who needs to be needed. And even though I hate that role that I've carved for myself, it's like-- you know, your cat needs you. My cat has saved me from potential suicide twice. Ariel needs to be fed. She needs someone to clean the litter box. It's so easy to be taken in. It's this fantasy that they create that you want to be in. I mean, part of it, I'm madly in love with this guy. And he said, you're an artist. You should be doing artwork. You shouldn't be dealing with your finances. I'll support you. I'll take over all the finances. And it was like God dropped out of the sky and said, "Here. You've worked hard. You deserve this. Here." Money has always been a really stressful thing for me. My family didn't have a lot of money. You have to understand my history. I was the oldest child. When my dad died, I was 13. My mother didn't know how to deal with it. I had three kids under me. I became the second adult in the family when I was 13 years old. I started drinking coffee. I started going to parent-teacher meetings. I was always mother to everyone else. And I was the head dancer in a company, and then I had my own company. And here was someone who came along and said, "I'll take some of that weight off. I'll take care of you." And I've been one of these people who always had to do that for everyone else. So your deepest, darkest, secret desire is that someone, somewhere will do that for you. The thing about him is, I think that he was probably really, really intuitive, because I think, perhaps, what he's able to do is become a mirror of your secret fantasy life, of your secret desires. And I don't know, because I'd like to be a fly on the wall and see if he does that with other people, whether the fantasies are always different, or whether he's so ingrained-- See, there's two things. Either he's this kind of person who's so intuitive that he can create a fantasy that mirrors whatever your fantasy life is, or he picks out people who will buy his fantasy life. And I don't know which one it is. He had this entire fiction of his life. I believe some of it was fiction. I'm sure some of it was true, because I don't think he would have ended up the way that he ended up if some of the stories that he told were not true. When he told these stories, it was passionate. It was like the best theater you've ever attended. It was the best monologue. He was from Ireland. He was an earl or a lord. I can never figure out what those people are. His father had been very prominent in politics. He had been given a different last name. He had been given the last name of the ancestral family because his father had singled him out as being the chosen son or whatever. And then his father totally mistreated him and abused him emotionally. And the IRA blew up their home at some point. It was this tragic existence, this really compelling tale of a person kind of drifting through life, looking for something they could hang on to. He was a director. He directed commercials for one of the big advertising agencies. And then when his wife died, he made these brilliant commercials. And then he sold everything he owned. And he went down, and he became a mercenary fighter in border disputes down in South America. Maybe he did that. Maybe he didn't. The problem that I still have is I don't know which were lies. I don't know what's real and what's not. I mean, I've sat and thought, well, that couldn't be true. But I went to Ireland. I went to the place where his house supposedly would be. And there is a house that underwent significant damage. If I really cared to make a life project out of this, I could research every aspect of what he told me. Oh, he didn't completely disappear, though. He still will call me. I'll be cooking dinner at my house. My phone number's not listed. I've moved twice since he knew me. And he'll call. "How are you?" And I'll be like, "I'm fine." People have said, do you think he really loved you? Or people have told me, he never really loved you. He just used you. My mother was key among that school of people. And this is part of what messes with my head still, because I don't believe that I could be so far off the mark. I mean, I believe that he truly loved me. When he looked into my eyes and he said, I love you, when he calls me back and says he-- there's no need for him, at this point-- if he really is trying to make this con go down, he wouldn't try to keep in contact with me. He keeps coming back. And I believe it's because he really did love me. I think for a while afterwards, I created a new fiction. This is a bad dream. And I'm going to wake up, and he's going to come back. And he will have gotten this fabulous job, and he's going to pay off all these debts. And I'm not going to have to deal with this. It didn't happen. But he kept saying, I swear to you, I will pay you back. I will make this up to you. I really think he believed it. I think he had no basis in reality in general. And I really wanted to believe him. I really wanted to believe that he wasn't this horrible ogre who had done this to me. I don't know. Am I not vindictive? Sometimes I'd like to kill him. Mostly I'd just like to have the dream back. I really wish that there had been someone out there existing in the world who was who he said he was. That would be great. I think that he truly, truly loved me and probably didn't want things to turn out the way they did. But he was so deeply entrenched in that. He couldn't say, OK, erase everything I've ever said to you. This is the real story. This is who I really am. And he may very well have thought, this is going to be the one that I'm going to change. He talked about having children, long-range commitment kinds of things. Because the house of cards didn't fall down for at least a year and a half. Bills were being paid. It was one of these catch-up games. So maybe he thought, I'm just going to get one more credit card and pay this off to keep it afloat, because I'm going to get this job. And I'm going to be making $80,000 a year, and we're not going to have to worry about anything. And just the next credit card. Oh, I've got to get one more. And I'll get one more, and I'll pay those off, just to keep it going, just keep it going. For the longest time, even after I said to him, look at what you've done, look at what you've done to me, he said, I will make it up to you. I will pay every cent back. I don't know. Maybe he just sold me all that. Maybe he's the best actor in the whole world, Academy Award winner. And maybe he just creates this character, this tragic-- I don't know. It's like standing on air. It's like nothing is too far-fetched. Nothing is impossible. It's like a whole crisis of faith. What do you believe in? I don't know what I can believe in. Can you believe in things you see? Can you believe in things you hold? Can you believe in looking into someone? Can you believe when someone swears? Can you believe? What do you believe? Once I interviewed a parapsychologist, and this is what he told me about ghosts. The peskiest ghosts, the kind that do the most haunting, are the ones who left this world so abruptly that they don't even know that they're dead. He said it's like if two people driving in a car get into this horrible car wreck where the driver is safe but the passenger is catapulted through the front windshield and dies. The parapsychologist said that the soul of the passenger can be ripped from their body so quickly that their energy remains. The specter, it's confused. Everything happened so suddenly. And that's why it keeps bothering those it left behind. Once you discover that everything someone has been telling you about themselves is basically nonsense, it's like you suddenly find yourself alone in that car. The person who was sitting next to you no longer exists. All that's left is this vapory memory. And figuring out what to think about the experience ends up taking people years. You're stuck for a while between several contradictory feelings about the liar-- pity, anger, sympathy. You don't know what think. You wait until you just don't care about it anymore. And the people I talked to, they say they view the world differently now. Now I don't trust anyone. My husband says, you are the most suspicious woman I've ever encountered. It's like, I go through his mail. Ever since then, every time I meet someone who strikes me as dishonest, there's this moment of real fear when I wonder, what could they do to me? See, it's one of the reasons why I live in this apartment alone, because I would never, ever move in with someone I didn't know. And even people that you do know, they don't turn out to be what you thought they were. Our program on compulsive liars was produced by Margy Rochlin and myself, narrated by Margy Rochlin. Post-production by Peter Clowney. If you'd like a copy of this program, call us at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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You know how there are certain stories that, in your family or your circle of friends, become infamous, favorite stories that people tell? Well, for a generation of people working in public radio, especially documentary producers, the story of how Scott Carrier got on the radio is one of those stories. Here's what happened. Scott was living in Salt Lake City and things weren't going so great. His marriage was coming apart. He had a job painting a semi-conductor factory that was easy to walk away from. But from time to time, when he was listening to an especially great story on the radio, on public radio, he would think to himself, I could do that. And so one day he got himself a tape recorder and walked to the highway and stuck out his thumb and headed east to the headquarters of NPR News in Washington DC. And anybody who picked him up and gave him a ride, he interviewed. So after a couple weeks on the road, he arrives at NPR's old offices on M Street in Washington with all these interviews in his backpack. It was a Sunday. The place was mostly deserted. Only the staff of weekend All Things Considered and some engineering staff were there in the building. But there was a telephone in the lobby of that building and Scott called in, and the then-host of weekend All Things Considered, Alex Chadwick, happened to be the one who picked up the phone. And Scott explained that he had just arrived, having hitchhiked across the country, and now he had all these tapes, and he would like it if somebody would show him how to turn the tapes into a radio story. Which, incredibly, somebody did. Most people on the radio sound like each other, the same way that most people on TV sound like other people on TV, and most writing in the newspaper is like all the other writing in the newspaper. Scott sounds only like himself. There's a feeling in his stories that's unlike anything anybody else does. And so, today, we're going to do something different. We're going to be bringing you an entire hour of stories from one contributor, from Scott Carrier. We wanted to try this, and try it with Scott, because there's just something in this set of stories where, when you put them all together, somehow they seem to be telling one long story in a really nice way. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, stories by one of the most interesting people working in radio, Scott Carrier. Our show today in four acts, including, in Act Three, Scott Carrier heads out on a mission to discover whether amnesia-- the kind that's in the movies where someone gets bonked on the head and you can't remember anything-- he tries to find out whether that actually happens in real life. Our show today in four acts. Stay with us. Act One, The Test. A couple years back, Scott Carrier was hired to interview men and women in Utah who were diagnosed with schizophrenia. He got the job because the director of the research project heard some of his radio stories and thought that he was a good interviewer, somebody who knew how to listen. So they taught Scott to administer this test that measured mental health. It was 100 questions, each of which was scored on a scale of one to seven. It took an hour to give the test. Scott was paid $30 for each test he gave. The people he gave the test to got $5. I was hired to interview men and women in the state of Utah who receive Medicaid support for treatment of mental illnesses generally diagnosed as schizophrenia. I had little understanding of schizophrenia before I began, and I have little more understanding now. I took the job because I had no other. I took the job because I'd just quit my steady job, my professional job, after realizing that what I wanted more than anything was to put my boss on the floor and stand on his throat and watch him gag. Then my wife moved out, took the kids and everything. She said, I've thought about it and I really think it's the best thing for me at this time in my life. And so I took the job interviewing schizophrenics because it was offered to me and because it was all there seemed to be. And it seemed somehow predestined, a karmic response that could not be avoided. It would only be temporary, something to get through the summer, and I was told that they needed someone willing to drive around the state, through the small towns, searching out individuals who were often transient and prone to hiding. I like to drive, I like to travel, and I like the idea of pursuit, so I took the job and did the job, and my life will never be the same. The patient is 21 years old and has lived with his parents since his discharge from the army. He has no friends, no recreational activities, and no social life. He spends his time writing and reading, but these activities do not give him any pleasure. He has lost weight, has general anxiety and loss of libido, and occasional feelings of unreality. He is worried about his unpredictable behavior-- for example, getting down on all fours and chewing the grass because he was thinking what it would be like to be a cow. The patient is 25 years old and believes that she is the devil, and therefore responsible for all the evil in the world. She's not been out of her house for seven days, and only comes down from her room for meals. A few days ago, her mother walked into her room and found her crying. She asked her mother what was the most painful punishment that one human being could inflict upon another. The mother tried to get the reason for this question, and her daughter mumbled something about the devil having to be punished for the benefit of humanity, something about having to die for his sins. When the mother asked her if she still thought she was the devil, she answered, "Let's not get into that again. It only upsets you and you don't believe me anyway, even when the evidence is all around you, plain for you to see." The people I interview are all so sad, so lonely with such thin souls, like ghosts and demons have invaded their hearts and are sucking their souls dry. A person's soul should be like an ocean, but a schizophrenic's soul is like a pool of rain in a parking lot. They suffer and they are completely alone in their suffering, and there's nothing I can do, nothing anyone can do to bring them back. I come home at night and cry. I sob like a three-year-old. Today, halfway through an interview with a man in Tooele, he says, "I have a crystal in my pouch. Do you want to see it?" I say OK and he takes it out, a normal crystal the size of a large paper clip. And he says, "I can look through this and it will tell me whether you're a good person or a bad person. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to look through it or not?" My first thought is to say, "Do you want to go on with the interview? Maybe when we're done, you can look through the crystal." But then I realize that he's really asking me to take his test, just like I'm asking him to take mine. I come into his house. I ask him very personal questions, and I expect him to answer honestly. And why should he? So I say, "OK, go ahead." And he puts the crystal up to his eye, turns it clockwise and counterclockwise, back and forth, squinting, looking me up and down, and he says, "I can't tell for sure. I'm going to have to read your mind. Here, take my hand." He holds out his right hand with the crystal resting in the palm. I take his hand and he puts his left hand over mine and squeezes it tight and shakes it, and goes into a small spasm. Then he lets go and sort of sits back like he's exhausted. He asks me if I felt anything, and I say, "Well, maybe a little." And he says, "I sent you a message. I put it in your mind. I told you what is wrong with me." I'm not supposed to figure out what's wrong with these people. I'm just supposed to ask the questions and score the answers from one to seven. This is partly because I'm not a doctor and might get something going that I wouldn't know how to contain, but it's mainly because my supervisors want clean data. They want all the people asking the questions to be doing it in the same way. I'm not supposed to get emotional. I'm not supposed to let the patient get emotional. The therapy part of the county mental health system is in another department. I wouldn't even know what number to call, and I've been told more than once not to worry about it. I should never have let him take the crystal out of his pouch. I drove around all day trying to find a Navajo man. He lives very close to the Four Corners, the cross where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet. It's all dirt roads, a house every five miles or so, no addresses, no phones. I stop at every house and knock on the door, but either nobody's home or nobody will answer. I flag down every car that passes and ask directions, and the people offer complicated directions that I follow as best as possible, sometimes driving for 20 or 30 miles. But it's always the wrong place, or nobody's home, or there just isn't a house there at all. Driving around, I think about how I have some of the same problems as the people I interview. I'm angry, depressed, prone to paranoid delusions, and I worry a lot. Up to now, I thought these were common problems and that I was more or less able to control them. But now I don't know. I feel like I'm just faking it. Eventually, late in the afternoon, I find the man, or at least I think he's the man. I'm a third of the way through the test before I realize he's not the right guy. "When was your last visit to a mental health clinic?" "I don't go to a clinic." "When did you last see a doctor?" "I don't have a doctor." "Do you blame yourself for anything you've done or not done?" "No." "Have you felt more self-confident than usual?" "No." "Have you heard voices or other things that weren't there, or that other people couldn't hear, or seen things that weren't there?" And he says, "I think you want to talk to my son." And I ask him what his son's name is and he says, "Same as mine." I come back the next morning and interview the son in the kitchen. They make coffee for me on a propane camp stove, as the house has no electricity. The son is 19 years old, a good-looking kid, tall, healthy. He says he used to run cross-country in high school. He seems to be fine, but as I go through the questions, he starts to fix his eyes on mine, a direct, almost hypnotic stare straight into my head, like he's trying to pull me in and trap me. I try to look back, to look just as deeply into his mind, but it's like looking into a cave. He says he hears voices, satanic voices, and that he worries a lot about his shoes, that they're not the right kind, not the kind he sees on MTV. I can't tell if he's sick or if he's just trying to torture me, and I drive away thinking I don't know anything about this disease, that I know even less than when I started. I spent two days driving around, and I made $30, and I feel really, really tired. The house is dark, as all the windows have heavy curtains pulled nearly shut. The curtains over the big picture window in the living room are open just a bit, and the light cuts through like a laser beam and hits the red shag carpet, throwing up small dust particles and cigarette ash. Two feet away from the light, near the television, is a slice of pizza lying upside down in the carpet. I'm interviewing the woman, a mother, and her teenage daughter is on the phone talking to her boyfriend, or rather a series of boyfriends, who call and call, and all of them want her to go out right now. But her mother won't let her. She's trying to answer my questions, trying to concentrate and be polite, but she's mainly listening to what her daughter is saying on the phone, and will suddenly switch from saying, "No, no, I've been feeling fine, I haven't had a relapse in months," to screaming out, "Is that John? I told you never to talk to him again," or "Who is it? Is it a boy? You can't go out. Tell him he has to come over here." I can't stop looking at the slice of pizza on the carpet. I keep looking at the slice of pizza, because it's the only clue that the woman is sick. I mean she has a teenage daughter and a dirty house, and maybe she shouldn't try to wear makeup to bed, but these are not necessarily symptoms of schizophrenia. She seems to be fine, just worn out, until I get to the question, "Have you been worrying a lot?" And she says, yes, she has. She's been worrying a lot that the elders of the church, the Mormon church, will take her daughter away from her. And I ask her why, and she says because she stopped taking her medication. And I ask her, "Why did you stop taking your medication?" And she says that the only reason she takes it is because she told her bishop that she was visited by the archangel Gabriel and that she'd had sex with him. And then she was also visited by the archangel Michael, and that she'd had sex with both of them at once, and that they'd ravished her almost every night. So her bishop made her go to a doctor, and the doctor gave her some pills, and she took the pills, and the angels stopped coming. The bishop and the elders had told her that if she had sex with any more angels, they'd take her daughter away. So I asked her again why she stopped taking her medication and she says, "I'm lonely. I miss them. I want them to come back." Today in a restaurant, eating lunch between interviews, I decided to take the test. I answered the questions and scored myself appropriately, and at some point I realized I wasn't doing so well. I decided not to even add up the points, because then I'd be left with a score and I'd never forget it. If I were to write a report on myself, it would sound something like this. The patient is 36 years old and lives alone since his wife left him three weeks ago. She took the kids and all the silverware except for a large knife and a bowl and a coffee cup. The patient admits that her leaving may have had something to do with the fact that, without warning, he completely gutted the house, tore out all the walls and ceilings, all the lath and plaster, right down to the studs. He says he did this in order to live like a primitive. When asked if he was successful, he says it was the first step in the right direction. The patient is a 36-year-old male who lives alone since his wife and children left him two months ago. He says there's a darkness that separates him from other people, a heavy darkness like looking at a person from the bottom of a well. He believes that if he could say the right words, then the darkness would go away. He says he sometimes knows the right words but cannot say them. Other times, he can't even think of the words to say. The patient is 36 years old and lives alone since his wife and children left him three months ago. Last week he went fishing in the San Juans, and now believes that there's no better fisherman than himself. He says, "I can't tell you about it, because talking about fishing is silly, like farting and tap dancing at the same time. All I can say is I walk around in the water, and I know the instant the fish will jump for the fly. I cut open their stomachs and squeeze out the bugs in my hand, study what they eat, how it all gets digested, even the exoskeleton and wings." He says he was sick before, but now he's OK, and that it was the fly rod, just holding the rod in his hand, that cured him. His house is clean. The electricity is on. The walls have been sheetrocked and painted white. He says, "I'll have to ask her, beg her, and maybe she'll come back." Act Two, The Friendly Man. There are three kids. There's a house. There's a marriage. What Scott wanted was a steady job with bosses he did not hate and who did not hate him. He found that job, for a short time, in commercial radio. There are a lot of bad ways to wake up, but surely one of the worst is by looking into the flood light from a police car. I was in a field, some farmer's field next to a power plant just outside Lawrence, Kansas. I was sleeping there next to my car before driving into Kansas City in the morning. The policeman somehow saw my car from the road, and they pulled up right in front of it, and I didn't even wake up. I was lying on the ground on the passenger side of the car, and when I did wake up, one of the policemen was in the front seat, I guess looking for drugs, and the other was 40 feet away in the hay field. And I don't know why he was out there, unless he had his gun pulled, covering this partner. He said I scared him when I woke up so suddenly. I sat straight up. Boom, awake. And I bet he nearly shot me dead. They wanted to know what I was doing sleeping in the field, and I told them that I didn't like motels, which was only partly true. So I decided to tell them that I was born here in Lawrence, but that I don't live here anymore, which was completely true but somehow didn't achieve the level of meaning I hoped it would. They asked me what I was going to do in Kansas City, and I said I was going to interview the mayor at 11:00 in the morning. I told them I was a producer for a radio program. I told them the name of the program and the name of the host, and they'd heard of him. You'd know who he is as well, if I were to say his name, but I've decided not to say his name and call him the Friendly Man instead, because this is his persona. I told the policemen that every weekday morning, the Friendly Man has a five-minute feed on one of the networks, and 12 million people listen. His stories are, as a rule, upbeat and positive. Their general theme is people taking responsibility for their lives, their community, their country. The Friendly Man always has good news, and the good news is always that America just keeps getting better and better. Both policemen said they had heard of the program and that they liked the Friendly Man, and so they decided they liked me as well, and that it was OK to sleep in the field, sorry to have bothered you. I was hired by one of the Friendly Man's executive producers. Her job was to wrangle and corral radio producers like myself from around the country into conducting interviews and writing scripts for stories that had been found by her flock of computer researchers, also from around the country. Some people are surprised to hear that the Friendly Man doesn't actually produce the stories he tells, but in reality he just doesn't have the time, what with the television show now and the specials and so on. It's not that he doesn't want to write his stories, not that he can't. It's just that he's really busy now, being the Friendly Man, and you shouldn't expect him to come up with all of his own material. The way it works is that the Friendly Man is in New York with maybe a couple of editors and an engineer. And his executive producer is in San Francisco with fax machines and email. And the researchers are all over the place, looking for story ideas through computer searches. When the researcher finds what looks like an appropriate story, he calls the people in the story on the phone and talks to them for a while. Then he writes out a story synopsis, which is sent to the Friendly Man for approval. Once approved, the story goes to a producer and the producer is in charge of conducting, basically, the same interviews all over again, on tape this time, and then editing the tape and writing the script, which is reviewed by the executive producer in San Francisco and sent to the Friendly Man in New York City so he can read it on the air. The first story I produced for the Friendly Man was in Tucson, Arizona. It was about some people in Tucson who were helping to make America a better place. It doesn't really matter what the story was about. What matters is that I had to do all the interviews over the phone. There wasn't enough money to send me to Tucson. So I found an audio engineer in Tucson and had him go to the locations and hold a microphone up to the subjects while I talked to them on the phone. Then he sent me the tape, which I edited and then wrote the script without ever meeting the people I was writing about or the person I was writing for. When I made a suggestion for changing the story, a change that I thought would make it better, the executive producer said that she would try not to get upset with me because this was my first story, and maybe I didn't understand my role. The story had been approved as written in the synopsis. There were to be no changes, no additional narratives or discoveries. I was but the writer-producer, one of many cogs in the wheel. I apologized and did the story as ordered. After this first story, I asked the executive producer if I could go on the road, drive around and collect interviews, actually meet the people and see what they were doing, and then come back and produce the stories. She gave me four stories at a distance of 3,000 miles. They would pay the mileage but would give me nothing up front. The food and lodging were to be my expenses, and so I was sleeping out. It was the first week of July and so warm at night you could sleep on the grass without a bag or a blanket. At 11:00 AM, on the morning after the incident with the police, I was standing in the mayor's office on the top floor of the Kansas City, Missouri municipal building. It's a tall building, built on one of the highest hills in the area, so looking out of the window, I could see most of the city, buildings and railroad tracks and the river-- the Missouri River-- making a big ox-bow right through town. We sat at a long wooden table, a conference table, in tall chairs. Mayor Emanuel Cleaver, also a Methodist minister, a black mayor in a black town. I'd come to ask him about his summertime midnight basketball program. The program, like all midnight basketball programs, was designed to reduce the crime rate by keeping juveniles off the street. And, like with some of the other programs, the crime rate hadn't gotten any better except for the time that the kids were actually playing basketball. Whenever there was a game going on, the crime rate in the neighborhood was lower. The mayor's opponents were saying that the program was pork, that the $100,000 a year could be better spent somewhere else. I asked the mayor about this, and he was adamant, even passionate, about the value of teaching kids to play basketball or any team sport. He said that team sports teach kids the best values, that they learn to cooperate and play by the rules. They learn to problem-solve through cooperation, and by playing, they learn to love the game, and through the love of the game, they learn to love themselves and each other. He said that a few of the kids had gone to college on basketball scholarships, and this gave hope to everybody in the community, a community where hope was like a foreign language. And that alone was worth it, even a bargain at $100,000. He said, "You go to the games. It's mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. You'll see the whole community there." He was right. Over on the east side, the poor side of town, there were games going on in a community center and the place was packed. And the games were good, little eight- and nine-year-olds passing the ball and making plays and running hard the whole game. They loved the game. I interviewed coaches, kids, and parents, and everything was going fine. Things really were getting better and better in America. But then, just before I left, I was talking to a father about a son, and somebody-- I think probably a little kid-- took my three rechargeable batteries and a digital audiotape with the mayor's interview on it out of my bag and out of the building. And they were gone. The batteries were worth $250 and could be replaced, but the interview with the mayor was lost for good. Some little kid looked in my bag and these things were like eggs in a basket. Anyone older would've just taken the bag. I walked around the neighborhood for a while, trying to figure out what to do. The next day was a Saturday and I doubted the mayor would be in his office, which would mean that I'd have to wait until Monday. But I had appointments for interviews Monday morning for another story in St. Louis, 300 miles to the east. And then there was the fact that I'd been robbed while doing a story about a program that reduces juvenile crime. The story, as it was written by the researcher in the synopsis, was all about how black people were improving their lives and making things better by playing basketball. But the reality of the situation, at least the way I saw it, was that these people were poor, that they'd been poor for a long time, and that they were probably going to stay poor for a long time. So I called the executive producer and left her a message, saying that maybe she should consider scrapping the basketball story, and that I was going on to St. Louis and would call her from there. The story in St. Louis was also about poor black people, only in St. Louis it was about old poor black people, old poor black people who lived in a nursing home and had started their own private economy, wherein they'd get paid for helping each other out by washing clothes or cooking meals or even reading books and stories out loud at bedtime. But they didn't get paid in real money. They got paid in what they called time dollars, which could only be exchanged between themselves or cashed in at a special community store for food, clothing, and other necessary items. The old people liked the time dollar program. They were much happier than before they had the time dollar program. At least this is what the researcher had written in the synopsis, and this is how things seemed for most of the morning I was there doing interviews. My first interview was with the woman who'd set everything up. She was a well-educated upper-middle-class white lady who worked for a large charitable organization as a local manager of its programs. This woman was very nervous, and I couldn't tell if it was because she was just nervous being interviewed, or if she was nervous being surrounded by poor black people, or if she was just nervous by nature. I talked to her for a while, and then she introduced me to some women who actually participated in the time dollar program. And they told me that they do things like call up old people around town and ask them if they feel OK, if they're sick or something. Or they clean and dry a neighbor's clothes before he goes into the hospital, for cook for someone who has bad asthma. And then they could use the time dollars to buy stuff they needed. They were friendly ladies, and it was just like it said in the synopsis-- neighbors helping neighbors and getting paid to do it. So I asked them if we could go over and see the store, the place where they actually buy everything. And they sort of hemmed and hawed about it, said there was a key and they'd have to get it. And then we were talking about grandchildren, arthritis, the weather in Mississippi. I was wondering if maybe they didn't really want to go to the store, so I asked again, and they said it was a couple of blocks away and it was raining so hard. I was a little worried at this point, because the store was in the synopsis and so there had to be some tape of the store in the story. And so I explained my predicament to the women and begged them, as best I could, if we could go there. We borrowed some umbrellas and walked over to the building that housed the store. It was a one-story warehouse, brick and concrete, a few windows. Inside, we went down a hallway that separated two large rooms, each packed with desks and office people, stacks of paper, stacks of folders, desk fans, lots of desk lights, people typing on real typewriters, old adding machines. It was very suspicious. One side looked like the Bulgarian foreign trade department, the other side like the Lithuanian shipping commission. Down at the far, dark end of the hall was a large metal cabinet with two full length doors, closed by a padlock. One of the ladies opened the lock, and inside were four shelves. The top held bottles of fabric softener. The next was full of baby wipes. Another had some paper plates and plastic silverware, and the bottom was full of bathroom deodorizer. That was it. That was the store. I'd imagined something between a 7-Eleven and a thrift store, and I didn't understand. I didn't understand how any of this was working. I stood there and looked at the cabinet and the story disintegrated into baby wipes and picnic forks. I thanked the ladies and left the building and called the executive producer. I didn't want to tell her about the baby wipes and the fabric softener. There was no use in telling her that something was wrong, that maybe the whole story was a sham. But I did want to ask her if it would be OK if I left the store out of the story, that maybe the story should be that these people just like helping each other, and that the time money thing wasn't so important. But she never let me get to it. She was upset, very upset, about the message I'd left on her machine Friday night. It had ruined her whole weekend. She was distraught and nearly hysterical. Everyone was distraught and nearly hysterical, and it was my fault. My fault to have taken my eyes off the equipment, my fault to have been robbed, my fault to have left town without completing the story assignment. She said that I'd led her to believe that I was a professional, but no professional would ever behave in such a manner. She said this twice, the subtext being that the Friendly Man can only use professional producers, and that therefore I was fired unless maybe I went back to Kansas City to re-interview the mayor. My job was to do what I was told, just as their job was to do what they were told, just as the Friendly Man's job was to do what he was told. Because the audience, the 12 million listeners, had something they wanted to be told-- that America is a good place with decent people, never mind the screaming coming from the basement. So I got in my car and drove 300 west to Kansas City. I could have told them to go [BLEEP] themselves, but I didn't. I went back, because I didn't want to be fired by the Friendly Man. I'd been fired by other, less well-known friendly men, and it's always like being branded, scorned as the one who ran. I was tired of that, tired of being broke and not having any work. My wife, my family-- they were tired of it too. I decided that I wanted to be a professional. I wanted to be a team player. I wanted to take responsibility for my life, my community and my country. I wanted to get ahead and go someplace with my career and be happy. I drove back to Kansas City and got in late at night. I drove through the big buildings downtown, the streets lit yellow and vacant. I drove through the poor neighborhoods, the streets lit yellow and vacant. I drove along the parkways, past fountains and parks, and I drove past my grandmother's house and down to the Country Club Plaza, where I slept without a bag or a blanket on the lawn, on the long esplanade in front of the Nelson Art Museum. If I was to be bothered by the police, I would tell them that I am a radio producer working for the Friendly Man, and that I have a meeting with the mayor in the morning. Coming up, you can call me Ray or you can call me Jay, but I don't want to know my own name, thank you very much. Amnesiac wannabe forgets to forget. Also, sixth-grader remembers to remember. More stories from Scott Carrier in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. Well, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose some theme, and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, The Friendly Man, stories by Scott Carrier. We're devoting the full hour to Scott's stories because they're just great radio stories, and they sound great when you listen to them one after another. Each of these stories originally appeared on different episodes of our radio show, most of them back in the 1990s, actually. And there's a point where I made a little collection of these on a CD, and I would duplicate copies and give them to friends now and then. And at some point, I realized, oh, this CD would be a really great hour on the radio. And so that's basically what we have today. Scott is just one of the great original voices working in radio. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here? Sometimes all we want to do is forget. All we want is amnesia. But of course, real amnesia happens a lot more on TV and in the movies than it does in real life. In the movies, people are constantly getting bonked on the head and forgetting who they are. And then they embark on a series of madcap adventures that teach them who they really are. But does that happen, the amnesia part at least? Is there really such a thing as amnesia, and does it work like that? Have you ever met a single person who's had amnesia? Well, a few years back, we at This American Life wanted to find out the answer to that. And Scott agreed to help. The idea was to find someone who had amnesia and ask them what it was like in real life. I was warned that it might be difficult to locate such a person, that the affliction may in reality be quite rare, but that there was at least one known amnesiac living in Tennessee, and another in Pennsylvania. The particular cities and addresses could be found if necessary. "Nonsense," I said. "I'm surrounded by amnesiacs. This city breeds forgetfulness. There must be five or six amnesiacs in the neighborhood around my office alone." I accepted the offer, thinking it would be an easy assignment. I began by asking everybody I saw if they had or had ever had amnesia. I did this for three days, and I tried not to be selective, but to ask everybody with whom I came into contact, whether my wife or the checker at the grocery store, "Do you have or have you ever had amnesia?" And furthermore, I'd ask this each and every time I saw the person, sometimes two or three times a day. No one admitted to currently having amnesia, but at least one in four remembered being knocked hard on the head and losing memory from a concussion. This kind of amnesia lasts only a few minutes or a few hours, and concussion stories, I found out, are usually not worth listening to or worth telling. They usually go something like this. "I was in a football game and two guys fell on my head. I kept playing. I played the whole game and everything, but then after the game I had to get a ride home, because I didn't remember where I lived." I heard this story three times from the same person, and each time he told it to me in the same way with some difficulty, as if something had been taken from him and he didn't know what it was. Two people admitted to suffering from drug-induced amnesia. One had a drinking problem. The other was myself as, due to the fact that when I was 19, I ate a big psilocybin mushroom right off the ground in the mountains of Colombia, South America, and spent four or five hours where I didn't know my name, where I was, or why. I was hallucinating wildly, the sky exploding, the ground bubbling up under my feet. The trees and bushes were throwing off little packets of flame and brightly colored orbs. I wandered around and around in a cow pasture, holding my hands over my eyes, delirious. And then a man in a jeep picked me up and I thought he might be my father, and I thought I knew what he was saying, but I didn't know what language he was speaking. And we went to his house and watched a soccer game on television, while his wife, who I thought might be my mother, served us coffee from a metal tray. And then I was back out on the road, and I walked up to a park and sat down and drew a picture of myself in a notebook. And below the picture I wrote these words: "I'm still here." If this gave me any insights into what amnesia is like-- real amnesia-- I don't remember what they are. In three days, the closest I came to finding someone with amnesia was through a young woman who's the daughter of a friend of mine. She's a physical therapist and one of her patients had had her head smashed in a car accident. Her amnesia is kind of the opposite of what we normally think about. She can remember things in the distant past just fine, but she doesn't seem to be able to remember what just happened or what she was just thinking or just where it was she was going. So she can't, for instance, drive a car or even ride a bus. I asked my friend's daughter if I might be able to talk with this woman, and she said, "Well, I guess so, but you might have a better conversation with her dog." I came back to my office feeling a little down. Finding an amnesiac was proving to be more difficult than expected. I decided to seek professional help. I got up out of my chair and walked across the hallway and knocked on the door of Dr. Jeff Harris, psychologist. I think there was a guy that went through it when I was in Vietnam, who ended up in serious action. And he ended up going from one APC to the next. Each one got blown up as he was getting in, or-- I don't know exactly how he survived the whole thing, but we're talking about a platoon basically getting wiped out, he being one of the few survivors. And he couldn't remember. He couldn't remember his past. He couldn't remember where he was going. And that's the classical Freudian theory of repression. We don't remember things that make us feel guilty, or feel pain. All right. Well, let me ask you this. Say I have the ability to make you have amnesia. If I flip this switch, you won't remember your name. You won't remember who you are. What do you think? What do I think? Yeah, would you do it or not? Would you? I would want to do it because then I think that I would lose my ego. I would lose this-- I would have a clean slate, sort of thing. It would-- if all of a sudden you sat here and you couldn't remember why you're holding this microphone or who I am or why you're talking to me, to say it was disorienting would be too mild. I think I would be smart enough to realize, this is a gift. I mean, there's two choices. Either you realize that it's a gift, or you completely freak out. One or the other. You're talking as if you wake up in the morning, you don't know where you are, who you are, where in the hell you're going, and you're happy with it? Give me a [BLEEP] break. That still seems attractive to me. It still seems like it might be a good thing, to be put in a situation where I have to admit that I'm completely lost. It seems like-- Oh, I think you already are, Scott. After five days, having found no one who had, or had had amnesia, I decided to visit a hypnotherapist, Diane Bradshaw, and ask her if she could give me amnesia. She said she probably could do it, as long as I was willing to be put under hypnosis. She said some people just weren't willing. And if you're open to the possibility that, say, amnesia would be OK for five minutes, or one minute, it might happen. Well, I'm open to even a day, if that-- would that be a bad idea? What do you really want here? Do you want to get that extreme? Well, let's say a few hours, anyway. Do you think-- what do you think? Because he's going to have to hang out with me. You know what I think? I think an hour-- I think if you had a half-hour of amnesia, you would get it pretty quick. All right. An hour. Half-hour. I think a half-hour would probably be plenty of time. And then I have to ask you, what do you want to forget? I mean, I can do anything from giving you a suggestion to forget your name, to forget where you live, to-- what do you want to forget? Is it possible to forget everything? My whole self-identity? Is that too much? Well, I-- She took notes on what I wanted to forget. Then she hypnotized me, which involved having me count backwards from 100, and telling me to relax, deeper and deeper, and then having me imagine being in a big garden with a stream running through it. And she said, if I drank from the stream, I'd forget my name and where I was, and also the name of my friend who'd come with me. So I went and drank from the stream and she woke me up. --five, open your eyes, all the way back, emerging from hypnosis. All the way back. Hi, there. Hi. How are you doing? Good. Feels pretty good, doesn't it? It was pleasant. Yeah. It was fun. Yeah. But I think I can remember. I'm sorry. And what is it you can remember? What town do you live in? Salt Lake. Sorry. And what have you been doing today? Uh. Working on this story. Uh huh. And what's his name over here. Trent Harris. I'm sorry, man. I tried. I did. I tried. The next day, I typed "amnesia" into a search engine on the World Wide Web, and got a phone number for the Beckman Institute, a neuroscience center at the University of Illinois. I called up and talked to Rob Althoff, a graduate student, and he told me that the kind of amnesia I was looking for was, indeed, very rare, and that there's some disagreement over whether it even happens at all. He said people do suffer long-term memory loss from severe brain injuries, but that usually these people never recover their memories, that the brain doesn't regenerate. And he said that the other kind of amnesia, where there's no physical trauma, is often a matter of the person not wanting to remember, for one psychological reason or another, and that in these cases it's really difficult to know whether the person is, basically, just faking it. Talking to Althoff made me wonder if amnesia, the kind we see on TV and in the movies, where a character gets hit on the head with a coconut, loses his self-identity, then spends the rest of the story rediscovering it or getting bonked on the head by another coconut-- whether this is really just a story that we want to be true. Everyone loves the idea of a second chance, of starting over without the burden of the past. I think that's why amnesia is in so many movies and TV shows and romance novels. We somehow want to believe in it. Act Four, The Day Mom and Dad Fell in Love. Do you know how Mom and I met? I think you were working an antelope story and Mom was doing filming or something. You met each other and then you liked each other. And then you married each other. I remember sitting on my front steps in the morning, waiting for her to ride up the hill on her bicycle. It was in the spring, late April, and it had been raining, steam coming up off the street and sidewalks. I was waiting on the steps and I realized that I was in love with her, and that everything was going to be different now. She'd ride up the hill and set her bike down on the grass. And we'd go inside, and she'd live with me there for a long time, maybe forever. I knew it. I saw the whole thing coming, just like I see everything now. The only thing missing is the ending. I remember lots of times you were nice to mom. She told me once that for her birthday or for Christmas or something, you bought her perfume and you wanted to get her the right one. And so you went around and you had a sample of each, and you were smelling it. And you were deciding but you couldn't decide which one to give her. And then when you came home, you hugged her. My house inside had no furniture, other than two chairs and a table. I made some coffee and moved the table over by the window so she could sit in the sun. She was a modern dancer, small and thin, wearing a white cotton blouse. No bra, no need for a bra, shorts and sandals and sweating a bit from the ride. Her skin was dark tanned already, so early. Lovely legs but with lots of scars on the knees and shins, and feet that were like little creatures unto themselves, beautiful and frightening. They had the structure of the Golden Gate Bridge, a high sinewy arch with built-in springs and pulleys and long toes stretching out for purchase. Do you feel like anything's a mystery between Hillary and me that you don't understand? This week, when I ask our 11-year-old daughter Jessie this question. she pauses for at least a half a minute. I've asked maybe a million questions in my reporting career, but this has got to be the longest pause I've ever heard. I don't really think about it much. And I-- it's-- it's a hard thing to think about. Why? Because it's-- I usually don't pay much attention to what you and Mom are doing between each other. Well, kind of, I do. And I don't really wonder anything. I don't think that there's something that I don't know that I really want to know, like a mystery or anything. I'd seen her dance the night before in front of a small audience downtown, and her style was wrapped around the idea-- her idea-- that she really weighed nothing at all, and that her body was only there to tell little jokes-- her little jokes, whatever might come to mind. I asked her if she liked my house, and she said she liked the view. She asked me what I thought about her concert, and I said I thought it was funny. She said, "Funny? Only funny?" "Funny and beautiful," I said. And she said, "That's better." Do you think Hillary and I are in love? Yeah. I mean, you-- I know because you sometimes have fights. I think people who love each other have to have fights sometimes. Otherwise they don't understand each other very well. Not everybody is exactly the same, and so people might disagree about something. But two people who love each other have to understand each other, and to understand each other, they have to know what they're thinking. Up until this time, I'd been living alone and was not unhappy. I had a house and a dog and a car, no job, no need for a job. I had money from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce a radio story about chasing antelope, which, as far as I could tell, only required a wholehearted effort to live as much like a primitive hunter as possible. It was a problem I was working on by myself, and really I had no idea how to go about it, other than by trying to live simply and by trying to stay outside and cover as much ground as possible. But there she was, finally arrived, come to stay. When you get married-- have you ever thought about getting married? Not really. Not much. Maybe a little bit? I don't know. I mean, I don't believe we can ever guess the future or-- I can hope, but I don't like saying what I want to be when I grow up. Because you never know. She asked me why I only had one fork in the kitchen. I said it was all I needed, and then asked her how many she had in her kitchen. "Eight," she said, "and at least 10 spoons. And I have some glasses, different kinds, even wine glasses. I like to have friends over. I like to cook and have friends over to eat. Don't you have any friends?" "Yeah, I have a friend, but he doesn't have any hands," I said, looking over at my dog. "You know," she said. "I've been dreaming about you. I think I'm in love with you." How do you know she supports me? She doesn't wish-- I mean, she doesn't say it as that she regrets that she married you or that maybe not having a job sometimes. And so she still appreciates what she has. When you get married, if your marriage turns out like our marriage, between your mom and me, would that be good enough for you or would you want more than that? I think it would be fine. I mean, you guys seem pretty happy. And I think that if my marriage, if I got married, was like yours, I would be pretty happy too. And I think I would try to make a little more money. But otherwise, getting along like that, I think that would be a good marriage. Jessie Carrier was 11 when that story was recorded. It was a long time ago, though. She's going to be graduating from college in a couple weeks. Scott Carrier is working on a new book, Prisoner of Zion, and he's looking for a publisher for that. He's been teaching lately in the Communication department at Utah Valley University. The stories that you've heard this hour are collected in a book with some other stories. The book is called Running After Antelope. And you can hear Scott's very first radio story, the one that I talked about at the beginning of the program, with the people who he met while hitchhiking across the country, at transom.org. All of the Scott Carrier stories in today's program were originally produced by at Alix Spiegel. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. And thanks to everybody who came out this past week to our live cinema event in 430 movie theaters across the country. In case you missed it, you get one more chance. There's going to be an encore presentation in movie theaters everywhere, Thursday, May 7. More information at our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who explains his recent management decisions this way. I was in a football game and two guys fell on my head. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Joe worked at this office where every now and then, the office manager would bring her nine-year-old to work. Good kid, kind of tomboyish. And she would just help out around the office. She would pass mail out. And over the time that I was there, she and I developed this kind of teasing relationship. She would come into my office, and she would drop my mail off and stick her tongue out at me. And I would fake chase her down the hallway or something. That's sweet. Yeah, yeah. She was an incredibly sweet kid. And so there's this day when it's early in the morning. I've arrived at the office. And I go into the bathroom. And when I come out of the bathroom, I have my glasses in my shirt pocket, rather than on my head. And I look down this hallway and I see this small person walking towards me. And I then get down and start to crab walk towards her. So I go down on my haunches and put my hands up as if they're claws and waddle towards her. And as I'm waddling towards her, I say, in this kind of creepy voice, "Oh, no, I can't believe you're here today." And then, at that moment, as I say "today," she comes into focus. And I realize, in fact, it's not at all the young girl who I thought it was. But it's in fact, one of our interns, a business intern who is a midget. And so she comes into focus. And I see her. And I'm horrified. And I go bolt upright. And I stand up, and I say, "Oh my god. I'm terribly sorry. I thought you were somebody else." And I think to myself, "Who could she possibly think that somebody else is?" And I wondered at the time, should I have tried to explain it to her? And it seems to me like one of those situations where it only gets worse the more you try to explain it. The only thing I could do was, in fact, apologize and then end all contact with her forever, right there. Joe says the woman was utterly gracious. She introduces herself. She tries to put him at ease. But Joe says, not only did he cringe when this happened, he cringes every single time he tells this story. People cringe when they hear this story. And why? Seriously, why? What is it about certain stories that get this physical reaction out of us? You know what I mean? What are the physical reactions we ever actually give a story? There's laughing. There's crying. There's cringing? It's in the top three? Well, this week on our radio show, This American Life, we have looked into this matter. And I have to say, if there is scientific literature specifically on the physiology or psychology of cringing, we and many helpful doctors and researchers were unable to find it. But from examining a wide array of cringe stories, we have made some tentative conclusions about what it is that makes us cringe. Consider please, Howie's story. It was his sixth grade graduation dance. There had been one teacher, Mrs. S, who had been really cruel to him all year long. He was chubby, and she used to examine his papers for food stains, which then she would hold up and show the entire class. She'd mock him in front of class up to the day of the graduation dance. As we're in line, she's like, "OK, you're all going to high school. I want you to be good." And then she kind of stops. And she says, "Well, I don't know if we're all going to high school." She goes, "I don't know. What do you think, kids? You think Howard should pass?" And then all the sudden, my heart dropped into my stomach. "What do you mean, ma'am?" "Yeah, yeah, let him pass. Let him pass." "I don't know. I don't know if we should let Howard pass. It's up to you kids. It's up to you. Should Howard pass?" "Yes, yes." "Should he pass?" "Yes, yes." "I don't know." That was humiliating, but that is not the part of the story that makes him cringe. The cringe part happens when, dressed in his best Saturday Night Fever tight pants and polyester shirt, he takes matters into his own hands. He takes action. At the end of the dance, relieved that he is, in fact, graduating, he finds her in the teachers' lounge. So I walk in. I'm feeling good. I'm smiling. I'm strutting around in my John Travolta clothes. I grab my jacket. And picture this really sweaty, fat little kid, clothes plastered to his body. Mrs. S, who'd been so cruel, is standing with another Mrs. S, the French teacher. I basically bowed to the French teacher. And I said, "Enchantee, Madame S." And then I looked at the other Mrs. S., and I went, "Thank you so much, Mrs. S." And I took a deep bow. I actually waved my arm underneath my waist, bowing deep to my knees, you know, getting up, flipping my jacket with one finger over my shoulder and going a Jackson 5 spin around, and strutted out, thinking I was the coolest. I remember that when I bowed, and I said "Enchantee," and all this, I remember their faces. And they were disgusted. There wasn't a smile. There wasn't some kind of, "Oh, thank you, Howard." It was basically silence, this stern, down-at-the-mouth like, uugh. The things that she did to him were just humiliating, he says. It was the fact that he decided to thank her for it. That's what makes him cringe. And that seems to be true of a lot of cringe stories. The people in them go out of their way to embarrass themselves. In Joe's case, to get back to the guy crab walking in the office, if he had just come out of the men's room with his fly open, for example, that would've been embarrassing. But he went further. He made a special effort. A part of him was proud that he was the one adult in the office cool enough to goof around with a little kid. And pride, my friend, goeth before a cringe. You know, you're in your office. And then suddenly, you're just like, "You know, I'm in a pretty good mood today. And I'm ready to goof around a little. I'm going to crouch down by these mailboxes, and I'm going to walk like a crab towards her down the hallway. This is a stuffy place full of stuffy people, and I'm still a pretty fun guy." You cringe in that moment of revelation, when you suddenly see that maybe you are not the fun guy, when you see yourself as others see you. And it is not pretty. One of the doctors that we talked to about cringes for this week's show pointed out that a cringe is basically the human body cowering in fear for an instant. And he said that one of the most fearsome, stressful things that we can encounter as people is the thought that we are not who we think we are, the thought that the world sees us differently than we see ourselves, and not in a good way. Well, our program today, as always from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. Today on our show, an investigation into stories that make us cringe. Act One, What We Cringe About When We Cringe About Love. Nancy Updike explains the peculiar characteristics of a cringe love affair. Act Two, M*A*S*H Notes, in which I tell a story from my past that I actually spent two decades trying to forget about a week that I had back in 1979 on the set of a television show. Also in that story, why I hope to never run into Alan Alda on the street. Act Three, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, David Ben-Gurion and Me, the story of one teenager's cringeworthy dream, to become prime minister of a nation in which he does not even reside. Act Four, Cringe and Purge. We have a story from Bruce Jay Friedman about a man who tries to rid himself of a decades-old cringe, if that is really possible. Stay with us. Act One, What We Cringe About When We Cringe About Love. If cringing is basically shrinking from something dangerous or painful, what could be more potentially dangerous and painful than love? Nancy Updike has this report on the characteristics and bylaws of cringe love. A cringe love story always starts with a one-liner. went out with a guy whose role models were Jean Genet and Clint Eastwood. I once went out with this alcoholic. And I guess I just didn't realize he was an alcoholic, because he was doing so much cocaine at the time. I once dated a guy who, three months after we broke up, slept with both his stepmother and his stepsister. You probably notice these are all women. That's because cringe love stories are usually embarrassing. And I'm generalizing here, but in my experience, women like telling embarrassing love stories. We bond over them. We like to one-up each other. "You did that for love? Well, I did this." And while I'm generalizing, let me also say that as far as I can tell, the most common cringe love story is the kind that takes place in your early 20s with a guy not that much older. And you are new at love. It's not your first relationship. But everything about your romantic self still feels on loan from somewhere else-- movies, rumors, your friends. You don't quite know who you are yet when it comes to love because you're still becoming that person. And everything these early 20s cringe love stories have to teach us, we can learn from a woman from Texas named Julie. I once went out with a guy who, while we were dating, joined the Hare Krishnas. So how did he tell you this? Well, we started going to Prasadam, which is this thing the Krishnas do on Sundays. They have this big feast. And basically, it was a way to get free food. Free food is very important in this story. The reason is that Julie's boyfriend was a squatter. Do you know what that is? For years, in cities all over the country, people have been taking over abandoned buildings and living in them, squatting. People do it for a lot of reasons, anti-corporate idealism, adventure, lack of interest in getting a job. Julie's boyfriend was a middle-class kid from New York who, when they met, was squatting in an abandoned warehouse in Austin, Texas, bartering, hitchhiking, and keeping an eye out for free food. Julie, at the time, lived in an air-conditioned apartment and drove an Oldsmobile. She was in her last year of college. We used to go around whenever I wanted pizza. We couldn't order pizza. We had to go to all the pizza places and ask for mistakes, because he didn't believe in paying for anything. And he used to say that when we did that, that I couldn't go in because I looked too much like a sorority girl, which I'm not. But he said I looked like one. So squatter guy meets college girl. A princess, he'd call her. And they fall in love during an AIDS outreach workshop. A lot of cringe love stories take this form, living on the edge guy meets suburban girl. They move in together to her bourgeois apartment. He takes her on midnight bike rides. She buys him dinner in real restaurants. He spare-changes on the corner to take them out for ice cream. And every week, they go to Prasadam to get a free vegetarian meal from the Hare Krishnas. And then one day, he came home after Prasadam. And he said he thought he'd like to go to classes in the morning. They had classes where you could learn more about Krishna consciousness. And I said that that was cool. I wasn't really interested in it. So he started going to classes. That's how it started. Then he came home, and he wanted me to shave his head, which wan't that big of a deal. I thought it was actually kind of cute. But then he came home and he had the gear. He had this long, white sheath they call a dhoti. And he told me he was going to start wearing that. And that's when I started feeling kind of weird about it. We started fighting because he had this new belief system. He'd become totally vegan. So we couldn't go to our favorite restaurants because, well, not only was it that he was vegan, but he couldn't go to a place where he didn't know what the the emotions of the cook were. Like if they were angry, that would get into the food. These were all things he'd picked up in Krishna consciousness. Every relationship that doesn't work out has some problem that can't be solved. With cringe love, it's an embarrassing problem. And looking back, it's not just the problem that makes you cringe. It's how long the relationship continued after this problem could not have been more clear, not only to you, but also to all your friends. That is, if you weren't hiding it from them. And all of this was a secret from all of my friends. I didn't tell any of them anything. But one day I came home, and I had a friend over. And John was there. And I walked in, and my whole living room smelled of incense. And he'd turned my bookshelf into a shrine to Swami Prabhupada. There was this big picture. There was candles. There was scarves. And I said, "Honey, who's that?" And he said, "That's Swami Prabhupada." And I'm like, OK. And he said, "Do you want me to take him down?" and gets defensive right away. And I'm like, "No, that's cool. I was just wondering who there is a shrine to in my living room." So then later, my friend left. And we just had this huge, huge fight. And it started because he had these beads. And he'd gotten me these beads. And the Krishnas have these-- kind of like a rosary. But it's about 20 beads, and you're supposed to repeat this mantra. It's out of Hair. "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare." You're supposed to repeat it 20 times. So you do it 400 times a day. So he's decided that if I do this, that I'll be happy, that all this anger I'm having is because I'm not chanting Hare Krishna and being happy. So I take these beads. And I'm like, "I'm not going to do this." And he said, "Why not? Why won't you worship Krishna?" This is the moment every cringe relationship comes down to in the end, the point where one person turns to the other and asks a question like-- "Why not? Why won't you worship Krishna?" That's because at the heart of the cringe is a fundamental disagreement in the way you see the world. He's Montague. You're Capulet. He's 60 Minutes. You're Felicity. He's potato. You're po-tah-to, but you just can't call the whole thing off. Because on paper, the relationship seemed so romantic. The very things that make you cringe looking back, at the time were just challenges on the path to love, and not just any love, the best kind-- impossible love. There was a point where I wanted to go to law school. And we were talking about moving to San Francisco. And I would go to Boalt, and he would hang out at the airport. Wait a minute, you would go where, and he would go to the airport? Boalt, the law school at Berkeley is called Boalt. Oh, OK. And he would go to the airport. I don't understand. The Krishnas hang out at the airport. Right. Julie laughs when she tells this now. She knows this story is one of the funniest things that's ever happened to her, and she loves telling it. She savors every absurdity in the story, and every absurd turn within every absurdity. But when I talked to her a few days after our interview, she said, "You know, it's the weirdest thing. After we talked that night, I went home and cried." For Julie, this relationship was the first time she fell in love. John was different from anyone else she'd ever known. When she had to go out of town the first week after they met, she thought about him every minute. And when I got back, he'd sent me cards from every place in Austin, with my name in them, or with a poem about me in them. He just pursued me. And he was just really romantic and exciting. Like, we did not go out for movie and a dinner ever, I think, the whole time we dated. Not that that's not nice-- that's great and everything. But I remember, he wrote me this card from when he went on the hitchhiking trip. And he took a picture of me with him. And the postcard said, "Hey, cheesecake, thanks for the cheesecake pic." He said, "I show it around to the other guys on the--" he was actually train-hopping at that point, "--on the train." And he says, "It solicits envious grunts of approval. But no one says anything boring, like 'she's beautiful.'" And I just thought, who would write love letters like this? She's reciting these lines from the postcard from memory. It's the only love letter she's kept as she's moved from place to place. But then, that's part of it. Her love for him is part of what she's cringing about when she looks back. What's the part of the story where you cringe most and just think, "Ugh, why did I do that?" I think it was when I ironed the dhoti. Remember the dhoti? That's that long, white sheath Julie's boyfriend had started wearing. He asked her one day to iron it. It was 25 feet long. and I ironed the whole thing. So you did iron it. I ironed the dhoti. And what did you say to yourself about why you were ironing it? I'm in love? I don't know. What do you say when you do stupid sh--? I wanted him to look nice for temple. I didn't want him to be the bad-looking bhakta with the uncool girlfriend. Not wanting to be uncool motivates a surprising number of cringe love stories. I had long talks about cringe love with a few women besides Julie, one of whom once found herself working two jobs to support a boyfriend who spent all day writing in his journal about the affair he was having with someone else. What makes you cringe is not so much that you are in a relationship that now seems ridiculous. It's that you wanted that ridiculous relationship. You got on the train. It was romantic. You were right in there. And you know it could happen again at any time. Who isn't willing to be ridiculous for love? Nancy Updike is one of the producers of our show. Act Two: M*A*S*H Notes. At one point during the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton said this to the press about the ongoing investigations, rumors, and accusations. I just have to try to put this in a little box, like I have every other thing that has been said and done and go on and do my job. That's what I'm going to work at. I think once we get to a certain age, so many things have happened in our lives that make us cringe, that it is no longer a box. It's like a whole room full of boxes, any one of which makes us cringe. And what we do is we try to keep the door to that room closed. But the fact is there are so many ways into those rooms. There's so many things that can remind us of the things that we feel ashamed of. For me, six months doesn't pass with at least one nightmare involving the cast and crew of the TV show M*A*S*H. Quiet, please. Roll camera. Don't you think it's about time it became an Army matter? When I was 20, back in 1979, I spent four days on the set of M*A*S*H. I'd written them this letter on National Public Radio stationery, asking if I could do a story about the show. I watched them film scenes and rehearse lines. Could be a good idea, Hawkeye could be an accessory before the fight. That could be very useful, Hawkeye. Oh, you say that? You say that? That could be very useful, Hawkeye. Could be useful, he says. Well, well, I say. Well, OK. We'll let-- let's-- we'll let-- OK, well, OK, we'll let balder heads prevail. What? I'd been an intern at NPR. I'd had short-term jobs on specials and documentaries and on All Things Considered, which meant that I was pretty much skillful enough to get access to official stationery, but not actually skilled enough to know how to do a real story on my own. Recently, I listened to the cassettes of these old interviews for the first time in 20 years, and it was one long cringe-a-thon. I ask lots of very strange questions on the tapes, questions that usually begin this way. There's the rumbling noise of somebody mishandling a microphone, and then a little rambling preamble before the actual question. One thing that's-- one of the messages-- one of the messages that I always get from the show is that every person should be listened to. Every person should be-- it's a very humanitarian, almost a populist sort of message that every person deserves some attention. But is there a problem with that with you? Because if you give everybody who knows you, now, by seeing you on TV, some attention, isn't that difficult? I mean, can't there be just a lot of pressure with that? The answer to that long question is yes, of course. This is the actor who played Klinger on the series. He is unfailingly gracious. In fact, everybody is unfailingly gracious, the stars, the extras, the writers, the crew. In a certain sense, that just makes it worse. It's one thing to be an ass in front of people who are also acting like asses. It is another to hear that you are the one and only idiot in the room. At the time, I didn't really know how exactly to prepare for this kind of story. And in retrospect, I have to say, I probably should have watched the program a little more intensively before going to California. Intensively enough, for example, to correctly pronounce all the characters' names. OK. Well, where should I start? Of all the characters, Father Mulcagy seems to have remained the most constant over the years. How are you pronouncing my name? Father? I have to hear you pronounce it to make sure you pronounce it right. Mulcahy? Oh, that's good. Good, good. No, that's fine. Well, most people don't see it spelled. Well, no, I think that the spelling bothers people, because of the H close to the end. You see now, until I came here and saw a script, I didn't know that. And I always assumed that it was Mulcagy. That's what I thought you might have said. It sounded sort of like you said that. Believe me, Ira-- At some point in my brief time working at NPR I'd been told that one way to put people at ease in an interview is to talk a little bit about yourself. If you tell a personal story, they tell a personal story. It's just human nature, I was told. So the seven hours of tape are filled with one little story after another that I tell about my life, trying to relate and all. One thing that happens in radio production, I know, is-- let me think of an example. Sometimes we'll be producing something. And we had a Halloween special. And we had a genetic engineer. One thing that I'm just thinking of as you're saying this is when I'm-- I mean, I've written a lot of scripts for commercials and for plays at schools and things like that. And there's so many times that I'm not in a scene. But I give them the dialogue. And I'll sit there. And they'll say it. And I'll say, "No, it doesn't sound right. I'll fix it," just to deal with the actor. And then they'll do it. And I'll think to myself, ah, I could do it better. Do you ever-- How much-- when I think of myself doing any sort of radio show, I feel like I'm trying to-- I feel like I've got this audience, and I've got these people. And I want to talk to them, you know? I want to get myself across. I'm a college sophomore, literally. What's striking about these questions is that they combine complete naivete with condescension. I am both clueless, and I think I know it all. Listening now, it's not the utter presumptuousness of it all that gets to me. It's the awkward moments where I hear myself just saying anything that I can think of, clumsy jokes and stories that are half-true and this kind of fake, familiar joshing, and basically anything else trying to make a connection. I cringe more at that because that is absolutely still in me. I hear that still in the interviews that I do now for this radio show. And most of the time we try to cut that out. What we cringe most at are the things we hate most in ourselves. Also horrifying on these tapes are questions whose sheer rudeness I was simply too young and ignorant to understand. Asking some of the extras, do they ever want, you know, speaking parts. Asking one of the show's stars if he really doesn't think to himself sometimes, "Is this TV stuff really as worthwhile as Shakespeare?" Asking Harry Morgan, the great character actor who played Colonel Potter on the show, and who had been on countless TV shows since the beginning of the medium, this question. It seems like in most of your roles, you're always there, but you're never the lead. You're never the center. Why is that? Well, I don't know. Some people just sort of fall into that category. I think all my life I've been a supporting character. It didn't occur to the 20-year-old me what it might mean to spend decades as an actor, doing fine, but not being offered leading man parts. Oblivious, I pressed on. You must get the offers. You must-- you've been around. No, nobody's offered me the lead in a show. At that point, even I figure it out. What makes a-- I'm changing the subject. What makes a successful television show? Again, he is unfailingly gracious. Since then, I've flipped past Harry Morgan's face in old episodes of Dragnet. He shows up sometimes in old black and white movies. He's actually in a lot of classics, like Inherit the Wind and High Noon. And every time I'm watching something, and he appears, I wince. It's hard to watch. Sometimes, out of the blue, I just remember the fact of his existence, and I cringe. Out of all this tape, though, my most cringeworthy line of questions had to do with what I called then the "message" or the "morals" of the show. The 20-year-old me seems to have been fixated on this idea that TV and radio should impart big, important ideas to the people all the time. Though, weirdly, whenever I bring this up on the tapes, I seem somehow to lack the language to express this thought clearly. Here's how I begin my interview with Alan Alda, who won Emmys on M*A*S*H for acting and for writing and for directing. All your recent writing and directing and acting are-- all the stories have a very-- they show a lot of human values, very moralistic in a lot of ways. Do you believe that television and film should teach? I think that to answer that question, I'd have to know what you mean by moralistic. That sounds faintly pejorative to me. I don't know. Tell me a little bit more about what you mean. Well, when you-- what are you trying to-- well, maybe you should define it for me. What are you trying to tell your audience? OK, I think that for me, the kind of writing that appeals to me the most, and the kind of writing that I try to accomplish, is the kind that-- For 45 minutes on the tape, I ask Alan Alda question after question. I quote him egghead ideas from egghead books. And miraculously, he gives kind of a great interview, mostly by ignoring my actual words and trying to respond to what it is that I seem to be interested in. It turns out, he's not interested in teaching anybody a lesson, a political lesson, a moral lesson. He hates that idea. His goal is much simpler. He's interested in stories that just capture the way people are. And I don't want to sound self-congratulatory. There are times that I don't think we make it, plenty of times. There are things I see sometimes that I wince at. But we're always trying, that I will give us credit for, to reflect real experience. And the audience hasn't rejected us for that. In fact, the more we've been able to do that, the more the audience has made us popular. But there were people in the beginning who said, "Oh, keep them out of the operating room. Nobody wants to see blood. That'll turn them off on the humor." If we had started a couple of years later, there would have been people who said, "Look, you've got all those nurses. Let's show the nurses in shorts and halters. And let's show them in their underwear and get them into wet t-shirts as much as you can," and stuff like that. Well, we pretty much didn't do that. Now, this seems like a stupid thing to say. But the fact is, a lot of people in the entertainment business are afraid that if you get too real, if you reflect experience too truly, that you'll scare people away, that they'll be bored, that it's not flashy enough, or it's not, in quotes, "entertaining" enough. 20 years ago, I listened to these tapes over and over for months, cutting and re-cutting the interviews late into the night, trying to turn them into a radio story. I remember staying at NPR's headquarters, camped out in an edit booth, long after everybody had left, day after day after day. I didn't know what I was doing. I never finished the story. Ashamed of myself, I packed the tapes away in a little box and pushed my feelings about the whole thing into another, different sort of little box, and then did what anybody does to move on. I tried to pretend that it never, ever happened. When I dream about M*A*S*H, the cast is polite, but it's clear that I did let them down. The problem with having a big, cringey moment on the set of one of the most successful series in the history of television is that the show doesn't really go away. I checked TV guide. And where I live, in Chicago, M*A*S*H is on 10 times a day. It was my Grandma Molly's very favorite show. And for years after I visited the set of M*A*S*H, if she and I were ever together at any kind of setting, like a party or a wedding, or any setting with lots of people around, she would tell everybody at some point, in a big voice, how I had gone to the set of M*A*S*H, and wasn't that incredible? And then everybody would gather around. And people would get all excited. And they would start kvelling. And they would start to ask me, "Well, so what was it like? What was it like?" And it was always hard to know what to do. And so there would always be this long moment where I summoned up the energy to say something. "They're all really nice," I'd say. "They're really, really nice." Coming up, when the person who makes you cringe might be cringing at you. And can you undo a cringe? Our non-scientific inquiry continues, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, stories that make us cringe, and some thoughts about what it is about these stories that makes us have this physical reaction. We have arrived at act three of our program. Act Three, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, David Ben-Gurion, and Me. "December 3, 1986, Wednesday. Another fascinating day in the life of Adam Davidson. I have a math test tomorrow. I'm going to school early to tutor a girl in my class for the aforementioned test. My math class, a joint precalculus and calculus class, consists mainly of seniors not especially interested in learning. I guess that I'm the quote, 'class expert,' unquote, in that I always do the math problems which no one else can. And for this, I'm disliked. I guess that because I apply myself, think clearly, and do a little work, as well as some intelligence helping out, I am a geek. In truth, I am far from it." When you first read that to yourself, when you first saw it, your reaction was? It was pure horror. Recently, Adam Davidson, an occasional contributor to our program, found his old high school diaries. Adam's mom is Israeli. His dad is American. Adam grew up in New York. Well, his body was in New York. His brain, as the diaries reveal, was somewhere else entirely. I remember when I was writing it, I remember very clearly, although I don't say this in the diary, that it was very clear to me that this was the diary of the future Prime Minister of Israel, me. That I would one day be prime minister. And it would be very important for history for people to know the deep thoughts of a young Zionist as he prepared his way to lead his nation. Now, our regular listeners here on This American Life might remember that you've been on our program describing your experience in Israeli Army summer camp. That was right before I started writing this dairy. Read me another. Sure. Let's see. "There's so much wrong with Jews in Israel that I'm going to have a job ahead of me. One thing is the lack of any strong Jewish identity among most Jews. This attitude sickens me. You Jews of the world, stop worrying about money and well-being. I do not know what exactly I'll do. But if this situation continues when I'm a bit older, then watch out, world Jewry, here comes Adam." And "watch out world Jewry, here comes Adam" was all in capital letters. Wow. Yeah. It's interesting that you actually are addressing a readership. I know. I know. That's what's kind of amazing. And that leadership is world Jewry. Yeah I have this thing from January 4, 1987. "I memorized "The Hope," "Hatikva," which is the Israeli national anthem, a few minutes ago. That will help me in Israel." I find that really amazing, that here I am, the future Prime Minister of Israel, and what are the things I need? Oh god, I need to know the national anthem. I'll probably be called upon to recite that at some point. At 16, I had such an inflated sense of myself. There was so much going on in my life then that I can remember. And I wasn't recording it. Instead, I was creating this ridiculous fantasy of, I'm not just a 16-year-old kid who's having crushes, and a hopeless geek who can't get a girl to kiss him, and being scared and confused about growing old. I'm the future Prime Minister of Israel. And everything goes through that. But I don't know. But maybe keeping a diary where one tells the truth, maybe that's a luxury of being a certain kind of person in a certain kind of situation. Maybe other people in another kind of situation need to actually make up a little fantasy. Yeah, I think I didn't have much angst about being the future Prime Minister of Israel. I was very calm and confident and comfortable with it. And I had so much angst about every other aspect of my life. And so I now see it as just kind of a-- maybe it was a good solution. It was a good way to deal with what I was going through, to have this space where I could just be one of the greats. I wonder what the 16-year-old Adam Davidson would feel knowing that finally, an audience of a million people was getting some of the reading from this diary. I think this would feel so small to that 16-year-old. This would feel so nothing. This would be so unimportant. Being on the radio. Being on the radio, a million people, what's a million people? I mean, we're talking about history. We're talking about sweeping changes. I'm pretty sure that he would be thoroughly unimpressed. And Adam, what would the 16-year-old you think of you now? I think he'd be really disappointed. I think he'd be really sad. Because you're not the Prime Minister of Israel? Yeah, because I just have such a small life. I remember I was very disappointed and very sad about my parents. I was reading biographies, of course, of all the Prime Ministers of Israel. And I would just think about my parents, and just think, how do you wake up every day knowing that your actions won't affect millions of people? How is that enough motivation, just to have your petty little craft, and your petty little family, and your small, little apartment? It just seemed pathetic. And they have the kind of life that basically, I want for myself. What you're saying, though, is that the 16-year-old you would be cringing at your 30-year-old version, just as your 30-year-old version is cringing at the 16. Yeah, that's very true, yeah. He would be very, very disgusted if he heard this radio piece. It would seem like I had settled in a pathetic way. Act Four, Cringe and Purge. There are a lot of stories in your life that the more you tell them, the less power they have over you. It's like they wear themselves out like chewing gum that stops having flavor. But cringe stories somehow do not seem to lose their power over time. Every time you remember, you cringe. So what do you do if you want to stop cringing? We have this story from Bruce Jay Friedman about somebody who decides to take action. It had been a mild financial strain to take his wife and travel to Europe. And so for the first week, Gribitz kept reminding them that they were in a special place, much better than Rockaway Beach or Cape Cod. "You're drinking French water," he would tell his son each time the boy took a glassful. And on the way to the seashore, he would lean back and say to his wife, "Fill your lungs with some of that French air." As for Gribitz, he tried to fill himself with enjoyment, to look everywhere at once and afraid that by doing so, he was seeing nothing. Besides, he could not feel entirely comfortable, because he had not seen a soul he knew. He tried to turn this into an advantage, telling his wife, "Isn't it great that we don't know a soul here, that we can just be by ourselves for a change?" But actually, he longed to see just one familiar face-- Henry Nester, his insurance man, or even Uncle Hicky, who traveled to exotic places each year and raved about Miami hotels. It wasn't so much that he was lonely, but that he wanted his sense of reality straightened. How else could he be sure he was in Europe, and that it was he, Gribitz, and not some fellow in a dream? Each night, Gribitz and his wife would take seats at a sidewalk cafe and stare across the street at people in another sidewalk cafe. One night, he picked out a familiar face across the road said to his wife, "Uh-oh. I see one I think I know, only I hope I don't, because if it's him, it's going to start a whole thing." He excused himself and crossed the street. The fellow he went up to was well-muscled and had a deep-seamed suntan but also great swoops of hair that might have more appropriate for a concert musician. Beside him sat a petulant wife and two girls in their early teens. "I'll be brief," said Gribitz. "Your name doesn't happen to be Carroll, does it? And were you once in the Air Force?" The fellow nodded. And Gribitz said, "I'll be going back now. I just wanted to nail this down out of curiosity." Gribitz returned to his table and said, "Well, it's him all right. It's amazing what a whole cascade of things just came tumbling into my head. Well, I've finally seen someone, and I know it's me, right here in Europe now. Only I wish that fellow had been one of at least 4,000 other people I could mention." On the way back to their villa, Gribitz said, "Look. I'm not trying to be mysterious. It's the kind of story I just have to slide into, you know, when I get comfortable. I'm not even sure how important it is right now." But he couldn't sleep that night. He got up, woke his wife and said, "Look, I've always been honest. What's really getting to me is that fellow I just told you about, the one I'd rather not have run into. I thought I'd just think it out and pass it by, but it's not working out that way. I'm just being honest." "Don't be so honest," said his wife. The next morning, Gribitz called American Express. And then, in the middle of breakfast, he suddenly shoved aside a croissant and said, "Look, I don't really love these. I don't see why I have to go through the motions. "All right. Now here's the deal. I'm going after that fellow. Let me rephrase that. I'm going to visit that sunburned guy from the cafe last night. What happened is a long time ago, maybe 15 years now, he humiliated me in front of 250 guys. Don't ask me how he did it. I was a new officer. He was an enlisted man. It shouldn't have happened that way, but it did. I thought I'd forgotten all about it. I don't think I've thought of it once in the last eight years. But I guess it was simmering right there under the surface all along. Now I've tracked him down to Golfe Sainte-Juan. He's out of the service now with some engineering outfit. Anyway, I'm off to check in on him now. And don't even think about talking me out of it. But there is one thing I've got ask you to do. There's no effort involved. Just call me at this number in exactly an hour and a half. You know, I'm not really asking. This is one of those few marriage times when I've got to tell you, 'Just make the call, or that's it for us.'" "All right," she said, "but was there really a need to frame it exactly that way?" "There was a need. There was a need. Trust me," said Gribitz. "I have no time to go into any psychology with you. Just start twirling that dial in une heure et demie." Gribitz drove for half an hour, checked his watch, and then stopped off at a roadside cafe to get 12 cooked snails to go. He was the only customer, and two restaurant troubadours asked if they could play and sing for him. "Look, I'm not in that kind of mood," he said. But he finally allowed them to do "Quando, Quando, Quando," a slow cha-cha popular in the States. As they sang to him, he thought about the Air Force and the thing Carroll had done to him. Very simply, what happened was that Gribitz, on his second day as an officer in the Air Force, fresh from college, had been tossed into the thick of an experienced combat Air Force squadron of 250 men. One day, the entire squadron had been assembled for a weapons talk. Gribitz sat at the back of the auditorium, knowing nothing, scared out of his wits that momentarily he'd be unmasked as an idiot. In the middle of the lecture, the phone rang, loud and clear, the speaker waiting for it to be answered. Gribitz, a few feet away from the phone, could think of no way in the world in which he could have assisted the caller, since there was nothing in the world he knew about the Air Force. So while the audience waited, he asked Carroll, who was then a master sergeant, to answer the phone. Carroll, after thinking it over for a second, said "No," with a queer little smile. Gribitz sat up then. And with all 250 men looking on, he asked Carroll a second time to pick up the phone. "I said no," Carroll replied. And Gribitz, his collar suddenly strangling him, had run out of the auditorium on the fourth or fifth ring. The proper procedure, of course, would have been to bring court martial charges against Carroll for disobeying a direct order. And Gribitz, however untutored he'd been at the time, at least knew this much. But he had been just as frightened of his immediate superior and a court martial procedure, as he was of master sergeants and telephones. Doing anything then had been out of the question. Thinking about the incident now, he got a little hitch to his breath. It had stuck in his throat. And in many ways, it spoiled his entire service experience, just as meeting Carroll the previous night now threatened to upset him for weeks to come. The troubadours ended their number. The snails arrived. And the check had an extra 20% added on for entertainment. "I just wish I had time to argue," he said as he paid the cashier. "I'd take you right down to the wire on that entertainment crap. I didn't ask for it. It wasn't entertaining." He drove another 20 minutes or so. And after some muddling about in a cliffside community overhanging the waterfront, he found a house with the name Carroll out front. Mrs. Carroll answered the doorbell. And Gribitz said, "Hi, I'm Leroy Gribitz, and I'm here to do some business with your husband. And I brought you some cooked snails. They make them all over the country, I know that. But I think you'll find these have a little extra zip to them. I mean, that's been my experience. And you know, give some to the kids. Is your husband home?" The woman called inside, then disappeared. And when the deep-seamed man came out, Gribitz said, "How are you doing, Carroll. I'm the guy who approached you last night at the cafe. And to get right down to it, I'm A02234907, Grange Air Force Base, 1951 to 1953, the young kid adjutant of squadron 4507 who you did that thing to." Carroll, who was wearing rimless Ben Franklin glasses coming into vogue on the Cote D'Azur, took them off his nose, stroked his chin, and said, "You know, I think I do remember. Young kid comes into the squadron, never done a lick of military and comes in as an officer yet." "The very kid," said Gribitz. "And while you're unwinding the spool, see if you can remember the little business you pulled on me that I'm here for now, 15 years later, about the telephone." "I do remember that thing," said Carroll, taking a seat at a dinette arrangement. "You mean when the phone rings, and it's clearly the duty of the officer in charge to pick it up, and you expected me, a master sergeant with 12 years duty on you, to do your dirty work for you, and I wouldn't?" "That's the time, all right. You disgraced me, pure and simple, in front of 250 guys I could never look in the face again. You fouled up my whole time in the service. I don't think I got one good night of Air Force sleep. And don't think I didn't think about it plenty after my discharge. The thing is, it's 15 years later. We're both here in this house. And we're playing that little scene again, only with a different ending. In 20 minutes to the second, that phone is going to ring. And when it does, you're going to be the one to answer it." "I always answer the phone when it rings," said Carroll, beginning to pick his teeth. "Look, now don't be any wise bastard," said Gribitz, "or you'll be hearing an entirely different kind of ring. You know damn well what I mean. I've got that phone set up to ring in 20 minutes. It's no ordinary phone call. It's the same one from the squadron 15 years ago. We both hear it, and you're the one that makes a grab for it, not me this time. And before you make any smart-ass comments, let me tell you why you're going to pick it up and not me. I mean, I may look the same as I did 15 years ago-- the same general body outline and all. But actually, I'm like four of what I was. I've been working out like a madman. The point is, I can get things done now, just about anything, anything I want, if I concentrate hard enough. How do you think I pulled off this trip? I set my sails for it and bulled it through with sheer willpower." "All right," said Carroll. "When does it ring?" "I told you when," said Gribitz. "When I said is when. You never should have done that thing to me." The phone rang, and Carroll, after flicking at some rear molars, picked up the phone casually and said, "Carroll speaking. Who's this?" He listened for a while and then said, "OK, make it chopped steak instead of cotelette d'agneau." "That was the butcher," said Carroll, laying down the receiver. "All right, forget that," said Gribitz, checking his watch. "Our call has another five minutes to go." "Look," said Carroll. "Why don't I just go beep, beep beep, pick it up, OK? We've got the show packed up, and we get out of here." "Well, that'll be the day," said Gribitz. "I'll bet you'd just love to pull something like that on me." They sat together in silence, and after two minutes, the phone rang again. "Carroll here, answering the phone as ordered," he said. He held the receiver aside and said to Gribitz, "Now you want me to just gab for a while?" "No," said Gribitz. "Just what you did does it." "Signing off," said Carroll, and laid down the receiver. Gribitz, who hadn't realized how hard he'd been breathing, pulled out a handkerchief and pulled it across his brow. "Well, that's done," he said. "And what's done is done." "Yup," said Carroll. "You been here long?" asked Gribitz. "Ah, a year," said Carroll. "Do your kids have anyone to play with?" "They do alright," said Carroll. "Well, maybe they could come over and play with mine. Boy, wouldn't that be a hell of a turn? Look, all of this was just something I had to get out of my system. I know a little bit about myself. If I have something like that bothering me, it can throw off my entire life. It's just like a splinter. You know the kind of grief that can give you? I mean, am I getting through to you at all?" "I guess," said Carroll, waiting with his hand on the door. "Look, when I saw you, I knew I wasn't going to be able to relax until I'd come over here and gotten the damn thing done. I mean, now that it's done, to me, it's as if nothing happened. What I'm getting at is it was nothing personal. I mean, do you see that at all?" "I don't see much of anything," said Carroll, opening the door for Gribitz to leave. "All right. I'm going to get you for this," said Gribitz, taking his coat, "for what you're doing right now. I don't care if it takes another 15 years. I mean, you can hide in the goddamned mountains of Tibet. I'll smoke you out, and I'll beat your head 'til you're bloody, because you have gone and spoiled my whole European vacation, you son of a bitch." Bruce Jay Friedman's story, "The Humiliation," can be found in a book that is called, simply enough, The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman. He has a new book coming out in September called Sexual Pensees. Well, our program was produced today by Jonathan Goldstein and myself with Alex Blumberg, Blue Chevigny, and Starlee Kine. Our senior producer, Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Annie Baxter, Seth Lind and Sativa January. Musical help from Terry Hecker. Nancy Updike's story was produced partly with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of hearingvoices.com. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free or buy CDs of them. You know, you can download today's program at our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia, who I just ran into in the hallway. It was weird. He said-- Oh, no. I can't believe you're here today. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Glen's not being mean when he mentions his other family, the one back in Africa. He's only seven, and adopted, and black, living with Cate and her husband, who are white. It comes up if he's punished, for instance. The best example I can think of is he's not allowed to cross the street by himself at seven. And he went over to a neighbor's house and then he came back by himself. And I kind of saw him do that. I knew he was looking, but I followed through. This is against the rules. And so when he came in the house he was sent to his room. And it's upstairs. And he sort of stomped up the stairs. "I'm going to leave. I'm out of here. I'm out of here. I'm going back to my family in Africa. I'm out of this family." Because in Africa, he was a prince, you have to understand. And he's stomping up the stairs and I sort of said to him, "They have rules in Africa." And he said, "Yeah, but they don't have roads in Africa. And so I wouldn't be grounded in Africa." Now this departs from reality in a number of ways. Number one, of course, there are roads in Africa. Number two, Glen wasn't adopted from Africa. He's not a prince. He was adopted from Chicago, which he knows very well. He has other parents who he could fantasize about, other parents who he could actually meet. But he doesn't want that. Not yet. I ask that many times and I have offered to help him find them. He's not ready for that. It's so interesting that it's not a desire for the actual parents, it's a desire for perfect parents. Fantasy is pretty wonderful. If you were a prince in Africa you wouldn't want to give it up either. In 1908, Sigmund Freud wrote an article with the disturbing name "Family Romances," in which he pointed out how common it is for children to fantasize, at some point or another, that the parents that they live with are not their real parents. Their real parents are out there, somewhere, and are perfect. Aristocrats, Freud says. It's comforting compared with the flaws of any real parents. And if you are somebody whose real parents aren't around anymore, really, how will you choose to imagine them? When do you want reality and when do you want fantasy? Well, today on our radio show, we bring you stories of children put into that position. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, stories from the Missing Parents Bureau. We bring you four case examples. Case One, Better Left to the Imagination. Why mothers who are impregnated with samples from sperm banks might choose to know less about the donors rather than more. Case Two, Tell It to the Void, in which we have these funny, moving letters the mom of a 13 year old has written to the kid's absent dad, letters she writes even though she has no idea where to send them. Act Three, I'm an Orphan; Don't Tell My Mom. Starlee Kine remembers back in the day when everybody wanted to be an orphan. Act Four, Runaway Mom. It's the old story. Baby meets mom. Baby loses mom. Baby asks after mom. Adoptive parents wonder what to say about mom. That story from Dan Savage. Stay with us. Act One, Better Left to the Imagination. If you want to understand how much kids and the parents left behind think about an absent parent, and what is that they do think about, consider what happens when kids are born to infertile couples, or to single moms, with sperm gotten from a sperm bank. Most sperm banks provide all sorts of information about their donors. And parents getting this sperm can actually choose how much they want to find out. How much they want their kid to find out. And how much they'd rather not know. Alix Spiegel has our story. The donor is German. His interests include music, literature, and comparative religion. He claims to have scored 780 on his math SATs and says that as a child he excelled at both violin and piano. That in fact, in school he was at the top of his class in music theory. He lists his favorite qualities as discipline, strength, honesty, and order. And when asked what message he would like to convey to the recipients of his semen he writes, "Take the middle path. Avoid extremes. Treat everyone you meet the way that you would like to be treated. And please, read The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham." The donor is Chinese. He says that he is excellent at visualizing abstracts and can, quote, "Take any car apart and learn it inside out." He can run six miles. He can play guitar. His hobbies include microbrews and football. When asked about his ambitions in life he writes that he wants to "help transform the moon for human habitation and create some kind of food supply that will replace meat." He says he's become a sperm donor because he wants to make sure that his genes are perpetuated into the future. He also writes that he's poor. A student. He says he needs the money. There are six-foot philosophers and pot-smoking surfers, future doctors, out-of-work computer programmers, and hopeful actors who are currently employed at the Dairy Queen. They come in all shapes and sizes, but most of them are there for the money. Young men who walk off the street and are given dirty magazines, a small plastic container, and a private room. But first there are forms to fill out-- health surveys, family histories, essay questions. This information-- and there's a lot of it-- is then compiled into catalogs. Glossy pamphlets filled with men sorted by ethnicity or level of education, and then sent through the mail. Sometimes to infertile couples, sometimes to single women. People whose lives haven't worked out quite the way they had hoped, but who are ready to cut their losses, shelve their doubts, and proceed with plan B. This isn't about falling in love with some guy. It's about making a very scientific decision. On the first page of my reporter's notebook, under the heading Karen in Brooklyn, there are these three words-- organized, tasteful, and fantasy. The first two words refer to Karen's apartment, a spacious one-bedroom in a fancy apartment house two blocks from the park in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The third word, fantasy, refers to something that Karen said to me in the first five minutes of our interview. She assured me, in the most reasonable tone possible, that the traditional idea of parenthood was a myth, a bill of goods we sold ourselves in order to bolster the illusion of control. You think because you marry somebody and you love them and you get together and you're going to have a child that you can in some way predict what your kid's going to be like. But you can't. Your kid's going to be something else. Your kid's going to be its own thing. Every parent I've ever spoken to has told me that their kid sort of came out fully formed, just the way that they are. And that the kid just sort of unfolds. So there's no more guarantee that I'm going to be able to identify what my kid's going to be like by picking a donor as there is by picking a husband. Armed with this idea, Karen developed a theory. I'll call it the theory of genetic variety. She believed that the health of her child would be substantially improved if she could find a donor who was the genetic opposite of herself. As an Eastern European Jew, she was therefore searching, she told me, for something along the lines of Cuban Swede, or maybe, Siberian Argentinian. She talked about this theory for a pretty long time, carefully emphasizing that this process was not about love, but about locating what she called "a little genetic material." Then she brought out the folders, a stack of catalogs almost a foot high which Karen had ranked using a system of checks and x's. We begin at the top. Brown eyes, brown straight hair, medium skin tone. And then his education. This guy had a bachelor's in psychology. A lot of them are students, so you're not going to get much-- their occupation is probably what they want to be rather than what they are. Now that's kind of interesting to me. I mean, did it feel weird to you at all that you would be having a child with a much younger man? Oh my god, it's so bizarre. I should mention here that although Karen looks extremely young, with a small thin frame and smooth tan face, she's actually 39. When I saw if they felt really young and boyish for whatever reason, I couldn't use them. I had to pass. Even though it's just genetic material? Absolutely. I couldn't control-- I didn't predict that seeing the age would send this really weird feeling through me, but it just did. And I went to my email group about this and a lot of other women shared this same feeling, that it just feels funny. I want to almost say incestuous. I want to almost say-- what's the word? Not incestuous, but there's a word for that when you-- Illegal? Yeah, exactly. It's like, statutory rape. It was a sentiment which didn't square very well with the notion of scientific process. After all, the sperm of an 18-year-old is no more or less mature than the sperm of an 88-year-old, as Karen herself admits. You know, even though this is a process that I have tried to make very sort of organized and scientific, there's this part of you that you can't really control and you can't really predict. And it just leaps out and you're like, I don't like this guy. I don't know why. That part of Karen, which she could not really control or predict, kept intruding on her search, no matter what her best intentions were. There was the problem of the red-headed donor, for example, a man who was clearly an inappropriate choice, but whose red hair attracted Karen because it reminded her of a college boyfriend. Then one day, Karen stumbled on another donor. His test scores weren't as high as some others. His family had some health problems which gave Karen pause. Still, there was something in his essay answers which caught Karen's eye, a quality of speech that she found somehow familiar. You know, and he named all these nuanced ways of experiencing the world. I just thought, oh, wow. This guy's complicated in a way that I'm complicated and that I appreciate completely in other people. He just felt completely right. And he was my guy. That was the guy. After her decision, Karen found herself thinking about her donor more and more. She read over his information packet and talked about him frequently with friends. You know, I knew what the sister did and that she had a kid. And I started thinking, oh, this is cool. Look at all the languages they speak. And I played violin and he plays violin. And I felt like it was good and right and positive. And I just thought it was going to work out well, that I was bringing good stuff to a kid. And then I called up one day to order. I used to order in batches, like a couple-- not just one at a time, but I was trying to psych myself out by over-ordering. You know, because I figured I'd rather get stuck with extra sperm than no kid. So let's do it that way. And I just called up, after I'd gotten my period yet again. And I called up to order some more. They were like, oh, it's not available. And I was like, what? Now, everybody will tell you be prepared for this. I was totally unprepared. I had gotten so attached to this donor that I think I cried. I think I just sat down and cried. Without meaning to, without even being fully aware of her own behavior, Karen had gotten attached and transformed her donor into a kind of phantom boyfriend. This isn't uncommon. Several of the women I spoke to described a similar attachment to their first donors. And like the others, after her first pick evaporated, Karen felt a profound sense of loss. She cursed. She cried. Then Karen got out her catalogs and looked again. But this time she didn't dawdle over essay questions. Karen did it by the numbers. My second donor, he's a much more elite guy. Because that stuff is just easy to jump on. This guy's got a doctorate. He speaks like four languages. He's obviously brilliant. Do you feel less emotionally attached to this second donor? I do. I do. And this created its own problem. Karen wanted some kind of connection, something which would allow her to feel that the father of her child was not simply a random stranger in a sperm bank. Which is actually what he was. But a worthy man, someone to respect and be proud of. Put another way, Karen wanted some story which explained her choice. A story that she could tell to herself. A story that someday, she could tell to her child. It was what she had to offer in lieu of something more substantive and she wanted to get it right. In fact, this need for a connection, for some narrative which justifies the choice, is so profound, so important to this process, that Karen has decided to improvise a relationship with her second donor. The brilliant doctoral student with high marks in everything is originally from Spain. So Karen is planning a trip, a kind of ghost honeymoon with the idea of a dad, performed for a baby not yet born. If I get pregnant with this donor, I will probably go to Barcelona and go to that region. Just so that I can have done that while I was pregnant with this child whose father probably came from that region. Just so I could have that to share with this kid. And that'll be the way that you communicate his father to him? And I'll take a lot of pictures and I'll say, I don't know where-- but you know, this is where they're from. These are your people. And I'll go back with the kid. As soon as the kid's ready to travel, we'll go there. We'll go there and I'll say, this is where your family's from. Part of your family's from here. Increase your knowledge and you increase your grief is a Latin proverb I read once, and remember, I guess, because it seemed like a self-defeating way to open a book. But anyway, this is a lesson which Karen, and many of the other women I spoke to, seemed to understand intuitively as they went about choosing their donors. In addition to medical histories and essay questions, many of the sperm banks offer pictures, audiotapes, even videos of potential donors. But the women I spoke to didn't seem very interested in these options. Not one of the four wanted to see a picture. They didn't want to watch video interviews either. And only two had chosen to listen to audiotapes. At first this confused me. Then I talked to Jamie. I had no idea what I was going to go for. So I said, well, let me go-- if I could pick my husband, what he looks like, and if he was smart or not, that's what I'm going to kind of pick. So you know, tall, dark, handsome, Italian stud sounded good to me. Jamie is a hairdresser who lives in a comfortable old farmhouse in rural upstate New York. When I drive to her home, around 8:00 on a Tuesday night, there are so few lights in the area that it's sometimes difficult to see the road. Sitting at her kitchen table, Jamie tells me that even though she's always been independent-- she started her own business in her early 20s-- she somehow knew that she wanted a family. It wasn't until her early 30s, though, when her best friend became pregnant with her third child, that Jamie decided that it was time to start a family of her own. She contacted a sperm bank and immediately found three men that seemed attractive. One donor in particular had caught Jamie's eye. And when the informational packets arrived, it was his tape that Jamie listened to first. I listened to his and I was like, oh no. He just didn't sound like anybody that I would ever want to talk with. I don't know, he was just-- I don't know. It's hard to explain. It's just something that I couldn't connect with. I couldn't feel like, oh, he sounds really cool. Not at all. Not at all. And then I said to myself, maybe the audiotapes aren't really a good idea. Maybe it's too much. Because maybe I'm really going to love them on paper and maybe it's going to totally change my outlook. In that experience of kind of liking someone on paper and then listening to their audiotape, was that like-- That was weird. That was definitely weird. That was weird. Because you know, like once you hear someone's voice it makes them real. If you ask Jamie to describe her donor, a man she's never seen, she'll tell you that she think he's about six feet tall. She'll say that he has curly brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses. And that when she thinks of him, she imagines him in a tomato garden, standing, laughing, his arm around his grandfather. If you ask her, really push her, she'll also admit that she sometimes fantasizes that she meets this man and that they fall in love and get married, and live happily ever after with their child. But two seconds later, Jamie will tell you that she knows how ridiculous this sounds. That she doesn't take it seriously. That it's just a thought she had, one that doesn't mean anything. Jamie is 32 years old. She allows herself this fantasy and should allow herself this fantasy because she know she's in no danger of mistaking it for a possible reality. But children are different. They're prone to hope and frequent victims of their own imagination. You know, I don't want them to have a picture in their head of somebody who didn't want to be with them. I want it to just be, OK, it was a man who let us borrow these special seeds. That it was very generous of him. But I don't want to tell the child, well, this is what I thought he looked like and this is where I think he lived. I don't want to paint that whole big fantasy picture for a kid, and then that person's not there. This is a situation where less is better. Better that the child not think too carefully about who or what his father is. Better that the women avoid pictures, avoid video. In fact, I would make a further argument, that perversely, even though creating a child is one of the most intimate things two people can do, this entire process depends on anonymity, on all parties remaining as abstract an abstraction as possible. To understand why this might be, consider the issue of the yes donor. A yes donor is sperm bank speak for a man who is willing to be contacted after the child turns 18. In other words, a potential real father that the kid could look forward to meeting. On the surface, the yes donor option seems like a good idea. It certainly seems like a better deal than never meeting your father at all. But when I ask Karen if she's ever considered using a yes donor, she looks down in her lap for a second and sighs a little before answering. Then she shakes her head no. When I made the decision to be a single mother, part of the challenge, part of what I knew I was giving to this kid that was something I was going to have to think deeply and confront again and again, was that I was bringing a kid into the world who is not going to know their father. Period. So the idea of someone who the kid could later contact, that wasn't appealing. Because the message that I'm going to have for this kid is, this is our family. Our family consists of me and you and our village. You know, the people around us who love us. There's somebody who's your father. We'll never know who he is. He made a decision to do something for a woman like me and we're really grateful about that, but he's not your dad. And maybe that's something to grieve, something to be angry at me about. But I had a vision of having enormous love to offer you and I knew that we could get through this. And that was always what I thought I would bring to being a single mom. So being able to hold out the promise to the kid that they can meet this person, it wasn't part of that. I couldn't imagine raising a kid to say, well, one day you'll meet your dad. Well, what if one day he meets his dad and he sucks? Or he's changed his mind and he's rejectful. I don't want to raise a kid with a fantasy where it's going to be blown to bits. The truth of the matter is, you know what? You don't have a dad. You have a lot of other things. I know from my conversations with other single moms by choice that the relationship between a mother and her donor changes over time. And that even women resolutely indifferent to their donors during the selection process tend to soften after a child is born. On the message boards, the new mothers talk of the quote "mysterious connection" they suddenly feel to their donors, and write things like, "If I could only send him pictures," or "I wish that he could see." Meanwhile the men, the financially strapped college sophomores, the hopeful actors, the future doctors, continue their lives more or less oblivious. They finish college and go on to graduate programs. They move from LA and switch to real estate. They become actual doctors and start their own practice without realizing that there are three, four, maybe five middle-aged women out there yearning to send them Polaroids of little Johnny's first tooth. After talking to a number of these women, I think about that sometimes. I think about lining up all the middle-aged women and all the 20-year-old men and letting them get a good look at one another. I think about the kids and the mean tricks an imagination can play when there's no reality, only absence. And then I think about Karen and I decide that she's right. That if I were a single mom I would say the same thing. You don't have a dad. A father, but not a dad. Your dad doesn't exist. But sit and try to remember, my dear, you have a lot of other things. Alix Spiegel in New York. Case Two, Tell It to the Void. As Alix Spiegel pointed out, at some point, some moms get a very pointed desire to send photos and information about their kids to forever absent dads. But exactly what information do they want the dads to know? And why, really, do they care if they know it? Well, not long ago, this website devoted to publishing letters from a wide variety of people, a site called openletters.net, published a series of letters from a woman in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who called herself X. That's the letter X. These were her dispatches to the father of her child. This father was somewhere out there. They detailed what the kid was doing these days. She called the kid O. His little sister was G. X's significant other was C. Here are some excerpts from some of the letters. Dear Mike, he's 13 and 1/2, which you probably know, and things are happening. So first thing this morning, when his eyes opened and his sheet is, as always, inexplicably half off his bed, he grabs his CD remote control and pushes play and we hear Fat Boy Slim all over the house. Same house as always, only it's red and yellow now, not blue. He comes downstairs all arms and legs and skinny. He's tall, taller than me, in his Joe Boxer boxers and sits at the dining room table eating Honey Nut Cheerios and reading yesterday's comics. He has the number 60 on his leg in black marker. That was his number yesterday at the provincial basketball tryouts, which he didn't make, due to lack of confidence, said the coach, though he's got the moves. And next year he'll be older and ready. It doesn't bug him. None of his friends made it this year. And his school coach had told them they wouldn't, but that it would be a good experience. That's what he and his friend said to each other after the tryout. "Hey, good experience, eh?" "Oh, yeah. Excellent experience." "Now that was a good experience." They're pretty funny. He's got a choice this morning for lunch. Bagel and cream cheese, turkey sandwich, or peanut butter and banana sandwich. He chooses peanut butter and banana. He plays around with the dog for a while, tells G., his 10-year-old sister, who's getting ready for running club, that when he had running club, they ran in the rain because they were tougher back then. And then he checks out his reflection in the toaster oven and off he goes to catch his bus for school. "Have a good day," I tell him. And he says, "You too." I can't call out to him after he's left the house with "I love you" or "Do you have your lunch?" This mortifies him. Later today he's got a different basketball practice for the regional team and he's going to miss his baseball game go to the basketball practice. His baseball team is called the Sabres and he pitches and catches. And he's a great pitcher with a wicked curve, although he prefers to catch. And if you could see him make the throw from home plate to second, you'd know how good he is. Then I guess he'll come home and eat ice cream and chocolate sauce and watch some bad television. He loves the Comedy Channel, and Letterman, he loves Letterman too, and thinks it's cool that Letterman and Nolan Ryan and his grandma all had the same kind of heart surgery. Maybe check out something on the net, like the phone number of that phone booth in the middle of the desert so he can call it some day. And then go to bed after some kidding around. And he'll call out from his freshly painted green and charcoal bedroom, "Hey, whoever put my sheet back on, thanks." I know you want to know one thing, but I'm not going to tell you whether he talks about you or not, or what he even remembers. I've tried to keep track of you through your brother, but I don't think he lives here anymore either. Where do you live? Japan, still, or what? Australia? Like you'd tell me. I'm not asking for money. I'm not asking for anything. I just want to tell you about your kid before there's no kid left and we're both 100 years old. It seems so stupid not to talk. Keep a stiff upper lip. There are a million things I could tell you. But you don't get to choose. Signed, X. Dear Mike, he's not here right now. He's over at my mom's watching The Usual Suspects and recovering from the Cobra, which is a killer ride at this carnival we found today downtown next to the river. He can't handle those rides very well, but he agreed to go on the Cobra with his sister twice, which I thought was sweet. Afterwards, he lurched back to the van clutching his bottle of Coke and making fake barfing sounds and saying stuff like, "Anything for the kid." And "I just remember how no one would go with me on the Cobra when I was a--" barfing noise-- "kid." And more barfing. "I just couldn't do that to her," falling on the grass motionless. Really sweet because G. giggled and said that when he was being nice to her he was the best brother in the world. The other day he bought himself a hat that said Porn Star on it. And I was kind of upset about it and I asked him not to wear it. Then my sister and my mom also asked him not to wear it and he said, "Man, would you just all relax?" "But, O.," I said, "Do you know what a porn star is?" "No, mom," he said. "What's a porn star?" And I said, "Well, OK, it's when a person becomes very good at--" And he said, "Yes, mother. I know what a porn star is. I was kidding. God." And then he told me it was a brand, just a brand. Or maybe he said a band. I can't remember. And I said, "Well, OK. I'm going to get a Porn Star hat for me, too. And one for Auntie M. and one for Grandma. And we'll all wear them if it's just a brand." "Fill your boots," he said, and stalked off. So it was kind of a dilemma. Take his hat away or just let it go. Or buy him a different one. I suggested that, a different one, and he said, "Yeah, please get me the one with Paddington the Bear on it." So finally, my sister called and she said she'd give him $20 not to wear the Porn Star hat. And he said he'd think about it. The next thing I know my sister's beaming and he's $20 richer. How pathetic is that? What do you think you'd have done? Have you ever heard of that brand in Uganda or Greenland or wherever you are? Now when we see a kid with a Porn Star t-shirt or hat or bumper sticker, O. says to me, "Go get them, mom." Today's my birthday and I'm drinking orange juice and champagne right now. He stayed up till 2:00 in the morning last night making me a mix tape of songs he knew I'd like-- stuff like Randy Newman and Paul Westerberg and Tom Waits, and the new Neil Young and even the Clash. And it's so sweet because he actually had to listen to all these old guys while he made it, which was a form of torture for him. So it means a lot. I'm listening to "Christmas Card" right now, Tom Waits. You remember. You do. The strange thing is, I can't remember your birthday. We were together long enough to put together this funny, intense, shy kid who stays up late making compilation tapes for his old lady, but not long enough for me to remember the day you were born. Was it April something? So today I'm 36 and you get to stay 23 forever, in black faded Levi's and an SNFU t-shirt and Converse sneakers, smoking an Export A and cooking penny wieners in some [BLEEP] apartment kitchen with the Cramps playing and no furniture. Soon I'll be old enough to be your mother. Sometimes I do think I see you on the street. And if I'm with O. I sometimes look over at him and wonder if he thinks he sees you too. If he remembers much from when he was what? Four or five and you went mini-golfing with him and then left forever. And I want to ask him, but at the same time I don't want to ask him. You take up a lot of room for a guy who's not here. Later, mystery man. X. Dear Mike, you know I was thinking about this letter thing and it occurred to me that if you're ever going to respond, you'd need kind of an amnesty deal, like libraries have to return way overdue books. Which means you don't have to go over the last 10 years pointing out all the stuff that happened that made you leave and not maintain contact and all that. Or blame yourself or seek redemption. We could just start again as of now. Because if we have to dredge up all the old [BLEEP] just to get to a place where we can talk normally again or whatever, it may never happen. Too overwhelming. So if you want to leave the old [BLEEP] alone and just start now, that's OK. That's perfect. It's just a thought, if you're even out there. If you're even alive. But here's a story of O.'s blossoming maturity. He's playing baseball for the Sabres and he's pitching in the third inning. He does well, three up, three down. So next inning, two out. He's up to bat and bam, he hits a home run. He's flying around the bases and makes it home and sits down on the bench while his teammates hit him on the back and high fives. All that. But wait, something's up. The ump comes over, calls him out on second because apparently he didn't touch the base. So that's the third out, which means he goes to pitch immediately. He's looking OK. Cool. But he's rattled. Obviously, as he starts throwing wild balls all over. Except not over home plate. His coach pulls him and puts him on third. New pitcher. So that's the thing, maturity. Not that he became rattled. That's normal. But that he tried not to show it. It was only evident in his pitching, not in his language, body language, that stuff. But his pitching couldn't hide it. That's what sports is all about in my mind, accepting the call and shaking it off. At least outwardly. Last year he would have been swearing, probably, and throwing his glove on the ground. That sort of thing. Not this year. And then, on top of it all, at the end of the game, I went over to him and said, "Tough call. I bet you did touch second." And he said, no, actually he hadn't. He said the ump was right. Unbelievable. That's your kid, you know. That's the story of O.'s blossoming maturity. Got to go. X. Dear Mike, more really big news. Last night O.'s school had its sports banquet and awards evening, which included dinner and dancing. And O. got three trophies, which were the Coach's Award for junior boys basketball, which basically means hardest working and most versatile. He's a wing like Vince Carter and Kobe Bryant are wings. MVP for junior boys volleyball. And get this, Male Athlete of the Year for grade eight. I can't even explain how wrong it is that you don't know this stuff. Unless, of course, you're reading this letter. Which you probably aren't. Which makes me wonder why I bother with this exercise. That's right, tell the void how much your son rocks. C. Told him how proud he was of him and that he didn't have to do sports if he didn't want to, if he wasn't having fun. And that if he quit all sports today, we'd still love him and still be proud of him. And C. told him how great it was that he was controlling his temper in the games when he lost, or after a bad call, or whatever. And O. said, "I'm just storing it up." And C. Said, "Oh, what are you going to do, explode on the court someday?" And O. said, "Oh, no. Way worse than that." And C. said, "Spit in the ump's face?" And O. said, "Oh, no. Way worse than that." OK, he was joking, but it reminded me of when you said you used to lose your temper all the time. And then around 12 or 13, after throwing a plate or a bottle of ketchup at your older sister who had taken your Ski-Doo suit or something, you just went, "OK, that's it. I'm not going to get mad anymore. It doesn't help me. It makes it worse. I get in trouble. I look like an idiot and it's stupid." And then, sure enough, I'm trying to think of one time you got mad and I can't. You never got mad. Even when I was such a jerk and stuff was happening. You just put on music and cooked meat and smoked cigarettes and what? Remember when I freaked out and drove myself to the hospital to have O. Because I thought you were too relaxed about the whole thing? And you ran all the way, all those miles of city blocks to the hospital and came in all sweating and red and purple. And I was already dilated and the nurse said you looked like John Lennon. And you said, "I'm here. I'm here." And I said some asshole thing and you said, "Come on. Look what's happening here. This is big. Don't be mad now." All right, that made a lot of sense. But Mike, it's still big. He's still here, still happening. So don't you be mad now. See, I'm trying to learn more about O. by remembering what I can of you. It's a little uncanny sometimes how some things are really similar, like this anger thing. Just out of the blue the kid stopped losing his temper at the same age you decided to stop losing your temper. So where does it go when you stop losing it? It would be so cool if you could get back to me, really. I mean, not me. Him. Or me first. Or whatever. Not for some romantic thing. Don't get the wrong idea. C. and me are great, and you're probably married with other athletic kids. Sometimes I wonder if you just decided that it would be best if you slipped away forever, best for O. and me and that you really, really believed that. Remember when I stood on the sidewalk in front of my house with O. on my hip? He was about two years old and I screamed my stupid head off at you while you walked away without saying a word. Maybe you were thinking, "This is nuts. This poor kid. I've got to go." That would've made sense at the time, right? But you know, I've calmed down since then. Even though I was a lot older than 13 when I figured out that losing my temper wasn't getting me anywhere. X in Winnipeg. Dear Mike, well, summer's almost over and as usual, odd things have been happening. This is the latest. Your dad called here, right out of the blue. Haven't seen or talked to him since O. was an infant and you and I took that road trip when you barfed in the hotel bathtub. And he told us that he lived in Australia now, but he was in town and would really like to see O. if O. would like to see him. O. said no. Not because he didn't want to see him really, but because he just didn't know why or what purpose it would serve. And your dad totally understood and said if O. ever changes his mind, he'd be glad. He'd wait. I asked him if you were happy, and he said, yes, very. That you live in Tokyo. That you're a very successful chef, an executive chef, he said. In a hotel with 550 rooms. And that you're married to a wonderful Japanese woman and that you have a beautiful three-year-old daughter. And that you'd probably never leave Tokyo. He said he'd send O. a picture of you and your wife and your daughter. He called her O.'s sister. He also said you were a lot like him, a wanderer, a bit of a loner, and that you often went off by yourself for stretches of time and didn't talk about it much. But he sounded very proud of you. Very protective. As though he was worried I'd slag you to bits or something. And of course, I wouldn't do that. Like O. says, what's the point? You're lucky, Mike, to have a father standing up for you. Have you introduced your famous penny wieners to the Japanese? Sayonara, X. Since posting those letters on the internet, X. has identified herself as Miriam Toews. She has a book coming out in the fall in the United States called Swing Low, A Life. Her letters were read for us by Alexa Junge. Read X.'s other letters at openletters.net. Coming up, suburban child wants unhappy childhood. Adopting couple tries to reunite biological mom and baby. What is this country coming to? In a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today, Stories from the Missing Parents Bureau. We have arrived at case three. Case Three, I'm an Orphan; Don't Tell My Mom. This is a story about wanting parents to be gone from the scene. It begins in the 1980s when Starlee Kine, who was 11 years old, decided, among other things, that she wanted to be a child star. With her parents' generous help, she attended a series of classes run by a man named Kevin McDermott. Kevin was regarded as one of the best child acting coaches in the business. Starlee picks up the story. By far, the strangest acting exercise I've ever heard of or participated in is one we did in his class called character group therapy. We were instructed to make up a character, the only guideline being that they had to be troubled in some way. We were given six weeks to develop. At the end of which, an actual certified psychologist came into the class and psychoanalyzed our characters during a group therapy session. I chose to be an orphan. My character had been abandoned by her parents as a little child. I don't remember her name, but it was something androgynous, like Sam. I'd lived on the street briefly, but for the most part I'd been tossed from one foster home to another. I was terribly suspicious of adults. There was a family that wanted to adopt me and I secretly hoped they would, but was too tough to admit it. The only one I truly trusted was my dog, who I'd found in a gutter or something when he was just a puppy. To the best of my memory, nearly all my fellow classmates picked orphans as well. They had similar back stories filled with uncannily familiar details. I tracked some of these people down, but they remember even less than I do. Probably because afterwards they actually went on to play these characters professionally. All of my classmates were working actors in some capacity or other. You'd see them as you flipped through the channels, playing comatose children on St. Elsewhere, or Ricky Schroder's first kiss on Silver Spoons. Or the young version of an older, more established actor on a sitcom special flashback episode. In my entire aspiring career, I didn't land a single role. No commercials, no pilots, no features. Nothing. It's the kind of record that sticks with a person, permanently labeling them, like alcoholism. I will forever be a failed child star. Kevin still teaches, his reputation as solid as ever. And I visited his current class to see if they were still pretending to be orphans. OK, Grady, let us see an expression that shows teeth and mouth open. The class is in a different location from when I was a student, but some things are the same-- the metal folding chairs, the special spotlight that Kevin uses to cue scenes. The walls in the waiting room are still plastered with children's head shots, including an autographed photo of Marc Price. Marc Price played the neighbor Skippy on Family Ties. He was in love with Mallory. The picture was up when I was in the class and it was always a source of pride to me, that Skippy and I had the same acting teacher. Mid series, a back story was added to Skippy's character. Skippy discovered he was adopted as a baby. I point the picture out to the class and they smile politely. It turns out they've never heard of Family Ties. Kevin still does character group therapy, but now he plays the therapist himself. It begins the same way it always has. The kids sit in a circle, they do a muscle relaxation exercise, and then Kevin counts them down into it, like he's hypnotizing them. Three, you're in the peer group counseling session. Two, you are this character. One, welcome. Some of you are new. Some of you started last week in our first group. I'm Dr. Roberts, for those of you who are new tonight. And I'd like to go around the room and I'd like everyone to tell us their first name and anything about themselves, or why they're here, that they would like to share. There's a stunning absence of orphans. In their place is a potpourri of trendy WB-style back stories and scandalous hour-long drama side plots. One boy impregnated his high school girlfriend and is full of despair over the possibility of her getting an abortion. There's a girl in an abusive relationship. Another boy cuts up his arms after his father becomes an alcoholic. One of the characters saw her boyfriend get killed in a drive-by shooting, an idea the actress got from an audition for The Practice she'd gone on right before class. The only kid whose back story is remotely orphan-like is played by a boy named Robert [? Negron. He doesn't cry. He doesn't even like talking about his feelings. He could care less about the other kids' problems. I'm kind of over it to tell you the truth. If my car breaks down, I don't form a club with other people whose cars are broken down. I go to someone whose car is running, for god's sakes. Jesus. These kids don't understand what being a real fake orphan is all about. Back in the day, orphans were strictly of the Punky Brewster, Webster variety-- sincere, saccharine, cloying. In my class, just as one kid finished sobbing his eyes out, another would start, and rightly so. Now there seems to be a trend of more realistic, less damp performances. In places of sap, the kids seem to challenge their depression into snappy, teenage angst, opting to come across deep instead of sniveling. Name. I'm Jeremy. Jeremy, what makes you feel sadness in your life? Sadness. Sadness usually comes from waking up in the morning. Why is that a sad time? I don't know. I guess the show goes on. What show goes on? You know, the show. The show we have to show people. By the end of the class it was clear. We all chose to be orphans because at the time, they were the norm, the given. Arnold, Willis, Fonzie, Ponyboy, Annie-- orphans dominated both the big and small screen. They were even recruited to breathe new life into the classics. When a show's ratings would drop, one of two things most likely happened. A baby was born or an orphan was discovered sleeping in the hall or shoplifting from the store. Soon after, the orphan became a permanent member of the cast. We picked orphans in response to market pressures, just like Kevin's students today. Name? Johnny. Last name? Calzone. Age? Want me to spell it for you? No, that's OK. You seem to have kind of an attitude, Johnny. Yeah? Yeah. That was Scott [? Newson. ?] He tells me he's been watching a lot of The Sopranos lately. But he says the name Johnny Calzone just popped into his head. Tell us a little bit about why you're here. Because I [BLEEP] love your group. Having said all that, I do think there's a personal element to choosing these characters. For the most part, these kids are from upper-middle-class families that are pretty supportive. Playing these parts, they aren't rebelling against their families as much as fantasizing about what life is like on the other side. In my case, I chose to be an orphan partly because I came from the kind of home where if my sister and I wanted to visit our friends who live directly across the street, instead of letting us just walk across, my mom would put us in the car, back the car out of our driveway across a deserted, residential street, and up into their driveway to eliminate all chance of us getting killed in a hit and run. The orphan's life, though was all about freedom. Orphans didn't have to answer to anyone. Didn't have a well-intentioned but irrational adult in charge of their every move. They had their smarts, they had their sidekick pet, they had their broken locket, and they had themselves. That was it. During my years in Kevin's class, a rope ladder made of tied-together bed sheets permanently hung from my suburban ranch house's second-story window for when I would have to sneak out in the middle of the night in search of my real parents. That was my favorite game. Character group therapy was just as good. Being in Kevin's class, it sometimes wasn't clear whether I was aspiring to be a child star orphan or an actual orphan. Starlee Kine is one of the producers of our program. Case Four, Runaway Mom. Three years ago, Dan Savage and his boyfriend, Terry, adopted a baby. It was an open adoption, the kind where the birth parents choose the adoptive parents, and then stay in touch after handing over the child. But things have not been working out according to plan. We decided to go ahead and try for an open adoption because we wanted our kid's biological parents to be a part of his life. We did this even though our agency warned us that we might be in for a long wait. The birth mothers who spoke at a two-day seminar we attended both said that finding good Christian homes for their babies was their first concern. Birth control wasn't a concern for them, apparently. As it turns out, we didn't have to wait long for a birth mother to come along who believed being born once was enough. A few weeks after our paperwork was done, we got a call from the agency. A 19-year-old street kid named Melissa, homeless by choice and seven months pregnant by accident, had selected my boyfriend and I from our adoption agency's pool of pre-screened parent wannabes. The day we met Melissa, the agency suggested that all three of us go out for lunch to get to know each other. We were bursting with touchy-feely questions, which we soon realized was a problem. Stoic and wary, Melissa was only interested in the facts. She was pregnant. She couldn't have a baby on the streets. And so she was doing an adoption. We were with Melissa when DJ was born and we were in her hospital room two days later when it was time for her to give him up. Before we could take DJ home, we had to take him out of his mother's arms as she sat sobbing in her bed. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I was 33 years old when we adopted DJ and I thought I knew what a broken heart was. I thought mine had been broken a couple of times. I thought I knew how a broken heart felt and what it looked like. I didn't know anything. You know what a broken heart looks like? Like a sobbing teenager in a hospital bed giving a two-day-old infant she knows she can't take care of to a couple she hopes can. There was nothing remotely uplifting about the moment. She didn't smile bravely through her tears and say, take good care of my baby. She folded up and sobbed and we stood there, feeling like monsters. We didn't meet Bacchus, our son's birth father, until almost a year after we'd adopted DJ. He was homeless, too, and Bacchus was his street name. Melissa hooked up with him for a few weeks one summer and by the time she realized she was pregnant, the God of Wine was gone. When we adopted DJ, Bacchus didn't know he was a father, or that his son had been adopted by a gay couple. So we were tense when Bacchus surfaced in New Orleans shortly before DJ's first birthday. But all Bacchus wanted was what Melissa was getting-- pictures, regular visits, phone calls. Bacchus turned out to be Melissa's opposite, smiling easily and quick to laugh. Like most homeless street kids, Melissa works a circuit-- Portland and Seattle in the spring and early summer, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York in the late summer, early fall, New Orleans, Phoenix, Las Vegas in the winter. Then it's back up to Portland. When Melissa's in Seattle during the summer we all get together in a park where she hangs out with her friends, so that she can visit with DJ and show him off. She keeps in touch by phone the rest of the year, but her calls are usually pretty short. She asks how we're doing. We ask how she's doing. Then we put DJ on the phone. The last time Melissa called, she didn't ask for DJ. Her boyfriend, she told me, died the night before of alcohol poisoning. They were sleeping on a sidewalk, he was lying beside her, and when she woke up, he was dead. That call came in early November and we haven't heard from Melissa since. Three months ago, I started calling hospitals, then morgues. When the clerk at the county morgue in New Orleans asked me to describe Melissa, without thinking, I started to say, well, she's kind of quiet. The morgue attendant laughed and told me that all his Jane Does fit that description. Then just as suddenly, Bacchus stopped calling. Soon, Bacchus's stepmother, who would be DJ's biological step-grandmother, was calling us, too, asking if we knew where Bacchus was. He drifted from New Orleans to Vermont to Texas, she told us, and then disappeared. We haven't heard from Melissa for six months. Bacchus has been missing for four months now. DJ's birthday came and went, and nothing. No calls. Last Sunday I was tearing down the wallpaper in my office at home when DJ walked in. His best friend, a little boy named Haven, had spent the night. After Haven's mother picked him up, DJ dragged a stool into my office and sat down to watch me pull wallpaper down in long strips. "Have has a mommy," DJ suddenly said. "And I have a mommy." DJ's going through this thing where he likes to make statements of fact and have us confirm them for him. It's as if he's testing himself, making sure his reality jives with ours. "That's right," I responded. "You have a money too, just like Haven." He went on. "My mommy's name is Melissa. I came out of Melissa's tummy. I play with my mommy in the park." Then DJ looked at me and asked a question. "When will I see my mommy again?" "This summer," I said, hoping it wasn't a lie. "We'll see Melissa in the park this summer, just like last summer." I'm not sure what we'll tell DJ if Melissa really has disappeared forever. What if he asks why his mother didn't love him enough to stick around for him? Maybe we'll tell him that some people self-destruct, and maybe Melissa knew she was going to self-destruct and loved him so much that she wanted to make sure he was someplace he wouldn't get hurt. And maybe this answer will be good enough for DJ. And maybe it won't. One of the things my boyfriend brought to our relationship was a video camera. I didn't let him bring it to the hospital with us that day, though. I didn't want a video camera in the room. I wanted to experience those moments, DJ's first moments, in real time, not sitting in front of a TV months later. Maybe I was being selfish. If Melissa has disappeared forever, well, I deeply regret that we don't have any videotape of DJ with his mother. If he could see her the way we saw her, holding him, feeding him, softly singing to him in her hospital bed the night he was born, he would know what I know, that his mother loved him very much. Dan Savage is the author of The Kid: (What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant). This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Alix Spiegel's story was produced with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The rap song after her story was written by Travolta W. and performed by him, Kevin G. and Keith L. They are juvenile offenders at Chicago's Audi Home Detention Center as part of a show put on behind bars by Chicago's Music Theatre Workshop. WBEZ management oversight for our show by Torey Malatia. He'd prefer it if our show instructed people how to-- Help transform the moon for human habitation and create some kind of food supply that will replace meat. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Back in 1991, a guy in Florida named Arnold Abbott started a charity helping the homeless. They gave out blankets and shoes and soap, served 1,100 meals a week. Helped people get jobs. He called the charity "Love Thy Neighbor." A few years later he was contacted by a woman in Michigan named Catherine Sims, who runs a ministry and business there called "Love Your Neighbor." She has a cable access show that's on from time to time in Detroit, and a prayer line she advertises in USA Today. She sells t-shirts and bracelets. She had actually trademarked the name "Love Your Neighbor" as the name of her business and ministry. Love Thy Neighbor just seemed too close to Love Your Neighbor to her. People might want to donate to her, but then give the money to him instead. She tried to convince him to change the name. First politely. Now, she's suing him. She demanded that I cease and desist using the name Love Thy Neighbor. Turn it over to her and turn over all profits I've made. Wait, she wanted profits you had made? Yeah, all the money I'd make taking money away from her since she owns the name, she said. At this point, I have had to hire an attorney in Detroit, Michigan to represent us. I had to send a retainer of $5,000, which translates into over 13,000 meals for the homeless. That's what it amounts to. We can put together a beautiful meal for about $0.38. So that's where you have it. And right now it's taking money out of-- food out of the mouth of the homeless to defend this kind of lawsuit. She, herself, is religious. Does follow the precepts of Jesus Christ. And she is trying to do God's work, following her very strong scruple. Catherine Sims wouldn't talk to us. Julie Greenberg is her attorney. She points out that US Trademark Law requires anybody who holds a trademark on a name to go and fight off other people who try to use the same name, even if it's a homeless shelter with 100 volunteers serving 6,000 needy people on a budget of $50,000 a year. In Trademark Law, the only real issue is who used it first in general. And in this case, Reverend Sims used it by 10 years first. When did Reverend Sims first use it? 1982. If your opponent in this case, if the charity Love Thy Neighbor down in Florida, were to employ the principle, love thy neighbor as thyself, in your view, what would they do? He's causing trademark infringement by using this particular choice of words. Pick any other words. Any other words that don't cause confusion and everybody would be better off. But if the idea of the principle is that you treat your neighbor as you would be treated, the way that she would want to be treated is that he would give up the name. Why doesn't she just give up the name? Well, because she has far too much to lose. And I don't think any doctrine of either biblical or civil law requires people to give up something of value to avoid a conflict. Both sides in this dispute claim that they are only trying to love their neighbor. Each side prays to the same God and quotes the same Bible. Neither side wanted a result as astonishing as a lawsuit, but the lawsuit came. Today on our show, people who think that they are good people, good neighbors, who ended up doing the least neighborly things possible. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. We bring you three stories today of three neighborhoods. Act One, Mr. Rothbart's Neighborhood. That act is a story from a few years back in which an average Chicagoan decides to appeal the disputes and problems in his neighborhood to a higher authority, Mr. Rogers. Yes, that Mr. Rogers. Act Two, The Little Girl Next Door. So a neighbor kid wants to befriend you, talks to you. She gives you presents, she hangs around. What if you don't want a very young new friend? Act Three, The Ratman Cometh. The story of a close-knit neighborhood. People who only want the best for all concerned. And coming from the house of a favorite neighbor, dozens and dozens of rats. And there is nothing they can do about it. Stay with us, my friend. Act one, Mr. Rothbart's neighborhood. Davy Rothbart lives on Chicago's west side. But our story with him today really begins before he knew any of this current neighbors. Back long ago when he had one special neighbor. When we were kids, my brother Mike wrote a letter to Mr. Rogers. My brother was six, I was three. On a recent show, a deaf woman had paid Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood a visit and my brother wanted to tell Mr. Rogers about our mom because she's deaf too. A few weeks later an envelope addressed to Mike appeared in our mailbox. It was a letter from Fred Rogers. My whole family was pretty excited. Mike wrote to Mr. Rogers again, and they began a little correspondence. The next summer my family was headed to Massachusetts for a week's vacation and Mr. Rogers invited all of us to chill with him for a day at his summer home on Nantucket Island. Here's what I remember. A long, long car trip. An afternoon's ride on a great big ferryboat. And then we were clattering down a gravel road and my mouth said, there's Mr. Rogers' house. We knocked on his door and there he was. The way I remember it, Mr. Rogers had in his house the entire set from the neighborhood of make believe. King Friday was there, Lady Elaine, X the Owl, Daniel Striped Tiger. We played way past dinner time and into the night. I can't say I'm a grown-up now, but I have grown up. And there's some things about that visit with Mr. Rogers that just don't quite make sense to me now. I mean, why would a guy-- even Mr. Rogers-- interrupt his vacation to hang out with a couple of kids? Were we the only kids he'd ever invited to visit him, or was this a standard practice? And what was up with the whole Neighborhood of Make-Believe at his house? Could that really be true? I wanted to see Mr. Rogers again and ask him some of these questions. So the day before my 26th birthday, This American Life producer Alex Blumberg and I flew to Pittsburgh, Mr. Rogers hometown, for another visit. We got picked up at the airport by his PR director, a guy named David Newell. You might known him as Mr. FcFeely, the mailman on the show. One speedy delivery later, we're in the same room with Mr. Rogers. Hi Mr. Rogers. Hi. Good to see you. Welcome. I'm glad to see you after all these years. It's been a while. I should say. You were about this big. Well, the last time I saw you, you could lift me up in your arms. I don't know if that'd be possible now. Well, I could try. How's your mom? She's doing real well. It's taken six months to arrange this meeting. Mr. Rogers is an incredibly busy man. And his staff, though they're kind and well meaning, is protective of his time. There had been some debate about where we'd meet with Fred. We finally settled on the WQED studios, where Mr. Rogers has filmed his show for the last 30 years. Because, as his chief assistant told me, Fred feels most comfortable around a piano. Welcome to this neighborhood. Oh, is this it? This is me visiting you on Nantucket. I show Fred the pictures of my family visiting him when I was four. In one of them he's in beach clothes holding me in his arms, my parents on either side. I ask him what he remembers about our visit, but it was a long time ago. He's met thousands of kids since then. And though he's too polite to say it, I don't think he remembers me specifically. Or what we did that day. But ordinarily I would play and ask the children to sing, It's a beautiful day in-- you know? And sometimes I would ask children-- I don't know whether I ask you. But I would ask them if they could recognize different characters from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. That's what I remember. Do you remember that? Yeah, I remember us-- I thought, well, this can't be right. I remember there being the entire set of the Land of Make-Believe in here in this building in this picture. But then, you didn't have all the set and the cast and everything. But just the fact that the puppets were probably there. They may not have even been there. The sound of them could have been there. Meow, meow, beautiful meow. Meow, meow, Henrietta meow, meow cat. Now that's Henrietta Pussycat. And I'm X the Owl, I was just flying around looking for all of you. Hey, welcome to this neighborhood. Up till now, I've never interviewed a dude who punctuates his points by pulling puppets out of a little gym bag and talking in the voice of an owl. But with Mr. Roger's, it doesn't seem weird. It's hard to describe his presence exactly, the strength of it. When you talk with him, he's utterly engaged. He asks a lot of questions and he seems to actually care about what you say. He let's the feelings come right to the surface. I've never been around someone who's both so vulnerable and so fearless about showing you who he is. Still, playing pretend with him, sometimes you just don't know what to say. It was Daniel Striped Tiger that finally tripped me up. Listen for when I lose it. I'm still pretty shy. Hi Daniel. Hi, how are you Davy? Good to meet you. Thanks and this one stripe of mine is awfully itchy. I wonder if you could scratch it? I'd be happy to. That's it. Oh boy, that feels so good. I was a factory reject. What do you mean by that Dan? You look all right to me. The thing is, I never looked like a fierce tiger. And hardly any tiger lives in a clock. But that's who I am. And after a while, if you get to know me, you probably accept me exactly as I am. The way I accept you. That's wonderful. When I told people at my neighborhood I was going out to visit Mr. Rogers, they kept wondering the same thing. What would Mr. Rogers do if he had to deal with the problems in our neighborhood? Fred agreed to talk to me about what goes on there and share his thoughts. So come with me, won't you, to my neighborhood. A very special place I call the 1800 block of West Augusta. Our first stop, Julie, who doesn't like the loud music from the apartment below. I get the broom, the weapon of choice, and I come out and I pound it on the floor. Show me how that sounds. OK, the truth is her loud downstairs neighbor-- it's me. Just a few little-- Well, Davy, you know it wasn't just a few. That's a leading question. You're leading the witness. It can be more if the music doesn't get turned down immediately. I've only done this twice. I've only done it twice. Haven't I? Actually, the way I remember it, they were banging on the floor a couple nights a week for a month. Finally one night I went upstairs, acting all innocent. Look, what's going on up here? We're trying to get some rest downstairs, but there's this constant hammering sound. Is everything all right? I think I had Julie's husband, Greg, kind of discombobulated. He was like, I think that's my wife. The music. The turf war actually began the first day my roommate and I moved in. We'd play music. Julie would send Greg to knock on our door. Or sometimes just bang that broom on the floor. We eventually worked out that quiet hours would start after 10 PM. But still, sometimes we'd have friends over and yeah, we'd play our music anyways. Me and my roommate, we both figured Julie was crazy. And actually, we kind of felt sorry for Greg. But I guess our music was pretty rough on her. It's like if you're being tortured in a prison camp. They do something to you enough. After a while, you're like, ah, stop the madness. It's just the bass sound. It's just kind of a thumping sound. And I don't know why, it just drove me insane. And so even it was a little bit, Greg wouldn't even be able to hear it and I'd be like, oh my God, do you hear that? Let's check back in with Mr. Rogers for a quick second. Here's his take on things. Good for you, Julie. I hate loud music. Hey, you're taking her side. You haven't even heard the whole story. Oh, OK. Well, no, that is the whole story. OK, you're on her side? But Fred, it's my space. Can't I listen to loud music in my space? I mean, what's wrong with that? You can, but you can put headphones on. Now silence, we started with silence and I will always uphold a person's right to silence. But I'm super sensitive about this stuff. I am so sensitive that sometime-- I was in Florida not too long ago and the traffic was so loud that I slept in the closet. I took the cushions from the couch and made a bed in the closet. That's what I should suggest to Julie. Go into the closet. Exactly. I have a feeling you're getting to know Julie though. And once you do know her, then either your music isn't going to bother her so much or you're going to care so much about her that you'll probably turn it down a couple notches anyway. How'd you know that? Mr. Rogers had broke it down perfect. That's exactly what's happened between me and Julie. We're not fighting over music anymore. I think for a lot of people, the only way they come in contact with their neighbors is through conflict. I might not have even gotten to know Greg and Julie if she wasn't always banging on the floor. But while the three of us were hanging out that night in their apartment, they told me a story that, at the time, I didn't pay any attention to. But later, made me see something. There's an invisible architecture that links together the folks who share a neighborhood. Greg and Julie were talking about our landlady's dog. Not the one she has now, but her old dog, the one that disappeared mysteriously. Greg had the inside scoop from the landlady. I had asked her what had happened to the dog and she said she let it out and somebody stole it. So we were kind of like, you know what? Nobody would have stolen that dog. Nobody would have stolen that dog. That dog was so old it was-- what is that word when you can't-- incontinent. A few days later I ran into my neighbor from across the street, Mike. A guy who makes his living fixing cars. Not in a shop, he just lines them up by the curve in front of his apartment. And my landlady's dog came up again out of nowhere. We were just BSing about something totally different, the meaning of the word "neighbor." To me, a neighbor is a friend, like family. But there's some people that no matter how much you try to be nice, they're unappreciative. Like the landlady from here. She accused me one day of stealing her dog. It sounds a little funny, but it's true. And the dog was just about as old as she is. What would I want with a dog-- he was so old he couldn't even hardly walk or see. Mike's a good guy. He's like the unofficial mayor of my neighbor. He knows everybody. He's always waving. His daughter asked him once if his arm gets tired by the end of the day. Now and then I see Mike going up and down the street with a big broom, a one man volunteer cleaning brigade. He's not the kind of guy who steals dogs from old ladies. But she's 80 something years old, so I understand. She's a little senile. So my sister had a beautiful dog. She had the shots for it, paid for the shots. She had the license, everything. I went out of my way. I gave it to my neighbor Jeannie and told her to give it to her, the landlady here. And I gave it to Jeannie to give to her because if I would have gave it to her, she probably wouldn't have taken it. And to this day, she does not know that I gave her that dog. I don't need to tell you, this is the kind of story Mr. Rogers likes to hear. My, what a tender heart. And that'd be somebody that you'd like to know. Is this somebody that you know? Oh, I know him well, yeah. He lives across the street from me. What a fine young man. Across the street from my apartment there's a boarded up building that everyone says used to be a brothel. The next building over belongs to a kid named Hoppy and his blind grandfather, Pete. About 15 or 20 folks stay at their place. More than once I've seen the cops go in there and bring someone out in handcuffs. Hoppy and Pete keep a kind of used car lot going on the street in front of their building. Cars that Mike fixes up. In fact, I bought my car from them, a '73 Ford LTD. Every time I pull up Mike whistles and shakes his head and says, "It's a cruiser, man. It's a cruiser." These days, there's not as many old Cadillacs and Lincolns parked on the block at night. More Saturns and Explorers and shiny VW Jettas. Old buildings are being demolished. In their place, three storey condominiums sprout right up. The condos are taking over all our neighborhood. Our neighborhood ain't even here no more. It's gone. On the corner of [? Anre ?] and Iowa, just after dark, three teenagers were hanging out sipping duece deuces-- 22 ounce bottles of beer. Gustavo, Isaac, and Hernando, whose nickname is "The Mouth." And who has probably lived at 10 different apartments in a four block radius. Everywhere in this neighborhood, March Field and Cortes, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and Cortes, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and Cortes. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and Walcot. Chicago and Wood, everywhere, you name it. I lived all around here and I know more. I can't afford the rent. Papa's got to move out. But I still come back. I'll always be here. Regardless what? Who moves in, I'll always be here. You can take the gangbanger away from the hood, but you can't take the hood away from a gangbanger. As gangmembers go, these guys are pretty low-key. They sell weed and hang out drinking. I had decided to talk to them because when I roaming my neighborhood talking to my neighbors, the same thing kept coming up. A lot of people were afraid of their neighbors. Who exactly are you afraid of?, I'd ask. They all answered the same way. The gangbangers. The kids in baggy jeans and basketball jerseys who cruise the neighborhood with their stereos bumping. The gangbangers, they said. Those are the bad neighbors. I guess it's no surprise The Mouth had his own idea about who the bad neighbors are, the ones who fear and distrust him. There was a neighbor in the neighborhood that he didn't agree with what we did so much. So he's stand in his house with a video camera and record what we were doing. Try to bring it to the beat meetings. He used to follow us around with cameras. Literally, follow us around the neighborhood with cameras. And say, I'm going to call the cops on you. For what? We ain't bothering you. That's what I think the worst neighbor is. They come in here fearing us and maybe thinking that we're going to do this and do that. But we'll talk to you, you know what I'm saying, bro? We ain't animals, bro. We're normal people like you. Someone like me and him who don't have everything. We were drinking a Heineken. In their house, what do they do? They drink maybe some wine or something. And to us, where we're standing on a pavement, this is our house. I got an older relationship with his neighborhood than the building they live in. [SINGING] You are the only one like you, like you, my friend. I like you. Here's the bridge. In the daytime-- Back in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood, we talk things over. Whether it's music, or a dog that's vanished, or neighbors who fear each other. It becomes clear that what he'd do in any of these situations is pretty much the same. I can tell you what I would hope that I would do. I would hope that I would be brave enough to visit. It's so easy to condemn when we don't know. And if I would visit you and find out that you are a reasonable person, I could tell you about my sensitivities and see if it would make any difference to you. It's funny, a lot of the things, like-- Producer Alex Blumberg comes in with a questions. You said if you were in Davy's neighbor situation, you said that you hoped you would have enough courage to go down and visit. And a lot of what you were finding when you were talking to people had to do with that same sort of notion. And I'm wondering, what is it that we're afraid of do you think? Perhaps we think that we won't find another human being inside that person. Perhaps we think that, oh, there maybe are people in this world who I can't ever communicate with. And so I'll just give up before I try. And how sad it is to think that we would give up on any other creature who's just like us. Half the people around here wouldn't even-- if they would listen to this tape they wouldn't put that three faces that are behind the talking. They wouldn't put it together because they wouldn't sit there and think that we're intelligent enough to think. To sit there and think about stuff like that that happens in everyday life. They look at us as kids that are just probably doing bad. They don't need to do that because we don't look at them and say, oh, they're rich snobs. We say it's a person carrying their life, doing what they're doing. Minding their business. Just because I carry my life in a different way, you don't have to fear me. We'll talk to you, have a good time. Maybe we got stuff in common. A few weeks ago in the middle of the night there was a huge fire in the building next door to Hoppy and Pete's. Nobody seemed to be hurt. Every one on the block came out of their buildings and stood on the sidewalks, watching the blaze and looking around at each other. Everyone in t-shirts and bathrooms and nightgowns, blinking their eyes, the light from the fire on their faces. In a moment like that, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard for everyone to just see each other as people, the way Mr. Rogers and The Mouth both talk about. But you know how it goes. After an hour, the firemen rolled up their hoses, the trucks drifted away, and everyone disappeared back into their own apartments. Davy Rothbart. He's the creator of Found magazine. His new book, Found Two comes out this month as he heads out on a 36 city tour. Details at www.foundmagazine.com. Act Two, The Girl Next Door. So you want to be a good person, you want to be a good neighbor. But most of us have gotten into a situation at one point or another when that was just not very easy. Cheryl Wagner tells this story. The little girl next door is driving me crazy. I think she wants something from me. Tucker says I'm just imagining it. She must be about 11 now, a medium brown, black, maybe Spanish girl with hair tied back in a perfect bun. In the time that I've lived next door to her. she's grown about two feet and gotten her first real bike, a Walmart mountain bike. At first she only turn circles in her small front yard and navigated the cracked sidewalks between our houses. But now she's gone biking for hours at a time. I'd tell you her name, but I've blocked it. She knows mine, though I don't remember ever telling it to her. We both live in shotgun, so the alley between our houses is about five feet wide. Maybe smaller. Sound ricochets up, amplified and bouncing between our houses into my windows. I hate that. Since I started growing tomatoes, bananas, eggplant, whatever I can get to sprout in my backyard, the little girl has been hanging around on the wood stoop outside her bedroom door overlooking my backyard. Ariella. That's her name. It just snuck up on me when I wasn't trying to think of it. I had just turned 30 and I'm already losing my mind. OK, so first Ariella liked my dog, Buster. Is that a hot dog?, she'd ask. A basset hound, I'd say. Why is he so short? He was made like that so he could sneak under bushes in the woods better when he's hunting foxes in another country. France maybe. He hunts? No. Well, yeah. But just chicken bones and beer and French fries and stuff when we go on walks. No foxes here. Is he a pit bull, the boy cousins would say when they came over. He mean? No, Ariella would boss. Sometimes I would hear her through my back screen door whispering Buster's name over and over through the chicken wire fence I made so he wouldn't escape and go eat stuff under people's houses. Ariella's cousins would come over and I think maybe they were slipping my dog candy and chewies and bubble gum. Because I would find wrappers all around Ariella's little stoop by my fence. She and Buster fell in love because he wags himself in half when she says his name. Wish I was like that. Here comes the bad part. This spring Ariella gets a plant and puts it out of her side stoop by where I'm gardening and waters it when I'm gardening. And her plant does OK for a while. But she doesn't water it every day, so it starts to brown and curl. So I begin watering it for her. One day I give her six Miracle-Gro sticks to bury near its roots. Because it looks so wilty I feel bad for her. Other than that, I try not to get involved because I know how attached kids around here can get. Does that make me a bad person? Ariella's mother has this terrible boyfriend. He's tall, wide, imposing, bushy hair and beard. Old work truck. Brings craw fish, crabs, and fish by in burlap sacks that sit and steep in the sun in our alley. Drinks Miller tallboys until he's yelling on the front step. The works. Though in his defense I should say that he does toss the tallboys in our recycling bin, instead of on the ground or under the house. The boyfriend and the mother, a wiry woman in her late 30s, get drunk on Saturdays. Sometimes Fridays, Thursdays, and Sundays. And scream and yell and throw things while Ariella hides in her bedroom near my backyard. Which brings me to, is it just fighting or more? I'm not opposed to calling the police when I hear what sounds like beating. No one has any visible bruises, but it sounds like chairs and couches against walls. Ariella's whole world being ransacked. I hear the fighting in my living room and in my bedroom even with mine and their music turned up. I hear fighting over my friend's band practicing next door. I hear fighting over their friend's screaming drunken 60 soul hits. The soundtrack to my life is Fats Domino, sad, old motown, all wailed against the other side of my wall, trying to submerge the neighborhood in dreamy water songs. Calm things down. Last spring, Ariella's mother sat with her on our side stoop and helped her with her homework. Ariella make straight A's. Some days I'd hear her mother calmly chiding her to clean up her room. This summer rolled around quick, and now the lunkhead boyfriend's around all the time. What would I tell the police? I don't think Ariel should have to listen to all that? You are not going to stand there and talk to me like a bitch and use that language in front of my daughter. One day I came home and there was a small manila envelope in my mailbox. It said, cheer up. Have a good day. From Ariella, the little girl next door. I opened up the envelope and there was a smiling wooden clothes pin with googly eyes glued to it. And I panicked. I called my mom and asked her what I should do. She said, thank her. I said, I'm afraid she wants something. Don't scrutinize everything my mom said. I didn't know what I wanted to give her in return. I couldn't just knock on her door and thank her face to face. I wound up picking some flowers I had grown and leaving them with a note on her front step one morning before I left for work. I don't know if she ever got them. Recently I've stopped seeing her on the side stoop so much. She got her bike and started riding. Her mother casually says to me one morning, sorry if I was beating on your door and ringing your doorbell and screaming for help last night. My boyfriend had too much to drink and got a little crazy. I thought he was going to kill me. That's why the police were here. I told him not to come around anymore, but I don't know. Sometimes I want to take Ariella for an ice cream, but then I think how possible that is. An ice cream? I showed her a tiny wood Buddha once for a report she was doing for school and her mother was jealous. Ariella's father drove in from out of town in a Mercedes SUV with this new wife and kid straight out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad last summer and picked Ariella up. While she was gone, the mother kept stopping me on the sidewalk in front of our houses. She said that Ariella was excited because on her way home she was going to get to ride in an airplane. She said that Ariella had been scared to leave because she thought something bad was going to happen to her mother. I told her mother to call on the phone if she needed anything because my doorbell doesn't work. She said thanks, but she didn't ask for my phone number. A couple of weeks ago, Tucker hammered some rotten railings off the Ariella side of the house. Our slumlord was about to kick us out and sell the place. And all four of us were thinking about getting a low income loan and pitching in $200 each for the mortgage, so we wouldn't have to move to a dangerous neighborhood. We were trying to fix up the place for the government inspectors. One of the rotten railings had a message penciled on it in a child's round handwriting. "You were not good neighbors," the railing said. "You never say hello." When my old roommate loaned a little boy down the street from us a bike pump, the boy never brought it back. And then one of his cousins got shot. So my friend didn't want to ask for his pump back, even though he didn't have the money for a new one. Maybe that's how I feel. Last night I cracked open the door because I heard slamming and cursing and someone yelling, is it going to be 911? I saw the mother's brother throw a 10-speed at her. I saw him shove her into the street. Ariella was standing on the front sidewalk near them the whole time holding a portable phone with her finger pointed at the dial. Ariella's in charge of dialing 911. She looked up over her shoulder at me. I shut the door. Tucker said, do not call the police. He'll know it was you. I said, I can't stand it. But I didn't call that night. Why did the police always tell when they say they won't? The brother left and the shouting stopped. I called the YWCA 24 hour crisis line. They said, does the woman want help? We can't help people unless they want to be helped. What about if there's a kid?, I said. Do you have any reason to believe the child is being physically harmed in some way? Not physically, I said. Well, then no. The next day the mother stopped me and said Ariella was worried about me worrying. I said I never know if I should call the police. She said only call if her boyfriend is trying to hurt her, not if her brother is trying to hurt her. Just the boyfriend. Then call. She kept apologizing. I want to get rid of my chicken wire and put up this big fence between our houses. I think about it whenever I go outside. Yesterday I went to the green project salvage place and picked out some metal grid. The week before, I bought one of those cheap rolls of bamboo. The other afternoon, Tucker helped me put it up, but none of it was tall enough. And this morning when I went outside, a breeze had knocked everything down. Cheryl Wagner, a version of her story originally appeared on the website openletters.net. Coming up, who let the rats out. Why that's never going to be the words to a hit song. In a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Class Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, neighbors and how even people who want to love their neighbors, want to love their neighbors as themselves, end up in confusion and in trouble with their neighbors. We have arrived at act three of our show. Act three, The Ratman Cometh. Katie Davis has this story of people wanting to do the right thing on the block where she grew up in Washington, DC. The block where she still lives now. Mostly coming up my block I get this cozy claustrophobic feeling. Two and three story row houses are squeezed together. There's the Nelson's house where I first got drunk playing cards. Next to it is Erica's dad's house where I heard about Nixon's enemy list. Two doors down is 1773 where Frank Sanchez's mother shot his father in the bathtub. We stayed up all night that night. And then, in the middle of the block, right before you get to the fire house, the light opens up. A low stucco house stands apart, setback from the street. It's an old farmhouse really, painted peppermint green and surrounded by a saggy picket fence. The oldest house on the block, built when there were just fields here. Bobby, who grew up a block over says, it's the kind of house he and his friends went to on purpose on Halloween to scare themselves. We stand on the sidewalk looking through the pokeweed and overgrown bushes, which come up to our shoulders. It's closed up. There's no sign. It looks like no one lives there. And there's sheets in the windows. There's no lights hardly ever on in there. So it's just a spooky place. The house belongs to Mrs. G. She's 85 and has lived on my street since the 1940s. Although she acts like she's still on the farm she grew up on in North Carolina. I see her scatter food scraps for the birds like her yard is a chicken coop. But the bread crumbs and fish heads draw more rats than sparrows. It stinks so bad that the UPS man, Gancy, he won't go to the door anymore and he just leaves her packages in the yard. Neighbors wonder about it all the time. I've seen the backyard. I've seen the front yard. I've never seen anything inside the house. Only rumors. The only thing I know about the interior of that house I believe is all rumor. I stood at the front door and I saw a beautiful painting inside the entry. And there were cockroaches, literally crawling around the painting. Her stepson showed me pictures of the interior. It was filled, filled, filled with debris. Mrs. G will sit on a cement bench in the middle of the pokeweed all day. She used to be there with her worty looking dog, Morgan. But he died a few years ago. She took a bad turn after that. Started looking raggedy and wearing pants and shirts with big tears. I find myself looking away when I'm talking to her because it feels wrong to get a glimpse of her pale, creepy skin. Around the time that Morgan died, the rats really started taking over. Marin lives three doors down in 1773. I have seen these rats. I'll be talking with Mrs. G on the sidewalk and behind her, the rats will be in front of her door just hopping. Like playing tag in broad daylight, my goodness. They're very bold. They felt very well at home because she ignores them, chooses not to see them. Or maybe she even feeds them. Perhaps they're her pets. I don't really know. Rats act different at Mrs. G's house. Out of the blue about a year ago, Judith my neighbor, the lawyer, she called to say Mrs. G pets the rats. Have you seen her, Judith? No. She said, but Bebe has. When I asked Bebe, Bebe said, I didn't see her, someone else did. No matter, Mrs. G is now the lady who pets the rats. On the one side and Mrs. G's there's the fire house and on the other, there's Bebe and Fernando and their three kids. They've lived next door for 20 years. And in the last four, it's become horrible. A few months ago, the family cat and dog, Gata and Tinkerbell started to sit like statues in the kitchen pantry. Just sit there, staring at a big bag of pet food. At first, Bebe and Fernando thought their pets had suddenly becomes really smart, able to communicate that they were hungry. When they moved the pet food though, they found a huge hole in the pantry floor. Rats had gnawed through the brick, through the mortar, and electrical wiring, right into their kitchen. That same day, Fernando went out and bought a bunch of rat traps. The first time that I got one, there was like-- this was a six inch big rat over there. You caught one in the house? Oh yeah, right here. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] the sink. Mrs. G is lucky that her next door neighbors are Fernando and Bebe. They are both community activists. They believe in compromise and working things out. Sit with them a while and they'll tell you that it hasn't been all bad living next to her. That she's great with their kids and their pets. She's part of this community. One of the best community member that we have. She walks the street all day. She talks to people. She's very friendly to all the people on the block. She say hi to everyone. She knows who is who on the block. And every one of us talk to her. We are not walking away from her. We don't screaming to her. It's true. Every month Mrs. G brings me a $20 bill for the neighborhood fund that helps pay rent for an elderly carpenter who can't afford the rising rents on our street. That's much more than some of the high-powered lawyers on the block have ever given. For years, Bebe and Fernando have tried talking to Mrs. G about the rats. They've talked to her over and over. They offered to help her cleanup up her yard and the house. Mrs. G always says, I'll take care of it. But nothing gets done. And the rats keep multiplying. We really feel very much caught. This is an elderly person who clearly needs help. Our way and who we are does not allow us to impose certain kinds of things that would put her in a position that she would lose property or even her own freedom. This really drives Bebe crazy. She can fix most anything. I go to her when I'm stuck on tough problems. Tenants facing eviction, a suicidal teen, or a kid who can't read. Bebe always knows what to do. She started to feel trapped though, in her own house. She couldn't sit on her porch or leave her windows open because of the stench of the rats and the cats. It's not our nature to use enforcement. But here, this is a situation where there's very little we can do. We've done the talking. We've done the conversation. We try not to be the angry, mean neighbors. Let me tell you, I hear it from every neighbor on the block. And very often I hear, so why don't you do something about it? So three years ago, Bebe finally called the Department of Housing and the Department of Health for an inspection. Nothing happened. Bebe called again, knowing full well that if the system ever got triggered, serious things could happen to her neighbor. For a long time, Mrs. G was blessed with the amazing incompetence of the DC government. The sluggish workers charged with enforcement would get a call, put it on their list, and now and then get around to sending someone out. One day an instructor knocked on Mrs. G's door and was apparently chased away by rats. Or, I think she was swarmed by a pack of rats. That's what people say anyway. Every time I asked Mrs. G if I could get her version of all of this in an interview, she said no. Sometimes nicely and sometimes not so nicely. Seeing the government failing, Judith, the lawyer, made a calculation that money might be the thing to move Mrs. G. She dispatched a developer to buy both her houses. With the DC housing boom, they're worth-- even in their terrible shape-- at least a million dollars. The developer called me to find out what I knew. And after a while, he laid his cards on the table. I just put my grandmother in a home he said and I can help Mrs. G get into one. I was beside myself. I couldn't imagine anyone but Mrs. G in that house, rats and all. And what was this developer planning anyway? To whitewash the house? Maybe bulldoze it and build condos. You see, that's how rumors get started. I actively, viciously, spread rumors about this developer because I didn't like the way he said, "She deserves to live in a nice place." I got my neighbors riled up. I dangled the gentrification threat, which worries old-timers on the block. I even got Fernando going. Even though a developer could be his salvation and his key to fresh air. I think that this anti-neighbor approach, that's really jeopardizing the neighborhood and the community. Because see, that developer coming is affecting every one of us. And that's the problem. Because I, as a neighbor, if I see that you're bringing in 50 unit building next to my house, I will scream and I will prefer to keep her. In the end, it was Mrs. G who stonewalled the developer. Wouldn't talk to him, even after he left her flowers. She is masterful at sidestepping people. It's hard. I want Mrs. G to change. I want her to quit creating problems for my neighbors. And yet, I admire her stubbornness and tenacity. But you know, what is she holding onto? A big pile of putrid garbage and wet newspapers pasted thick with cat piss? This is something both Bebe And Marin have thought about. Clearly from conversations with her son and others, something drastically changed when her husband died. And somehow, a part of her has stood still. She's talked about her husband a lot. It was a real love story. They were, I guess, sweethearts in high school. But then they married different people. And years later, they reunited and married. And it sounded like they were very much in love. I've heard neighbors say they used to walk down the sidewalk hand in hand. My Claude is what she calls him. My Claude could fix anything. There was a time when the Green house had all its shutters up, every picket in place. I don't think Mrs. G counted on the DC government ever reforming. But two years ago, people elected a new mayor here and he set about coordinating city services. They started keeping a record of complaints and cross referencing them, getting the Department of Health to talk to the Department of Housing. And then, just when all that was in place last summer, Bebe took advantage of a windless day to sit outside on her porch to discuss a project with a colleague. And well, the rats started doing their thing. When Bebe's colleague got back to her office, which happened to be the office of the mayor, she made a few phone calls. That same day, Jose [UNINTELLIGIBLE], the new neighborhood services coordinator, got an assignment. Fix the problem at 1767. Message one. Hey, Katie, this is Jose. You know that business about the mountain and Mohammad and like that? Let me tell you a specific reason for calling among many. It's funny how we're all connected. I've known Jose since I was a teenager at dance parties. He knows Bebe too. Their sons play together. So you can see where Jose might take the rats personally. Probably the most important thing to know is this. Jose has only had this job as a neighborhood fixer for a few months and he likes it. He has his own cellphone, a government car, and a really good salary. No way is he going to blow this job. He has to fix the problem at Mrs. G's house. The situation at 1767 has reached what they call critical mass. Even the fire people next door are now complaining about the amount of rats in that house. And she's going to have to do something. I don't exactly know how we're going to approach this, but it's not going to be as kindly and careful as before because it really is-- So Jose went out to talk with Mrs. G and he kept on going, pressuring her, pressuring me to pressure her. So I pressured Jim, the pastor up the street, to talk to her because Mrs. G will listen to a preacher over any of us. I think it was the preacher who convinced her to let Jose clean up her yard. We were all impressed. Mrs. G never lets anyone help her. She actually said, OK, come on Friday. And we did. Three fire marshalls, Gerard the rat man, Jose, two neighbors, and myself. Would you like us to help you out with the back of your yard? No, that's what [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. She doesn't want our assistance now. How you doing? How you doing, lieutenant? It's also her birthday today too. When we get there, Mrs. G has beat us to it. The pokeweed, her beloved pokeweed is cut down to the ground. The bushes trimmed, all with her kitchen scissors. Mrs. G stands in her yard, the front door fully visible for the first time in six months. She lets me record this day, maybe because she thinks it will shield her from the city officials. Well, I just enjoy doing it myself. And I did it. And I was proud that I could do it myself. Mrs. G is hoping she's done enough to make us go away. But everyone keeps offering to do more. You all must have been boy scouts. Mrs. G is laughing, but I can tell her teeth are clenched. She never sounds this high pitched. She's really softer. Robbed of their mission, the city workers poke around for something they can do. Can we rake? No. Can we put a smoke detector inside your house? No. No thank you. Jose is trying not to notice that his party is a bust. That he got us all here for nothing. He leans over to inspect a drain with Mrs. G. You're a tough, old lady. I've had to be. I still don't get it. I really don't. Because I mean-- Well, you're used to be people wanting help. I don't. Even what you've done in the garden, I mean it seemed to me-- I'd like to get some guy to help you trim the rest of it and clean the rest of it down. But you don't want to do that. You want to do it yourself. Out on the sidewalk I pulled Gerard aside. He's a city rat exterminator and he is gentle, almost courtly with Mrs. G. He'd love to kill the rats in her yard, in her house. He'd be a legend in the rat world, if she would just let him. I feel that she do't want us to do too much for her because she don't want people to know her. And the more she let people do for her, the more you'll know her. And what would we learn? That she doesn't mind roaches and rats? We already know that. I keep thinking about what Mrs. G said to Jose, "You're used to people wanting help." It's true, we all are. We figure if someone's alone and struggling with things, then all they need is their neighbor's help. And if a neighbor offers help, well, problem solved. It bugs us when people say no. It bugs me anyway. I want to say to her, Mrs. G, you help Paul every month with his rent, why won't you let us help you? Three weeks ago, I went down to Bebe and Fernando's house. They're all dreading what's going to happen this summer. It's been eight months since the city came out and the weeds and rats are out of control again. Bebe says the cleanup was purely cosmetic. That no one ever makes a real dent in the problem. One of the things that I'm afraid also, is that at one point the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] rat is so big in that house and the house is too old that at one point the rats will eat one electrical wire and that will cause a major fire. And she will die and everyone will feel guilty for a couple weeks, and life is going on. We should call and get the house condemned Fernando says. Bebe looks at her husband and answers, OK, do it. Make the call. There's a pause and then he mutters, I feel too guilty. Mrs. G goes to the grocery store every day. I look out my window and see her coming back from the Safeway dragging a cart full of cat food for the strays. On Sundays though, Mrs. G combs her white wavy hair to the side, puts on a skirt-- the blue one usually-- and walks up to the Baptist church on 16th street. After the service, Sarah, the secretary at the church, comes and visits a while. They sit outside on the bench and talk. Never inside. Not even Sarah goes inside. If it's cold, they just zip their coats up. Next door, Fernando has come up with a new approach to his neighbor problems. Talking failed, government failed, and real estate money failed. He just installed an anti-rat device. An electronic box that sends out a signal painful to a rat's ear. From Mrs. G's yard with the pokeweed coming back, you can barely hear it. Katie Davis lives on her block in Washington, DC. Well, our program was produced today by Starlee Kine and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Blue Chevigny and Jonathan Goldstein. Senior producer Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Annie Baxter. Music help from Mr. John Connors. Our website www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free, or buy CDs of them. You can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia, who-- I don't know. Is this right for a boss? He's constantly walking up to all of us in the hall and saying-- This one stripe of mine is awfully itchy. I wonder if you could scratch it. Oh boy, that feels so good. I was a factory reject. And I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And friends, let's begin. Open your bibles, please, to the Book of Exodus, chapter 32. God has just brought the Israelites out of Egypt. He's heard their prayers. They are not slaves anymore. They are in the desert. Moses is now up on Mt. Sinai, where God is giving him the ten commandments, and it is taking a while. And although evidence of God's existence couldn't have been clearer just days and weeks before-- he split the Red Sea for them, and they marched across. He drowned Pharaoh's army for them. He punished the Egyptians with boils and locusts and frogs. Even though God had done all that, now they're in the desert, Moses is gone, and it's been a while. And in a certain way, in this moment, the Israelites are just like us, hapless idiots wandering around, wondering what their future will be, where their God is, if God even cares. So they go to Moses's brother, Aaron, and ask him to make some gods. He collects some gold, makes the golden calf. God learns about it, and he is not happy. Biblical scholar Pauline Viviano picks up the story from there. God is going to kill everyone. He tells Moses that he's going to wipe them out, and Moses intercedes. It's one of the greatest dialogs of the Bible because Moses pretty much convinces God not to destroy the people because if he does so, he'll ruin his reputation as a God. People will say this Yahweh God, he just brings people out in the desert to destroy them. So that if he wants to maintain his reputation, he better not wipe them out. God apparently decides that he wants to protect his reputation. Or of course, being God, he has reasons for the whole thing that we will never understand. Whatever, in any case, God has mercy. Only 3,000 people are killed. The golden calf is destroyed. And this turns out to be a lesson that happens again and again in the Bible. It's made over and over and over and over again throughout the biblical text. As soon as you get into the historical books of the Bible, the pervasive or the continuous sin of the people is that they worship other gods. And so constantly, every catastrophe is understood in terms of Yahweh punishing his people for their failure to worship him alone. The idea that you would have a God who does not want you to worship other gods, which seems completely normal to us, as best as anybody can tell, at the time of the Bible, that is a brand new idea. The people in that part of the world at that time mostly seemed to worship lots of gods, gods who did not care who else you worshipped. And it turns out that it is not an accident that it's a golden calf in this story that's being worshipped in this key moment in the desert. Here's professor John Spencer, who wrote the passage on the golden calf in the Anchor Dictonary of Theology. There were many traditions in the ancient Near East where people did indeed worship a calf or a golden calf or a bull. There sometimes were calves that were made out of bronze. There were sometimes calves that had either a silver or a gold alloy put over the outside of them. And probably the story was intended to set the traditions of the Israelite people, the ancient Israelite peoples, apart from those who did indeed worship the golden calf. Indeed, at one point in the ancient Near East and ancient Israel, there was a division between the Israelites, between the northerners and southerners. And the northerners went off and continued to worship the golden calf. But the Bible that we have is actually the sacred text of the southerners, who hadn't gotten along so great with the northerners. In the southerner's version of the story, the calf was clearly offensive to God. But imagine, for a moment, the story told from the perspective of the northerners. At that period of time, the most normal thing would seem to be, well you worship a god who's in charge of fertility, and a god who's in charge of architecture and a god who's in charge of something else. So you have these multiple deities. From their perspective, you need all the help you can get. And worshipping a golden calf, that would be a fertility image, and fertility is what's going to be the most important thing settled in a land that is not very fertile. Part of what the story of the golden calf is about is how, by and large, we want to worship false idols. It is a deep impulse within us. Pauline Viviano says that there are hundreds of years of religious icons and paintings and saints and all sorts of things that of course are not intended as idolatry, but that come perhaps from the same impulse, to see a representation of God right here in the world. All the way till today. Now my family never did this, but I do know that some Italian families, they will bury a statue of St. Joseph upside down in the backyard if they want to sell their home. And the point is that if St. Joseph wants to get out of the ground, he will help in the selling of the home. It's that kind of use of an image that is actually being forbidden in the Old Testament. You're not supposed to control and manipulate the divine realm by the use of these images. But people need tangible things. We have medals. We have scapulars. We have all kinds of things because we are people enfleshed, and we like tangible signs. And many people have sold their house very quickly after burying the statue in the backyard. Well, today on our radio program. people worshipping the golden calf today, bowing before worldly things when they should not. Our program today in three acts. Act One, Bowing Before the Famous, the story about an accidental exchange of phone messages, one of the most famous singers in America and hundreds of people looking to be healed. Act Two, Thou Shalt Worship No Other Trousers Before Me. If you're enthralled to a pair of pants, is that necessarily such a bad thing? Is that so wrong? Act Three, Don't Have a Golden Cow. A couple tries to get in on the San Francisco real estate boom, cash in, move up, with the sort of results you might expect even now, given the theme of today's program. Stay with us. Act One, Bowing Before the Famous. One way to measure the faith, the pure, old-fashioned faith that we put in celebrities, is to examine what we ask of them. This next story is a vivid and rare glimpse of that, which comes to us only through a kind of accident and a series of phone messages. Ann Hepperman tells the story. I've known Josh since I was 16. We met at a wedding when my sister married his brother. Josh has been a Willie Nelson fan since he was seven. His mother loved the Redheaded Stranger album, and played it all the time. Josh remembers listening to it while he waxed the living room furniture for a dime. He's been to dozens of Willie Nelson concerts, and 20 years after he first heard his music, Josh decided to pay tribute to his idol in a rather unusual way. I had a roommate that was moving out, and the phone was under his name. And so when we settled up the final phone bill and he moved away, we called the phone company to get the name changed and make sure the bill got to the right address. And the telephone service person asked me, "What name do you want your caller ID listed under?" And I thought to myself, hey, this is an opportunity to make that name say whatever I want. And so I said, "Let's have it say Willie Nelson." And she chuckled, and she said, "No really, what name do you want on your caller ID?" And I said, "Willie Nelson, that's one of my roomate's names." And so she did it. I never fathomed that it would create inbound calls. Oh my gosh, your answering machine voice doesn't sound a bit like your singing voice. This is Melissa. Boy, I can't believe I found you. Really, I love every one of your songs. I have every album, every album. I cannot believe it. Melissa, that's my name. I think that I wanted to do it not so people would think I was Willie Nelson, but so when I called out to other people, that on their caller ID it would show up and say, "Call from Willie Nelson." With the thought that I could somebody up and say, "Hey, I'm at Willie's house" and play a joke on my friends. I'm calling this number again until I get you. Willie, I love you. I love you, Willie. I'm calling back. I am. Since I was 16, you've been the only man. I can't believe I found your number. I cannot believe it. You're probably singing somewhere right now. You're probably touring. I can't believe it. I'm going to find out where you are. Oh my God. Are you with Roland and the boys? I bet you are. If you get a call in the middle of the night, answer it. It's me. I can't wait to talk to you. I'm going to call back again till I get you. Love you, talk to you soon. Bye. Hi, I'm not for sure, and I know this is just way on out there. I was wondering if this was Willie Nelson. Willie Q. Nelson, country singer. He's received some mail here, and it seems to be from an attorney. My name is Lincoln Stamper, and I live in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Hallendale, Florida. Saskatchewan, in Big Valley. Grumman, Mississippi. Formerly known as Montana. You rang me in 1991, and I want to return your call. I'm sorry I'm a little bit late. If you're the singer, the blessed songwriter and singer, please call me. If you pack your dinner bucket, you can walk up here and stay all night. You don't probably remember me but I'm from a long time back. OK, here's your number. And if you would like to call my number collect-- I was trying to get hold of Mr. Willie. Wasn't a big deal or anything. I just wanted to talk to him a few minutes if I could. I got a little song called "Deep Ellum Blues." And I'm going to blow the furniture off on it while you sing it. We're wasting time. Call me back Willie if you hear. I love you since 1976, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain." I'll talk to you later, bye. Hello, this is a collect call from-- Jim Howard. An inmate at the county jail. To accept charges, press 0. To refuse charges, press 1. To prevent calls from this facility, press 6. Josh saved the messages because he didn't know what to do with them. He didn't know how to get them to Willie Nelson. He didn't have Willie Nelson's phone number. He tried to get it. He just coulnd't. Sometimes he was home when people called looking for the real Willie Nelson. At first, I just said, no, this isn't the Willie Nelson. And I would tell them, hey, maybe you should look on the back of your latest album and send a letter to the address on the album cover. But then, once in a while, I would take the call as if, yeah, you've reached the house of the Willie Nelson. I would say, he's on the road right now, but is there anything I can help you with? And so we would get into a dialogue, and they would say, I can't believe that this is really the house of Willie Nelson. And they would ask, who are you? And I would say, I'm just a friend hanging out at the house. Josh told me that over the three years he listed himself as Willie Nelson, he probably got some 500 calls. Peak times were around Willie Nelson's birthday, April 29, the Fourth of July, which is the time of Willie's annual picnic in Luckenbach, Texas, and Christmas. People called from nursing homes and mental hospitals. They called sober, and they called drunk. They called needing something they thought Willie Nelson could give them. A lot of people called needing something from Willie Nelson. Hey, hi You don't know me but-- I'd like to talk to you a little bit about Thunder Child and if you have a couple of minutes to visit. And I'm planning a music festival. I could really use some help. I need to find out about booking Willie for a big benefit. It's going to be at the Grenderry High School. Can you help us? I have something amazing to show you. See what you might charge us to come up here and put on a little show for us. I need to talk big time, baby. Please call. I keep trying. I'm trying to book Willie Nelson as the headliner. It's very important. I had some things that I wanted to talk to him about. And also, I'm a songwriter, and if you're looking for any new material. Please return the call. This is very, very important. A few people just wanted Willie Nelson to remember the time they'd met. I'm not sure I have the right number, and I don't want to seem like a groupie. But if this is Willie, this is Nonie, N-O-N-I-E. And I worked at a farm with Bobby, and you came in and then we went to my apartment. And I cooked you eggs and bacon, you and some of your band members. And I just haven't had the guts to call you because I didn't want to seem like a nut, but I would really like to say Hi to you and Bobby. Thank you. Then there were the calls that went beyond general requests. Hi, this is [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I just want to talk to you. I just want to talk to you. I want to hear Georgia Goin' Down. I just want to hear those songs. Please call me back. My name is Karen, and I live in Abilene, Texas. And I have words for a song, and I don't want anything. I just want to hear it before I die. And I work. I have to work. I have written words for a song, and I know that people will listen if you sing it. I don't want anything because I'm dying. I just want you to sing, or fix it to where it can be sung. I think that people connect him with kindness and gentleness, and they want to be soothed by him. And my feeling is that Willie probably gets more of these calls than your average celebrity because he is so kind and gentle and has that aura. But I don't know what to do when I hear a call like that. Those are the calls that make me glad that I am not myself a celebrity. On three occasions, Josh tried to forward important sounding messages to Willie. He'd go to a concert, work his way backstage, and give the information to a security person. He never knew if the messages got through. Willie, this is Kenny Morris. I live up in Gainseville, Texas. And I've been thinking a lot about you lately. And my mother is in the hospital and she has liver disease. My wife died three years ago of liver disease. And I've got some new ideas about how to help some people. And you probably have been feeling something pulling at you lately. So let's just talk about what this liver transplant program is about, and how we can administer to some of the patients that aren't as lucky as some of the other ones. And I feel something here. I feel like it's a new age. We need to figure out something to do. Thanks very much. I was able to contact Kenny Morris, the man from this message. He was surprised and embarrassed to get the call. He hadn't told anyone about how he tried to reach Willie Nelson. When I told him Josh's phone listing was fake, he wasn't angry. He said it just seemed like a prank, although in his case, a rather cruel one. I asked him what he expected Willie Nelson to do when he received his call. I expected a call back. I checked my answering machine. It wasn't that I was going to be crushed if he didn't call back, but I wouldn't want-- that was my only choice. And I thought that it might hit some kind of a heart chord when he heard that message. I had this fantasy that he would come to the hospital and meet my mother. And that I knew that she didn't have long to live, and I thought that's probably the best thing I could give to her if Willie Nelson would have come in there and sang her a song. So it's jumping out in faith, trying to reach for something that's unattainable. But I still believe that you have to try. Kenny says that looking back, he realizes just how crazy it was to think that Willie Nelson might come to his mother's bedside. But he says that back we called, that was a state of mind. He was grieving, and it made sense to him. Even though he didn't reach Willie Nelson, even though he never heard back, even though he actually had the wrong guy, he says the call might have done him some good. It helped me. I mean that probably took up a bad evening from me. I was probably in a pretty lousy state. I had just left the hospital. I was just realizing that my mother's fixing to die of the same thing that my wife just died of. And finding that telephone number and being able to leave that message, it probably helped me. It probably gave me a little time for my mind to cool off that night and probably allowed me to get a night's sleep. Yeah, I think it helped. I don't think Josh would ever admit this, but I think that he liked getting Willie Nelson's calls. But as Willie Nelson sings in the song, "My heroes have always been cowboys, who don't hold onto nothing too long." I came home from work one day to find my answering machine light blinking like it frequently is. And hit play, and the first message that came out, immediately I recognized the voice. Hi, yeah, this is Willie Nelson. And I was just, out of curiosity, wondering what your real name is, if it really is Willie Nelson, since there's not many of us left. Maybe you could give me a call. Thanks a lot. Have a nice day. In a way, this is a fan's best and worst case scenario, both at the same time. Your idol wants to meet you, but he's mad at you. The nicest guy in North America hates one person, and it's you. I caught up with Willie Nelson after a concert in Baltimore for a very rushed interview in his tour bus. He just wanted to make one thing clear. It's just none of this guy's business about what these people are telling me. Turn it around. How would you like for people to be picking up your messages? It's personal. It's just not anything I would like to see happen again. When the two men eventually spoke on the phone, Josh apologized. Willie was polite and invited Josh to meet him after a show in Austin. Josh met him backstage. Willie was gracious and forgiving. He asked Josh to stop. And so he did. But for Josh, things were different. I guess I preferred the relationship we had prior to that where it was more of fan and icon. I could still look up to him, and it was still an untouchable. I have tried to listen to the albums and not think about the phone number. And I've been somewhat successful. Certainly I got to meet him face to face. We got to talk and connect, but would I give that all up for a return to the fantasy? Maybe I would. Unlike a lot of fans who called Josh's phone number, Josh never wanted anything from Willie Nelson. But by listing himself as Willie Nelson in the Austin phone book, he unwittingly put himself in a situation where he eventually was forced to see Willie Nelson as a man, not as a celebrity. And the fact is, Josh liked it better when he could just see Willie as a legend. Ann Hepperman lives in Flagstaff. Act Two, Thou Shalt Have No Other Pants Before Me. How much power can a pair of trousers have over us? Kate met Joel in 1990. They were both working in a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. From the moment they met, Joel liked Kate, Kate liked Joel. But as things happen, it took awhile for each of them to figure this out, the mutual liking. and Kate spent a certain amount of time figuring out how to get in good with Joel. I mean, the embarrassing thing is that basically I would check the schedule at the hospital each week, and look ahead to the seven days and find shifts when I was working with Joel. And then plan my outfits accordingly because I really wanted to look cute. And one of the things that I always relied on was that I had this pair of jeans that I thought looked really good on me. And I would purposely save the jeans, after laundry, to the day when I knew I was going to be working with Joel so that I would look real fine in front of Joel. She did have this one pair of pants that I wasn't totally crazy about. The pants seemed not in fitting with the rest of her, and so it always threw me for a moment. Describe the pants, please. Well, they were acid washed. They were awesome. I loved them. They were acid-washed denim, speckly white, tapered at the bottom at the ankle. And a little bit, not balloonish but a little puffy. And they ballooned out in the thighs in a sort of jaud Paris way. And the really crazy part was what happened up near the top. They had this fold over front area. The feature of the pants that I thought made them really amazing is that they had at the top-- you have to try to picture this. They came up pretty high on your waist, like a good, gosh, four inches above your belly button. But at the very top of them in the front, they rolled over into this flap, this big flap. And they were very cool. There was a lot going on in these jeans. I don't want to pretend like I'm some incredible fashion maven. I'm not. But these were not a good-looking pair of pants. What was the original context of these pants? I'm picturing a Boy George concert, maybe The Cure? Exactly, yeah, you got the timing right. I bought them at this store. I remember now, I bought them at a store in Boston. I bought them probably late '80s or '87, something like that, in this store that was very just '80s Boston clothes, which is just a certain look. I mean it's definitely got a little of the Bananarama thing going on, a little but of Boy George. But I'm still dragging them out at this point because I'm thinking they look so good on me, and I like them so much. So one of my strategies was I'd see if we were working evening shift together because an evening shift meant we were more likely, as a group of people, to go out for a beer after. And that would be a golden opportunity to wear the pants because you'd wear them, and then you're going to be out afterwards in a bar. And it's just like, I've got a whole evening of these pants at that point, and I know I'm going to be just golden. Do you remember any key dates where you wore the pants? A key date? The first night when it became apparent that Joel was interested in me was a night we had an evening shift. And then a bunch of us went to this bar, and the group started dwindling and dwindling and dwindling until it was left with just me and Joel. And I was wearing the pants that night. And it was a very successful night because that was the night when he was making eyes at me, and I could tell this is going to go somewhere. He's going to ask me out. Really, so the actual night that you turned the corner with your husband and the father of your child, you were wearing the pants? Yes I was. That's right. That was the pivotal night on which your life turned from what it was to what it is. That's right, that's right. Well said. Joel and I began dating, and I'm just very, very happy at this point because he's just a wonderful person. And I can't believe it's worked out, and we start dating. So we're going along, and we're working together and dating. And it's reached-- I'd say we're at about four months at this point. So we've been dating for about four months, but it's at that point where relationships get where I think it's not super serious yet, but you know that this is going to keep going and this has a lot of potential. You're both clearly very into each other. So we're at that point, about four months, and Joel was actually over at my apartment. Kate's in her bedroom at her apartment, going through her clothes and figuring out which ones she should keep and which ones she should give to Salvation Army. And I opened up my drawer where I keep my pants and lifted the denim, the stonewashed pants out of the drawer, not at all because I was considering sending them to Salvation Army, but only because I had to move them to find the pants on the bottom of the drawer that of course I might send to Salvation Army. And as I pulled the pants out the drawer, Joel, sitting on the bed, sat there a minute and cleared his throat and said-- "You sure you want to keep those pants?" And she stops and looks at me and says, "Well, yeah. Of course, I mean I think I do, why? And so I say, "Well, you know, I just think those pants are maybe a little bit out of style now." He said, "Well, do you think maybe they're just not in so much style anymore?" And as the words are coming out, I see Kate's face flushing, becoming pinker and then red. And I was like, what? She's holding them in her hand, and looking at them, and looking at me, and looking back down at them. And I realize these aren't just another pair of pants. These were the special pants. And then i mean it's a very uncomfortable situation for me because a, again, I'm not a particularly fashionable guy myself so I probably don't have any right saying this to anybody. But then b, this is the woman who I've really fallen in love with. And this is one of the first moments when I've had to say to her, there's something about you, or something connected to you that I don't like. I couldn't believe it that these pants that I'd been purposely wearing in front of him for so many times and I thought had done such a good job for me-- and he was now saying I should put them in a bag and put them on the curb, basically. You thought that the pants had actually done a job on him. You thought the pants were part of your arsenal and part of your power over him. I knew that they were part of what made me look foxy. And there he was basically-- four months into it where it had worked, we were together, and he was saying the pants are awful. You know we're doing our show this week on the idea of the golden calf, the story of the golden calf from the Bible. And I feel like that story raises this question of, is the act of worshiping something, does that have value in and of itself even if you're worshipping the wrong thing? Right, well, I think when I talk about it with you, it makes me think yes, because by worshipping the pants, they gave me confidence, which gave me, I think, some degree maybe of attractiveness to this person who ultimately I was trying to attract. Because clearly when I was walking around in those pants, I feeling pretty confident. I thought I looked great. And you felt that way because of the pants? At times, yeah. Haven't you ever worn something and just thought, I look good right now? Do you think you could have gotten Joel without the pants? Wow, gosh. I hate to even have to think about it Ira. I don't know. You think the pants were that big of a factor? I don't know. I don't know. I mean it's been 11 years, but maybe those pants had something to do with it. I'd have to ask him. I'd have to ask him. I would have fallen for her if she were showing up in Garanimals everyday, say, or leisure suits or something. I mean as anybody knows who's ever fallen in love, you idolize the person you're falling in love with. And in those early days particularly, they feel perfect to you. And then you start asking yourself all sorts of questions. All sorts of insecurities come up. Why would this perfect person necessarily fall for me and accept me and want to be with me? But then when you discover a chink in that person's perfection, when you find a flaw, in this case Kate had bad taste at least in this one pair of pants, then it somehow makes you feel a little bit more comfortable. You feel like, maybe I do have a chance here because God, those pants had a chance with her. Let me read to you from the book of Exodus. Moses' reaction when he sees the calf, and the dancing actually. There's the calf and there's dancing. He gets rid of the new ten commandments, the brand new, freshly written ten commandments, breaks them at the foot of the mountain. And then in verse 32 of Exodus, says "And he took the calf that they had made and burnt it with fire and ground into powder and scattered it upon the water, and made the people of Israel drink it." If I have to think of that happening to those jeans, I'm going to be really depressed. They didn't deserve that. And I really wouldn't want to drink them. And of course, you know what I did, right? What? I threw them away. I gave them to the Salvation Army. Did you regret it? I kind of did because I thought, I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have-- if we had been going out for a year and he said it, I probably wouldn't have done it. It was that four-month thing when you're still probably going to do the thing to please the person. Whereas a year, you just are like, you're on your own here. It's like, ah, I'll still wear these pants. I would probably still be wearing them today. How lucky for him that he got you during that brief window. He was in the window. He didn't even know it. When you would actually do what he wanted. Exactly, exactly. I'd be sitting in them right now. You miss the jeans. You're darn right I do. Those were a great pair of jeans, and they're gone. 1990, I threw them away. Someone maybe has them, though. I recycled them to the Salvation Army so hopefully-- you know what I hope? That they brought some power to somebody else. I don't know. I'm just trying to picture who would have bought them from the Salvation Army. Somebody might have picked them up. Like maybe some local theater company was doing an '80s version of Godspell. They're doing The Breakfast Club at a dinner theater, and someone needed to wear them for the Ally Sheedy role. Look, all I'm saying is, if I still had them, you might still see me walking around in them today. They're going to come back, by the way. Kate and Joel live in New York City with their now 12-week-old daughter, who they named Adeline after some debate. Can you imagine the conversations with Joel when we were picking names? Think of it, the taste issues. Were there other strong contenders or was Adeline a sweep? Yeah, there was one I wanted that he didn't want. He thought it was tacky. Let's hear it. Now I'm embarrassed, but I like the name Tatum. I'm stuck in the '80s movies. Is that an '80s thing? I would say that. Coming up, the eternal question, money versus pee, which is more powerful? In a minute. I know all of our three year old listeners are going to stay around for that-- from Public Radio International-- when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program of course we bring you some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, The Golden Calf, stories of people worshipping false gods, and whether that is always such a bad thing. We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Don't Have a Golden Calf. What show about worshiping false gods could be complete without a story about money, or real estate, or hipness? Fortunately for us, this next story is about all three. Iggy Scam tells the tale. When I first moved to the city, The Chronicle had run a story about the donut shop in the corner, the one with the huge sign that proudly proclaimed, "Open 25 Hours." The story in the paper called the corner where the donut shop was the epicenter of crime, and they meant for all of San Francisco. It was a staggering idea. I would sit in the donut shop and try to imagine crime, disturbance, discontent radiating outward across the entire city from that very spot 25 hours a day. Years later, I moved into my friend Jimmy's house on the alley behind the donut shop and got to sit back and watch it all. On San Carlos Street, there was a daily sweet sad procession, a never ending back and forth that we could watch from our steps. There was the sound of man fruit bar carts up the alley, clanging their bells. And there was that tense, menacing no sound of cops cruising slowly the wrong way down the alley. The girl down the street that I had a crush on would walk, short sleeves in the Mission sun, smiling sweetly on her way to morning coffee at 1:00 PM. And Tony the drug dealer would walk the other way looking exhausted, sagging against a palm tree with gang tags carved into its weathered trunk. My favorite time on San Carlos was 6:00 AM, just before the street woke up. Staring down the alley past the tired old Victorians and shoes dangling from telephone wires, I could imagine 10, 20, 100 of 6:00 AM's all exactly like this one, yawning and stretching into the past. It was a working class street, a ghetto alley, a place with problems that money wouldn't solve, but for now, asleep and dreaming. But the Mission was changing. Streets that had been called down and out were now called green, and the Mission's turd and graffiti motif is now fashionable. Termite-ridden, drafty old Victorians were bought at exorbitant prices, not to live in but to immediately resell like internet stocks. Everyone in San Francisco had a dream that somehow hinged on real estate. The stock market was pumping so much easy cash into the neighborhood, the good times were so good, that the dream even had a name, Cleaning Up the Mission. Developers and slamming histories congratulated themselves, believing that the ordinary greed was actually a moral force, a rising tide to lift all boats. Our landlord up on the hill had bought into that dream too. Our landlord, who I'll call Maurice, was a dour-looking, henpecked little guy, a self-employed electrician who happened to own a couple houses. When I think of Maurice, I always think of him with his sad, black mustache and his tools, standing in the driveway as my roommate Jimmy came home from the flea market with his huge, green, grafitti-covered van. Maurice always seem to be thinking, how did this happen to me? He had bought our house eight years before and inherited Jimmy as his tenant. San Francisco's rent control laws are a stronger "'til death do us part" legal bind than marriage. And by law, Jimmy and Maurice would go to their graves with Jim still paying a sweet 1988 rent. In the 12 years Jim had lived in San Carlos, he'd become as much a part of the street as the street sign itself. Everybody knew Jimmy. Even the gang kids dressed in blue shook their heads and laughed when the green van drove by. Jim was a self-employed scavenger who sold trash at flea markets, gave away more of it to anyone who asked. Homeless guys came by for clothes and blankets. Jim's friends came by looking for baseball gloves, or Super 8 projectors, or a PA for a protest at Civic Center, and he usually hooked everybody up. He was also a long-time neighborhood bartender and had a band. Just about everybody in the Mission had either bought a beer from Jimmy or played drums in his band. Even though the Mission district real estate goldmine was becoming national news, Maurice never seemed ambitious enough to try to evict Jimmy and cash in. But he was married to Claire, a sour, always sneering woman with upwardly mobile aspirations of her own. Claire hated Jimmy. It was easy to imagine her up there on the hill working on Maurice, telling him if he was any kind of a real man, he'd get rid of that wing-nut trash salesman tenet of his, and they could sell the house and be rich. Or maybe she wanted to evict us and move into our house in the trendy, up and coming Mission that now had valet parking. We knew that Maurice's first wife had left him several years ago for another woman. Maybe Maurice thought that if he got left behind in the get rich quick housing market that Claire would leave him too. Whatever he thought, our house was now something else to him, a symbol of some brighter, well-heeled future. It was a chance, a chance for a henpecked electrician to finally hit it big, to be where the action was, to not be a small-time landlord anymore. And all they would have to do would be to get rid of us. We always paid our rent on time and had no problems with Maurice. It would be nearly impossible for him to legally evict us. So Maurice hired a notoriously ruthless and shark-like eviction trial lawyer, a man so stereotypically vile that when tenants' rights protesters staged demonstrations on his lawn, he would come out and greet them, waving and yelling smile as he videotaped them in action. Maurice's hotshot lawyer had never lost a case. He had a secret weapon, a little known law called the Ellis Act that allows landlords to evict their tenants if the landlord takes their property off the rental market forever. After they evict the tenants, the landlords can sell the property, move into it or turn it into a condo, but there is one catch. If the property is re-rented any time in the next 10 years, it has to be offered first at the old rent to the evicted tenants. This was not a big deal for Maurice's lawyer though because most people evicted under the Ellis Act didn't speak English and didn't know their rights. And the rest would move away and not fight it. The lawyer served eviction notices to us and our downstairs neighbors. Within a month, the neighbors had taken a settlement and left the city. But Jimmy decided to hire a lawyer and fight it in court. As long as the lawsuit went on, we would continue to live in the house and Maurice could not collect rent. Maurice and Claire were confident though. They sold their house on the hill and moved to the Mission. In fact, they moved in right downstairs. The first month was awful. Jim said he could hear them through his walls giggling and having sex in the bathtub, something I did not want to have to imagine. They were clearly enjoying their new lifestyle in the resurgent Mission, playing the part of wealthy real estate movers and shakers. Claire had taken to smoking cigars, and she would stand on the porch and sneer with great satisfaction at us, arms folded, saying things like, "Have any luck finding a new place yet, Jim? Better start looking." They would have their one friend over and talk with him loudly in front of the house about how they would soon be rid of us. But I actually felt sorry for Maurice. The Mission was no place for this kind of hubris, and I think he knew it. The electrician was in over his head, and he was about to meet George. George was the homeless guy who slept under our stairs. But to say George was just some homeless guy would be to say Shakespeare was just some writer. George had reinvented the role. With his trench coat and thick, greasy beard and wild mass of jet black hair, George was more of an ominous presence, a force, not so much a harbinger of doom, but a reminder that you were doomed. a feeling like a hangover that had always been part of San Carlos Street and always would be. While everyone else in town was worried about eviction, George wandered the streets unconcerned because he was, in fact, in charge. He slept anywhere he wanted at any time of day. He would go to the pizza place on the corner, put his feet up on the sidewalk table and throw his head back, surveying his domain through always squinting eyes. He would not buy a thing. Instead, he had the power to assess taxes on passersby. If you had a six pack, George would always get a cold one off of you. If you gave him a cigarette, George would stroke his beard and yell, "Give me two." George also left massive turds in front of our garage door every morning. There was nothing you could really do about it, but he was pretty good about going in a bucket if you put one out for him. Since Maurice was new downstairs, we decided to see if he could figure this out. Maurice had lived on Bernal Hill, a nice neighborhood full of kindly older lesbians where everyone always seemed to be out walking their dogs. It was a pretty part of town with trees and views. Nothing there could have prepared him for George. We would sit and drink beer on the steps and watch Maurice clean up after George. After a week or so of this, he installed one of those annoying security floodlights that turn on if anyone walks within, say, 100 yards if it. We were blinded anytime we walked up our steps at night. I found that if you just unscrewed the bulb a little bit, it wouldn't work. But one day George came by, and Jimmy asked him what he thought of the new light. George said, "Oh, I love those things. I can make sure I have all my things together before the light goes out and I go to sleep." After that, we quit unscrewing it. The case dragged on, and weeks with George stretched into months. Maurice and Claire's friend came over less and less, and then not at all. The bill from the hotshot attorney was mounting, and the flood of money into the neighborhood wasn't exactly cleaning up the Mission. No, if a rising tide was going to lift all boats in the Mission, that tide would not be money, but urine. The most visible nightly example of this so called economic revitalization was that the people pissing in our garden at night had on more expensive clothes. I'd come home to find giggling drunk girls in those huge shoes with their pants down peeing away in their driveway while their boyfriends drunkenly tried to pick all of Jim's flowers to give to them. I saw people mastering the art of pissing with one hand and talking on a cellphone with the other. The Latino working class bars in the Mission had all been systematically closed by the police because the patrons sold crack and got in fights with each other. They'd been replaced by hipster bars where the patrons all did coke and then went out to try to fight us. I'd see leather-coated, side burn-wearing guys scoring heroin at 16th and Mission and think, damn, it's like these people couldn't wait to move to the ghetto and lose their minds. Maurice, apparently frustrated, next turned against the very thing that might make him rich, the property itself. Possibly inspired by the high-ceilinged, white-walled lofts that all the kids were into these days, Maurice started gutting the downstairs interior, ripping out the solid redwood cabinets and the counter tops that had been constructed over 100 years ago out of trees brought over on ships from New Zealand. The craftsmanship had stood up through three major earthquakes, but it would not survive a Mission real estate craze. The legal case had by this time dragged on so long that it was no longer clear what winning might mean. Maurice and Claire were always locked inside now, their security alarm evilly protecting them from the epicenter of crime of a mere 24 hours a day. A bunker-like paranoia emanated from the downstairs unit. One day, our phone wasn't working so we had a guy from the phone company come look at it. "Well, here's your problem," he yelled in disbelief as he lifted our grey box. Maurice and Claire were tapping our phone. Later, a small dispute over parking in the driveway ended with Claire punching Jimmy's girlfriend in the head. Soon after that, Claire apparently moved away, curiously being escorted by a younger man who carried her bags and opened the car door for her while she gazed longingly up at him. No more sex in the bathtub for Maurice. After that, we almost never saw Maurice, except when he came home from work and slammed his door. And as for Jimmy, the block he had lived on for 12 years had changed considerably in a short time. Three Latino families down the block had been evicted under the Ellis Act, and now their former houses stood empty because they were more valuable that way. One was surrounded by rubble where the owner had tried to turn the Victorian into a loft but had run out of money. Some of our friends had just given up and moved away, including the girl I had a crush on, who took her sleepy smile back to Louisiana. There were no weekend garage sales anymore at Jim's, and no one really came by to hang out on the steps. No one had anything good to talk about anyway, just more eviction news. After nearly a year, the judge ruled against Jimmy, and we had to move out. Maurice's winning deposition was a monumental, four-page list of over 70 complaints against us, a staggering document of an almost Kurtz-like collapse that Mission life had caused in Maurice. He accused us of having our house open at all hours day and night so that homeless people could just come in and wash their clothes. One innocent time when Claire found Jim and two male friends working on the car in the garage was described as an orgy. In another complaint, Maurice accused us of, quote, "dragging heavy items across the floor all night in order to tape record the sounds." Well, it was easy to see why the judge had ruled against us. Maurice was just trying to do what he wished with his own property when he had suddenly found himself at the center of a sordid and vast avant-garde homosexual conspiracy, a Mission netherworld where the unclean and unhoused traded sex for laundry at twisted, 4:00 AM art shows. I said, "Man, I only wished we were that cool." The day we moved out was the only time that I ever actually saw Maurice's famous hotshot attorney. Everyone was there, waiting for the sheriff to come serve the final papers. Maurice came out to the top of his steps to wait. Claire finally pulled up, chauffeured by the younger man. And the lawyer pulled up in his SUV. He was the only one smiling. He strode confidently to the top of the stairs looking out into the alley, grinning as if he were about to address a crowded plaza full of supporters. After all, he'd still never lost a case, and he'd built a personal fortune on the one tried and true San Francisco idea that went all the way back to the first gold rush, the principle that the town was founded on. You don't get rich panning for gold. You get rich selling Levi's to all the fools who show up here every day to pan for gold. The Sheriff finally came, papers in hand, and the lawyer led him up into our old house. But a moment later, they came out confused. They couldn't find Jimmy to serve him the papers. For the first time, the lawyer was irritated. He turned to us and growled, "Where the hell did he go?" Just then, Jimmy came out of the house next door and casually said, "Oh, I'll take those. Thanks." See, a couple days before, Jimmy had worked out a deal with the landlord next door. And now, Jimmy was moving into a room in the very next house. Jim said, "Hey Ig, can you give me a hand with these plants?" And Maurice and Claire watched in stunned disbelief as we dragged the planter boxes across the driveway to Jim's new home, a mere 10 feet away. They knew they wouldn't be able to rent the house to anyone but Jimmy for 10 years, and he would be right next door watching. Maurice stood at the top of the steps looking out across San Carlos Street, a street with problems that money couldn't fix. How could he have known what would happen next? That within a year, the real estate boom would bust, that the stock market would flounder, lofts would stand vacant all over town. How could he have known that in a few months, he would move out of the house that was his dream, and that the house would soon be covered in graffiti and trash, that the driveway would be full of homeless guys sleeping on couches, and that George would move to the top of the stairs? How could he know that the get rich quick scheme would fail, and that he would be unable to even sell the house because no buyer would want to rent it to Jimmy at a 1988 rent. I don't know, but from the look on his face that day at the top of the steps, I could tell that Maurice did know. He'd figured it out all at once as his high-paid lawyer got in his SUV and sped away, as the younger man opened the car door for Claire and they drove off too. The house was all his. Somewhere George was stirring for his morning rounds. Iggy Scam lives in San Francisco. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Wendy Dorr, Jonathan Goldstein, and Starlee Kline. Senior producer Julie Snyder, contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hit, Margie Rockland, Becca Carroll, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Annie Baxter. This is Annie's last show with us, the end of her training. She has served at the altar of radio. Radio, the only true medium, and we encourage her to continue on that one true path. And we wish her the best. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you can get cassettes from our website. You know where you can also listen to the shows for free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management by Torey Malatia. Torey, who prefers to be known as-- The center of a sordid and vast avant-garde homosexual conspiracy. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Father's Day is here. I was about 9 or 10, and my parents were splitting up. And we lived in a very small rural town in North Dakota. And my dad, he left. And he left the house and he got an apartment in a city. And he's a farmer. To go and see him somewhere where there was no lawn, or pets, or field, or trees, it was just that, in itself, was strange. Plus the fact that he was there alone. The first time Leah and her sister and brother saw their dad's apartment after their parents separated, they were uncomfortable. The whole separation made them uncomfortable. They hadn't seen him in weeks. And then there was the apartment itself. We went up the stairs and it was a three flat behind the grocery store, across from the library. You know, it had that apartment smell of like cabbage in the hallway. And then, we went in and it was like a living room, and then a kitchen, and then a bathroom. And I remember I was like, wait, where's the bedroom? And he's like, that's the great part. You know, this is the cool part. See those doors, go open the doors. And I went over and opened the doors and there's just like metal frame. And that's the bed. And it's called a Murphy bed. I'd never seen one before. He said, you pull it down. Pull it down. And I pulled it down and it made this really awful noise, kind of creaked like, errr. Like it needed to be oiled. And I hated seeing it. It was like a lumpy mattress at there was a thin blanket on it. It just didn't look like it was very good quality or comfortable. And we would sit on it sometimes to watch TV. And I remember just thinking, this is so weird to sit on a bed and watch TV. It seemed really pathetic and lonely. And it's lonely and depressing anyway because you know your parents are splitting up. But then to see what your dad is living and it's not nice. It was so incongruous with who I knew him to be. I mean he's someone who belongs outside, working outside, animals, pets, agriculture, all of that. And here he is in this apartment. I even hated the word "apartment" for a while. I remember, like seeing it in books or reading it somewhere in the newspaper and being like, "Ugh, apartment. My dad lives in an apartment." I was really bothered by that. Was that the first time you saw him so vulnerable? Yeah. I mean, he'd always been-- my horse used to get out, escape, and like run down the road for miles. And I wouldn't know what to do. And my dad would just calmly get in the car and go drive. And find him in the bean field and lead him back. I mean, he was my-- who else could do that? But here he is in this apartment. And yet, he seemed kind of cowed by it. The walls closed in on him. So I saw him as just being kind of helpless. As the years went on, did he resume his full size, or did he stay more like the picture that you had in that apartment? No, that image was kind of-- he never regained the stature. He never regained the stature that he had before that moment and before that year that he lived there. Leah was nine. She says that if her parents hadn't split up, she probably would have had two or three more years where she would have kept her dad on that pedestal. Before adolescence would have hit and he would've come down to size anyway. Your father gets knocked off the pedestal. And that would have happened if they had gotten divorced or not. But it was more jarring the way that it happened. Do you regret that you lost those years of idealizing him, or do you think in the end it doesn't really matter? I think it matters. I think that it really-- it was so painful and we were so young. You don't need that. Yeah, to make a difference, you need a few more years. You need to have it come to you on your own terms. I don't think that it's good when it happens in a way that you don't control. And the way that it came about for me wasn't really natural. It was very shocking. It was like one day he was there and two weeks later he definitely was not there. Here's the story of everyone and their dad. Once, dad was on a pedestal. Then we got older and he came off the pedestal. And with some dads, that happens more or less, gracefully. With others, it is a quick, painful crash from which none of the participants ever recovers fully. And how a father manages that descent from power, that transition to being human sized with his children, man, that is a test. That is really a test. And a lot of really decent guys have a hard time with it. Today on our radio program, we bring you three stories of fathers handling their falls off the pedestal as best they can. Act One of our show, Driving the Divorce Mobile. What happens if your dad goes from hero to tooling around in a Corvette and honking at girls in one month. Act Two, And if that Diamond Ring Don't Shine. Ian Brown explains the lengths a normal dad will go through to try to do right by his daughter on her birthday. And how this innocent wish led him and his wife to the most corrupt and most questionable birthday stunt they, or any of their friends, had ever heard of. Act Three, Legend of a Bankrobber's Son. What if your dad was never on a pedestal to start with? And yet, you find yourself still, somehow imitating him? Answers, stay with us. Act one, Driving the Divorce Mobile. Kids whose parents divorce, like Leah, are often forced to see their parents as human size, all of a sudden, way before they want to. And if there is a separate culture in this country of divorce kids, this story is at the heart of its oral tradition. This story is swapped like trading cards. This story of parents and how they acted in those first few months after they split up. Those first few months when they were perfectly flawed human beings. And to start our show today, we've collected a few about fathers right after the divorce. Our dad would take my brother and I out on Sundays, like every Sunday. And this one time he took us out and he wouldn't tell us where we were going until we pulled up to this shopping mall that had this fair going on. And so I just remember seeing all the rides and you hear the music of the fair. We're so excited. And he went to the ticket booth and he bought a big wad of tickets. And we just knew this was going to be a great day. And the first ride we went on was this airplane ride where you go around in a circle in an airplane. And you could go up and down and you had a gun. You could fire the gun. It would make this noise. And I remember, like every time we would circle-- our dad was watching us as we'd circle around. And every time we'd go around, we'd pull the stick shift so we would rise up just as we passed our dad to show off in front of him. And my dad would wave to us as we would go by. It was a really nice moment. And then, I think probably on the third or fourth time around we noticed he started talking to this guy beside him. And we were like wondering, who's that guy that dad's talking to? And then the next time around they were closer together and we were like wondering, who is this guy? What's going on? And then the next time around, the next thing we know this guy's got my dad kind of like in a headlock or he's just got my dad's shirt pulled up over his back. He's like wrestling him and trying to punch him. My brother and I are in shock. And so we kept going around. And like instead of pulling on the stick shift, we were just frozen. We were constantly in the air circling around. And by now, a whole crowd had gathered. And they're kind of egging everyone on. Like hit him, hit him. And I guess the one image that stays in my mind is seeing my dad's exposed pale, white back because his shirt was up around his shoulders. And finally when the ride had ended we jumped out of the plane and ran over to my dad. By then I think the crowd had separated the two of them. I remember this lady coming up to my dad saying, oh, you should have punched him. You should have hit him in the face. And my dad was like, oh, you kids want to go on some more rides? And he took us over to this other ride and says, oh, here. Take some tickets. And we were just like, I want to go home now. And just kind of put a damper on the day. From what my dad was telling us, he said, oh, I think that guy was drunk or something. He thought I was calling him names while we were on the ride. He tried to, I guess, have a moral lesson out of it once we got back into the car. And he was saying, fighting is not the answer kind of thing. Always count to 10. But I think by the time you get to eight, your shirt's already off your back. What are you going to do? When I think of my father pre-divorce, I think of a very kind of dry, retiring, very British kind of man. Everything he did was very measured, very calm. We're talking about a guy who made muzak his kind of personal soundtrack. He found this radio station out of Vermont that played muzak all day and he kind of wandered around humming. And so I'd hear him wandering around the house-- [HUMMING "THE GIRL FROM IPANEMA"] But once my parents got divorced, he joined the Y. He started working out religiously. And suddenly he was saying incredibly bizarre things like, you know, I'm going to the gym and I'm going to wail on my pecs. When he was first divorced, he didn't really have a place to live. It was kind of a hasty divorce. And so he was having us live in his office. And we just visited him on the weekends. And his office consisted of this sort of psychedelic blue couch. And of course, the shaggy rug. And unfortunately, no bathroom. So he would actually get me to go to the bathroom with him on the roof into a Coke bottle. And somehow he made this fun to go out into the roof and practice my aim. It actually became like a fun thing to do that I actually look forward to during the day. And I have to really give him credit for that. He was always insisting on showing me this non-existent muscle growth. I'd be sitting watching TV and I could hear him thundering down the stairs and, "Jamie!" Sure enough, I'd go out and there at the bottom of the stairs he'd be naked, flexing like this divorcee pumping-iron Arnold Schwarzenegger. He'd want me to grab his biceps to see how they were growing. It was just absolutely horrible. I moved in with him when I was about 10 years old. I wasn't used to certain habits of his and one of them was where he would sit in the living room with a hairdryer on this head, completely naked. And it's surreal enough to see your father under a hairdryer. I mean, I'm talking like the old ones from the '50s. And I remember bringing over this friend of mine and we walk in and my dad's completely naked. And then we decide to just leave. And as we're leaving, my dad says, well, you guys going to go out and boogie tonight? Anyway, he's still in this kind of single-- he thought I was a single guy too. And of course, he started dating. And he'd tell me about these women. And he always insisted on calling them madame. There was Madame Farago and Madame Hardaway and Madame Wilson. And we never met any of these women, so they're like these phantom madames that I presume existed, but it was difficult. Because you're embarrassed of your father anyways. They're embarrassing. It's your dad. And then here he is gunning the Corvette at a light to impress a girl. And there you are, 10 years old, in this popsicle-colored green Corvette that's rusted and has a hole in the floor. We talked to a half dozen dads about all this and we discovered that for the most part, they did not have specific memories of moments when they realized that their kids were seeing them differently. Maybe the kids notice because for a child, any kind of change from what they're used to is huge. Or maybe, it's just that the dads, understandably, wanted to believe that they were not diminished in their children's eyes and didn't let themselves notice a change. Occasionally, a dad told us a story like this one. I call the boys every day and talk about whatever. How their day was. And one day I was on the phone with my eight year old, Alex. So we were having a conversation and there was a lull in the conversation. And then I sighed. I just went, ah, like that. And then he just asked me, lonely? I almost started to cry. I was so taken aback by his perception. And I was honest. I said yeah, when you go aren't around I'm lonely. But even in this case, this dad didn't really think that his kids saw him that differently since the divorce. Since seeing him so vulnerable. Since seeing him cry. One dad who did notice a change in his kid was Brian Masters in Wichita. Since he and his wife split up eight months ago, his young son started looking out for him. Taking care of him in ways he never had before the divorce. Probably the first thing that he started doing was helping me clean up, grabbing the Swiffer and going and doing the hardwood floors. And sweeping the porch. And going around and opening up windows to kind of freshen the place up. And you know, just sort of some of the kinds of things that you don't think of a kid even having on their radar screen. What else would he do to try to be the responsible one around the house? He kind of runs through this little checklist on our way out the door. Do you have your cellphone? Did you turn off the oven? Is the back door locked? You know, little litany of things that he knows I'm going to be worried about later. He's nine? 10. He's 10? Wow, that is so parental. Isn't it? Oh, I know. I would love it if that only made me happy. The fact is, it also makes me a little bit sad. Because? Well, because no kid should be in that position. Kids should get to be kids. Has Marshall tried to fix you up? Not in the specific. But especially in the early going, Marshall would-- say we'd be sitting at a coffee shop and he'd be doing his homework and I'd be reading a magazine. And he'd look across the room and kind of nudge me and say, she's really pretty. I bet she's a good cook. I love how the second sentence after she's really pretty is she's a good cook. Yeah. I bet she's a good cook. Did you have to learn new things to cook after your wife left? I had to remember to cook. You know, which was the hardest part in the darkest days, was just remembering that kids need to be fed just darn near every day for things to go well. And occasionally, he would-- about 7:30, 8 o'clock at night he'd very casually say, you know what would be neat? Dinner. See, one of the things that I've been thinking about is it's really hard for the child for their parent to be prematurely taken from them as the super person. But how hard is that for the dad? It's a terrible experience. I mean, talk about a failure. And it was important to me to be able to legitimately reclaim some of that ground. Not just to appear to, but to actually reclaim some of that ground. Did you consciously try to reclaim it? Absolutely. Sure. You know, those weren't proud moment in my life to realize that my kid had begun to look out for me. That my kid had begun to become aware of the chinks in my armor. What are you doing this Father's Day? Well, I won't be doing anything with Marshall. Sunday is not one of the days that I get to spend with him. Unless we make some kind of a special arrangement to do so. And we haven't just yet, so I would suspect that Sunday will be a little poignant. Because you'll be alone? Yeah. It will be interesting to see if Marshall figures this out and steps in. I'm hopeful that he will and on another level, I'm kind of hopeful that the whole thing slides passed him and that it isn't a concern for him. That would be strangely comforting to me. Why? Explain that. Why that would be a sign that things were maybe healthier? If that were to happen, it would be an indication that he is less aware of my loneliness and less aware of my frailty. And a little less concerned about me. Yeah. That'd be a great problem to have. It'd be a great way to be alone on Sunday. Thanks to all the kids and dads who talked to us. Act Two, And if that Diamond Ring Don't Shine. There are moments when a dad is tested. And on this Father's Day, let us examine one of them. A daughter's birthday. Ian Brown is a writer and a radio host for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has this story about what it means to be a dad who is merely human sized. He recorded this at a This American Life show that we did in front of live audiences in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. No one arrives fashionably late for a seven year old's birthday party. That offends rule one of parental life-- never waste free babysitting. But all seven guests at my daughter Haley's seventh birthday party weer dropped off by their parents mysteriously seven minutes early. That sort of behavior is just plain rude. It was like being swarmed by a gang from planet tiny. They drop their coats in the hall and immediately scattered to the farthest corners of the house, like some new, instantly contagious form of biological weapon. And I staggered upstairs with a small mountain of coats in my arms. Which is not a chore I saw myself performing back when I was young and longing to be grown up. Even when I was 11, I wanted to be married. Because married people, I knew, had sex every night of their lives. But that's another story. I was lugging coats. And back downstairs, Trish, the mother of Katie, Haley's best friend, two best friends ago, Trish shot me a knowing look. Magician, right? How can you tell I said. Fiber optic wands by the forks. And that was the first hint that my wife and I might have gone slightly over the top birthday-wise. That we might have stepped over the strict moral boundary that separates caring, thoughtful parents, who believe in personal attention and quality time, from cheese balls like us, who try to buy their way into their children's hearts. It's easy to commit that social gaffe these days. My wife and I both work. The harder we work, the guiltier we feel. The more we want Haley's birthday parties to be-- well, visible from outer space would be gratifying. We'd been planning Haley's seventh birthday. Or to be slightly more accurate, my wife Johanna had been planning it and I'd been doing nothing. For weeks. What there was a cake or iced by professionals in the shape of a magician's top hat, which cost $30. Eight loot bags filled with thoughtful, age appropriate peanut free party favors at $15 a bag. And of course, the magician himself, at $150 for 2 hours. He called himself the Amazing Robert. I don't think he meant that ironically. Now, I like to do something special on Haley's birthday. Still, don't you think, I said to my wife as she frantically tried to find a magician who wasn't booked three months in advance, don't you think we might be over amping? But honey, if we don't go slightly crazy, Johanna said quite logically, some other parent will. Then what's Haley going to think? And anyway, do you have a better idea? And I did not have a better idea. My sole contribution to the magician party had been to suggest that we include a whoopee cushion in every loot bag. Or at least it was my idea to blow them up and put them in the loot bags pre-inflated. In the old days, when Haley was small, we kept her birthday simple. I learned that lesson when I lived in Los Angeles near Beverly Hills. In Beverly Hills, parents like their children's birthday parties to have a theme. And a fairly significant theme at that. Manifest destiny say, or a NASA moon shot. In LA, I never went to a birthday party that featured anything less than pony rides. And one mother actually gave out Gucci t-shirts in the loot bags. It was hard to compete with that. In an act of defiance, a friend of ours, a struggling writer, staged her daughter's birthday in a park of all places. The kids had a good enough time. They ran around and swung on swings and played tag. And generally reveled in a whole two hours when they weren't under the watchful eye of a nanny or armed response security. The grab bags contained what grab bags are supposed to contain, candy rather than Rolex watches. And afterwards, the Beverly Hills parents flocked, I mean literally flocked round our friend. Fabulous idea they said. Nature, who would've thought? Can I steal the theme? But our friend Katharine is the queen of the less is more, easy on mummy birthday party. She says children want strong experiences, not new ones. Which is why last weekend for her daughter Mary's seventh birthday, Katharine invited six girls over to string gummy bears onto extra long bamboo satay skewers. That was the theme of the party. Skewering candies on a stick. There was some risk of eye injury and the entire gimmick seemed to have Freudian undertones. The little girls kept saying, I'm going to stick this skewer up gummy's tiny butt. And giggling hysterically. But all in all, it was a winner. Only one girl barfed. The entire party cost $15. Canadian. It is true that Katharine had a pinata. Pinatas are excellent because they entail hitting an object violently with a stick. But those were the old pre-bacchanalian birthdays. By the time Haley turned five, the year of our most corrupt-- and therefore, most successful birthday-- we'd gone as low as a parent can go. We'd hired Human Barbie. For $300 Human Barbie dressed up in full size versions of Barbie doll outfits and came to your house. Human Barbie arrived in a Dodge Grand Caravan with Human Midge, her assistant. Two giant mobile racks of party dresses for the girls, a tea set in a case, and two chests of makeup. She dressed the kids, discussed the possibility of multiple careers, and fed them cake. All our friends were completely horrified. I might as well have said, oh, this year Haley's having a crack party. We're having a cake made of crack too. My Canadian friends put this crassness down to the fact that Johanna, my wife, is an American. But successful? Well, it was as if the Dalai Lama had made a stop at our house. The girls were hypnotized with awe. They spent most of the afternoon standing in a circle brushing human Barbie's hair. I had the feeling that secretly, quite a few mum's wouldn't have minded giving it a try themselves. As it turned out, I needn't have worried about the Amazing Robert, the magician, either. He was a handsome guy with sideburns and a rye, if somewhat resigned manner. He knew what he was doing though. He started cracking jokes with the kids right away. You must be Haley he said to one of the boys as he walked through the door. No, Peter said. I'm a boy and clapped his hands. Hey, the magician said. No clapping. So all the kids clapped. I said no clapping. By the time he started pulling eggs out of their noses, they were goners. I chose that moment to run upstairs. I find I need a moment alone at regular intervals at these kiddie birthday bashes. Also at adult parties. In fact, I could use a moment alone right about now. But when I open the door to my bedroom, what do I find? Lying on my bed, surrounded by entire mountain ranges of miniature winter coats. Two of my adult guests holding hands. Their spouses were downstairs. I must say they played it cool. Headache, the woman said. Rubbing her temples. Not that I ask. Yeah, I said. These kids parties can be brutal. And I tell you, I left fast. I didn't want to ask. I certainly didn't want to now. And downstairs, the Amazing Robert was making cards disappear and reappear. But Trish, Katie's mom, she kept staring at the magician. I thought she disapproved of his tricks. But then she gave a little shriek. I know, she said. I knew I knew that magician. He has just come through a terrible divorce from a birthday clown. Which pretty much says it all, doesn't it? It's terrible getting older, the disappointments and the let-downs. But no child believes that. They want to get older. If you're seven, you can't wait to be nine. I mean, nine. That it's going to be the greatest. Because they think life just gets better and better and better the older you get. And we grown-ups, we know better. Or we think we do. Or at least we need to think we do. But I didn't have much time for such maudlin thought's. Frankly, convoluted ones. Because I knew sound was wafting in from the living room. A sound that is frankly, impossible to be maudlin about. They'd found the loot bags. Crass? Sure. Cheesy? Absolutely. Grown-up? Not at all. That's what I liked about it. Ian Brown is the author of Man, Medium Rare and Freewheeling. And the host of a radio program called Talking Books on the CBC. Coming up, more parental nudity. Very very, brief and very, very harmless parental nudity. Which is, frankly, the only way I can take it. I don't know about you. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we chose some theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show for father's day, stories about dads who have been removed from the pedestal of paternal grandeur. Dads who are entirely human scale. We have arrived at act three of our show. Act three, Legend of a Bankrobber's Son. Nick Flynn's father deserted the family not long after Nick was born. Nick did not know him at all. His father was a check forger and a bankrobber. And for a brief period in the '70s, served some time for it. Nick's mother, politically enough, worked for a bank. And at one point, after they split up, saw the dad on a wanted poster. She brought it home and showed his brother saying, that's your dad. Eventually, under rather odd circumstances, Nick and his father met, and started to get to know each other. Nick Flynn tells this story. At a certain point, I think I had already heard about my father being in prison and I knew that he was an alcoholic. I was probably 15 or so. I was actually drinking pretty heavily then also, and doing drugs. And my mother got concerned about it. I think she was afraid that I was just going to be like him. It was probably very difficult for her to have me in the house. She'd made a choice to leave a relationship like that and now here I was, sort of becoming that person. I remember we were sitting in the living room of our house and she-- I'd probably come home one more night, like completely shattered. And I believe it was the next morning, like we woke up and she was just like, this isn't good. She sat me down and said, what did I plan to do with my life? At 15 I had no idea. We didn't have a lot of money growing up. My mother worked two or three jobs. And things were tight. I told her I planned to go into crime. It seemed like a reasonable thing to think of doing. That would be a way to get a lot of money fast. That was the career path I was considering. But when I told her that she began to cry. I could see tears well up in her eyes. I tried to sort of back peddle and explain that I'd do sort of white collar victimless crime. And then she just left the room. She just walked out of the room. Until I was 16, I think I'd seen him just two or three times. I actually remember looking for him. I remember thinking I would see him places because he had friends in Scituate, in my hometown. But by that point, my mother had a warrant on him for nonpayment of child support. And then, when I was 16 was when my mother first showed me a letter that he sent. There's a lot of letters. I spent a couple weeks a couple of years ago going through all the letters he had sent me, pulling them together. The first letter that I have is from 1976. I just have written it's postmarked June 25. Signed dad. And he regrets for forgetting the date of my birthday. And then one of the lines in it is, "Tell me of yourself. I miss you both. And soon, very soon, I shall be known." That "soon, very soon, I shall be known." One of the things about my father is that he identifies himself as a writer, as a poet. He has a sense of grandiosity about himself and what his achievements, his place in the world. Often what he would do is he would take a letter from someone else and Xerox it, and then send it on to someone else. Like he has a correspondence with Ted Kennedy. He writes to him all the time. And being a senator, the senator, I think, just has someone who answers the letters for him. They'll often be that. Often he'll just sort of write something. Maybe a couple words and then there'd be maybe a Xeroxed letter from Ted Kennedy. I have one here. I mean, I just got one. Actually, the most recent. I just got one a couple days ago. A letter from Ted Kennedy. The print is actually sort of falling apart because it's been Xeroxed so many times. "Dr Mr. Flynn, thank you for your recent correspondence advising me of your further views on critical issues facing us in Congress." It goes on, "Thank you again for writing." These are some lines from a letter that I received from my father in 1995. "We must have one love, one great love in our life. We are a nation of grunters. I fully intend to control Senator Kennedy's reelection. He shall win and I shall be named the head of the American Arts Council. It shall happen. I do hope you both are well and earn some solid pursuits of solid goals in life." And another letter from 1989. "I shall be able to do for American now what Mr. Solzhenitsyn has done for Russia. My works are waiting. It shall be soon. And this is from 1987. "Writers, especially poets are particularly prone to madness. Whether you like it or not, you are me. Eno the Beano tells me you are into drugs. If so, good luck." By the early '80s, he had been-- I knew he was out of jail. I knew he was out of federal prison. And I knew he was driving a cab. I think a taxi in Boston. I knew something about him, but I hadn't seen him probably for 10, 12 years. And we finally did see each other. He got my phone number. And at some point, I believe it was in 1987, he called me up and said he was getting evicted from the rooming house he was in. He wanted me to come over and to-- he knew I had a pickup truck somehow and he wanted me to come over and to move all his stuff out of the house and out of his apartment. This might have been the first time I ever talked to him. When I was a kid I don't think I talked to him. And then I'd gotten these letters from him, which I hadn't answered. He was pretty drunk when he called. He said that he was sitting behind his door with a shotgun waiting for the knob to turn. He wasn't going to let them take his stuff and he wasn't going to leave. That I should get over there. So I actually brought a couple other friends, just for witnesses. And so we got over there. We got there and it was sort of an amazing scene. I knocked on his door and he said to come in. I went in and he was sitting in a tin tub naked in the middle of his room having a bath. And drinking vodka our of a silver challis. I'd never seen him before. Then he stood up naked in front of me covered with water. And it was shocking. It was a shocking scene. My friends and I stayed with him for maybe half an hour and I ended up giving him some money to put his stuff in storage. To hire a truck and to get a storage unit. I gave him a few hundred dollars. And then we left. And then he moved his stuff out. And then the next time I saw him was maybe a couple months later. It was getting warmer. I remember it was sort of a warm day. Like maybe April or something. And I was riding my bike along the Charles River and he was sleeping on a bench on the Esplanade by the Charles River. I realized that at this point he was homeless. At that point, in 1987, I had been working with the homeless at a homeless shelter in Boston for three years. I'd been there for three years as a caseworker. I sort of had a sick feeling in my stomach that he would show up at the shelter where I worked. After seeing him on the bench, probably within a month he ended up at the shelter. One day in the afternoon he walked into the shelter and he announced loudly to everyone that his son worked there and that he needed a bed. And demanded a bed. And then I came on for my shift later that day and the supervisor took me aside and told me what had happened. And asked me, he said that someone had come looking for a bed today that claimed to be my father. And I was shocked. It was a secret. I didn't want people to know this. I'd probably tell people that he'd been in prison. That he was a writer. That he was a failed writer. And all those things seemed actually sort of-- just seemed to add sort of a mystique. It's something you can just relate, like a good story. But then, when he becomes homeless, it goes up to another level. I felt riddled with shame that this man was my father. Which was confusing for me because I had worked with the homeless for three years and I had a lot of compassion for homeless people. But when it happened to someone in my family, to happen to my father, I felt utter shame that people would look at me and judge in a certain way. Whether that I was going to end up like him. That I was sort of crazy like him. Or why couldn't I help him? Why couldn't I do something? You know, I was his family. I lived in a place. Why didn't he live in my place? But then, I did not want him to be-- I had this sense that he had-- he hadn't really given me much in my life and now he was going to come and take away a job I had in some way. That he would come to my job and just sort of [BLEEP] that up. I wished he would go anywhere but where I worked. He did all right for a while. He got a job. He was sort of a model homeless person. He had a day job at a labor pool. He would have a bad held for him by someone else. I didn't have a lot of interaction with him. I remember him being in the lobby of the shelter and him coming in at night. I would have radar for when he came in. I would know when he was there. I would look over and see him go and get his bed ticket for the night. I probably wouldn't say anything to him. And then I would just sort of see him. And I'd judge whether he seemed drunk or not. Whether he seemed like it was just going to be a smooth transition from the day into the night. Or if it wasn't. Or if there was going to be a scene. And there were a few times I remember meeting him actually, after work. At dawn when he was on his way to the labor pools to do work. And walking with him and talking. Actually, like outside the shelter. Like walking along and trying to figure out what was going on with him. And I went back to the shelter recently this past winter for the first time. And talked to a lot of people who-- and asked them, what they were thinking of this. How we interacted. What I seemed like. What they thought. And most people said that they were just utterly confused. That they had no idea really what to-- how to treat me, how to treat him. And it seemed to them that I didn't want to talk about it. I wouldn't really give them a way into a conversation about this. I was just sort of maybe too freaked out and I didn't know what to say. I really don't know what I was feeling. I think I was feeling awful. I was feeling confused and it seemed like a nightmare to me, actually. When my father showed up in 1987 in the shelter, I was actively drinking and using drugs. From what I remember, my drug increase probably-- my drug intake, I imagine, increased. I had totaled three vehicles. And all of them I had been drinking or doing drugs while I was driving. At one point, I had a motorcycle accident while I was drunk. It's not a good idea to ride a motorcycle when you're drunk. And ended up in the hospital, Lost my spleen. I would drink and smoke marijuana. You know, pretty much daily. I was sort of fitting a profile of someone who was on the way to some kind of ruin or something. I looked at my father and he was 30 years older than me. He identified himself as a writer. I identified myself as a writer. He didn't take it seriously. He didn't take his situation seriously. And maybe I didn't either at that point. Somehow I was able to gain perspective by looking at him. And I'm not sure why I couldn't gain perspective by looking at all the other homeless guys that were there, and drinking and nose diving. But somehow looking at him and feeling like, OK, even though I don't know him as a father, there's some connection between us. And if I keep going like I'm going, I'm going to end up like him. It terrified me. And after he'd been there for two years, I ended up getting into therapy and getting sober. And I think it actually has a lot to do with that, with seeing my father and seeing what could happen to someone's life. I sort of had to see something that extreme I think to realize what a potential fate that I could end up in. He had it together enough to realize that when he turned 60 he was eligible for senior housing. And when he turned 60, he actually got an apartment in subsidized housing, section 8 housing. I began filming him probably five years after that, like in middle of the '90s. As I had learned in the 90 days I had been there what would happen. I would have looked like Toulouse Lautrec. They'd have shot the balls off at the knees. Not even higher. My proposal was that I was going to seek out and interview the men that had known my mother. The men that had been in my mother's life, for a year, or for five years, or for however long. And so the first time I really went to look for my father was with a video camera and I interviewed him. Every time I'd go to him for the next three or four years, I'd bring a camera with me. And just his story sort of kept coming. [UNINTELLIGIBLE], Lewisberg, Atlanta, Marion, Illinois, which was built to replace Alcatraz. I was there. And I had the pleasure. I mean, the pleasure speaking as Solzhenitsyn. I mean, I want to know what the [BLEEP] I was writing about. I was thinking, Jesus, Solzhenitsyn is going to jump with envy when he sees this [BLEEP] story. He and Dostoyevsky both wrote about their adventures in Russian prisons heavily. All he wanted to do was to give me his three step plan for how to rob a bank. Which seemed to be his version of fatherly advice. We had never spoken before and this was the first real conversation we had. Was he laid out his method of robbing banks to me. Three steps in the whole program. Step one, open an account. Open an account. He sort of kept forgetting the steps also. It involved getting someone to steal some checks from an insurance company and then to forge those checks. Make a whole series of forged checks. And then to open dummy bank accounts around the country. It was sort of elaborate. Elaborate and convoluted. And ultimately, a failed enterprise. Step one, I was given like a hundred $100 bills. Well, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Driven to the bank by [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Go in with my story. Always a female teller. Always go to a young female teller. A guy is no good. They're generally homosexuals. When I first met up with him, we went to a soup kitchen where he ate. I did a tape in there and he introduced me to other people he ate with, the other people in the soup kitchen, who had known him for years since he goes to the soup kitchen several times a week. This is your son? This is my son, Nicholas. How do you do? Hello. This is a good friend of mine. I'm not kidding you. I thought you were just somebody he picked up on the way making a documentary. I can't believe a handsome kid like you belongs to him. It was the mother. The mother was beautiful. I was lucky. He was very proud that this is my son. And no one really believed that he had a son. I said, yeah, I was his son. And he bragged to people that I was working at Columbia University. What's your name? Walter. Walter. Nice to meet you, Walter. He teaches at Columbia University. My kid. Imagine that. For writing. That's a miracle. Well again, his mother had brains. I got to get another coffee. How old are you anyway? I'm 35. Are you that old? Yeah, 35. When's the last time I saw you? Four years ago. How the hell you'd go to the NYU [UNINTELLIGIBLE] school? I don't know what promoted you. How'd you go there? You majored in writing? Yeah. Struggling fully. He knows how successful his father is as a writer. A lot of times I'm very frustrated when I go and meet with him because it seems like he tells the same stories over and over again. They seem very disconnected to reality. But those few times where I have felt some connection, it does seem that he's just let his guard down a little bit and let me glimpse at his struggle in some way. You know, what connects us. He actually wrote me a letter right after-- he sent me a couple letters after my book of poems came out. In the first one it just says, "Dear Nick, your book is a classic. Love, your father." That's a unique letter. Because the classic has only been a word that he's ever reserved for his own work. And so for him to apply that to my is just sort of him turning, even if just for a second and sort of looking at me and saying something about what I've done. There has to be a reason that I've held onto his letters for all these years. There has to be some sort of reason, something I've been waiting for, or looking for, or hoping for. And yes, something like this is sort of maybe as close as I'll get to it. I would like to have sort of one of those deep, connecting moments with him. But I'm not really sure if I've achieved that yet. Again, I'm actually not even sure if at this point, I would hope for or-- sure. Maybe you always hope for it, you just sort of deny that hope or something. I don't know if I even hope for it at this point. It's almost enough just to sit in front of him. To go to his room and sit with him for an hour. And just see where he is. And tell him, whatever. I'll tell him one thing about myself. If he hears it, that's great. If he doesn't hear it, that's fine. I don't expect him to give me anything at this point. It's almost enough just to go and see him. It somehow calms me enough or settles my soul enough just to go and have some relationship at all with him. I'm sort of down to the real basic, like really stripped down to the most basic father there can be. He just is my father and there's nothing I can do about that. There's nothing he can do about that. I go and I sit and I have a relationship with this person who is my father. Nick Flynn's book of poems is called Some Ether. He's working on a book in which his dad figures prominently. Well, our program was produced by Wendy Dorr and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jonathan Goldstein, and Starlee Kine. Senior producer Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], Rebecca Carroll, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Paul McCarthy. Musical help from Mr. John Connors. If you'd like to buy a cassette copy of this program, a little late for Father's Day, but still, you can own it. Call us here at WBEZ in Chicago 312-832-3380. Or visit our website where you can also listen to our programs for free, absolutely free at www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I tell you, the staff of the show just keeps complaining about Torey lately. They run into him in the restroom and I don't get what is going on with him these days. Be naked, flexing like this divorcee, pumping iron Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm IRA Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. He'd want me to grab his biceps to see how they were growing. It was just absolutely horrible. PRI, Public Radio International.
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The elite end of the German Navy was the submarine corps. Those who served on subs during World War II were the best paid, the best fed, the smartest, the toughest. 1,100 submarines, they sunk 2,800 Allied ships. And of the German subs, the deadliest were the Type IX subs. You have the sound room and the radio room. To the right of that, we're going to go into our officers' quarters and into the kitchen where these two have already opted to cook for us today. Come on in. Watch your head. One of these subs, the U-505 there we has been on permanent display at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry since the 1950s. It's stuffy, it's hot, and it's unbelievably cramped. Now check this out. This is the kitchen for 59 guys. From the point of view of the Nazi government that built this sub, this right here is pretty much a worst-case scenario-- little black and brown-skinned children climbing through one of the most powerful machines of destruction pointing and laughing being interviewed, being interviewed by a Jewish reporter who has not entirely lost that pestering, nasal Jewish-y quality that was ever-so-annoying back in the fatherland. That is pretty much not the way they wanted the war to come out. Little American kids thinking that they could have served on this boat. If I was on board, I would like to be the captain for all that ship. I want to be the captain. I want to be the person that walks around and checks around the whole boat. I want to be the person that carries the torpedoes and puts them in the thing and shoots them off. Now, believe it or not, we've just walked from our back part of our boat all the way up to the front. Are there any questions yet? Yeah, how come if this was a German U-boat, how come most of this stuff is in English not German? Do you speak German? No. See, they're making it easy to help you. In fact, this kid is on to something. There are not many German words. There are no swastikas onboard, no reminders of Nazis at all, in fact. The thought that these were bunk beds where slept men who wanted to kill us, who sunk seven Allied ships themselves, who fought for the notion of an Aryan homeland and a master race, these unpleasant thoughts, they are not encouraged. And you know, maybe that is for the best. Because I think if the museum would play up the evil, Nazi angle-- these are the dishes that the evil men ate from, this is their evil silverware. I think what they would lose in dignity, you can be sure they would gain dozens of times over in attendance. And how do I know this is true? Because, my friend, I have heard the story of Hitler's yacht, a fable if you will, a modern fable of what happens when the free market, the media, the World War II buffs, the neo-Nazis, and the Jews all collide over a huge Nazi tourist trap. We have devoted our entire program today to this story. It's kind of an amazing story. Alix Spiegel has spent months investigating Hitler's yacht, a craft whose original name was the Ostwind. For this hour she will be our guide. Here's Alix. There are things that we know and there are things that we don't know. We know that Hitler ordered it built in 1936 and that is cost a small fortune, close to $250,000. We know that it was completed in 1939, that each cabin was finished in a different fine wood, and that its sail, over 40 feet long, was made of a rare Egyptian linen. We know that its designer was Heinrich Gruber, the most lauded naval architect at the time. And we know that its purpose was to demonstrate the superiority of the master race. But we don't know, we'll never be able to say with absolute certainty whether or not Hitler ever actually set foot on the Ostwind, or if this idea was just some twisted collective fantasy perpetuated for over half a century by celebrity-crazed Americans. Of course there were always rumors about the yacht. And some of those rumors were repeated so often that it's difficult now to distinguish them from fact. One of the rumors was that Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, used the Ostwind for pleasure cruises. Another is that Hitler had an extraordinary affection for the boat, that it was very important to him, and that when he talked about it, he always referred to it as his special lady. But there's no real evidence for any of this, just as there's no real evidence that Hitler's ghost continues to haunt the decks, or that the boat was used as a brothel by high-ranking Nazi officials, or that the yacht itself is cursed, that it will kill, maim, or financially decimate anyone unfortunate enough to own it. Although, on this last point at least, there does seem to be a series of suspiciously consistent anecdotes. This is the story of the last days of the Ostwind, one of two yachts built by the Nazi government after a poor German showing in the 1936 Olympic races. Even though its original purpose was to demonstrate the superiority of the German people in Olympic competition, the Ostwind actually spent most of its life in America, war booty transported here by the US Navy in 1947. I should tell you that when it arrived in this country, it wasn't known as Hitler's yacht. It became Hitler's yacht. More precisely, we made it Hitler's yacht. The Ostwind's sister ship, the Nordwind, a boat, mind you, with an identical pedigree, built at the same time by the same people for the same purpose, has never been known as Hitler's yacht. To this day, it sails in Britain under the name The White Rose, a charter boat which inspires no controversy, attracts no attention at all. But here in America, sometime in the 1950s, we made the Ostwind into Hitler's yacht. We made it into Hitler's yacht and then we sailed it, cursed it, set it on fire, restored it, tried to put it in a museum, stripped it to a skeleton, and finally sailed it into the Miami Harbor, and as a group of Holocaust survivors stood witness on the deck of a boat nearby, sank it to the bottom of the sea. That road is a back road to the airport. Pecan Park there. Biscayne there, which runs into Dunn. J.J. Nelson has lived in Jacksonville, Florida, all his life on the Southside of town in a neighborhood called Panama Park. It's a modest neighborhood which borders the Trout River, a series of small ranch houses with water views and long docks stretching out behind them. J.J. owned one of those docks. He made his living renting boat space to wealthy weekenders who understood the pleasures of a fishing line and a cold beer. J.J., himself, was a fan of fishing lines and cold beer, particularly cold beer. He was a famous Jacksonville drunk. Now this is not a past that J.J. is ashamed of, not at all. More than once he's told me, without a note of regret in his voice, that as a young man he had, and I quote, "the worst reputation from Miami to Virginia." So I went down to Jacksonville to visit J.J. I spent two days in his truck listening to his extravagantly entertaining, occasionally appalling, and seemingly endless stories. J.J. is an excellent storyteller and a genius at Jacksonville history. He specializes in two particular kinds of narratives-- tails about crooked politicians thieving the public, and yarns about his own rather intimate experience with debauchery. Like the time J.J. tricked a man who had crossed him into marrying the woman that J.J. had tired of living with. She's really a nasty drunk, pretty but nasty. So I said, Johnny, you could come visit, but I said, my wife is a millionaire, she's a nymphomaniac. And she's an alcoholic. And it's all I can do to handle her. I can't put up with you. It don't seem like I hung the phone up, he was there. So he came in. And he had been on a ship three years saving his money. So I went down in my office on the side of the house and I'd left her estate book out, which is about this thick of all the properties she owned, and land, and her money. And he had smoked a carton of cigarettes and put the ashtray, reading all of what she was worth. The next night she didn't come upstairs to bed. And I went down and they were both passed out together on the floor nude. I won't tell you what position. But he was about to choke. I said, he has bit the hook. There was a story about the time J.J. shot a man for dunking his dog underwater, a couple of stories, which involved J.J. falling off a bridge. And then there was the time that J.J. spent two drunk days on Danish shipper with an entire crew of female sailors. He had met two or three of the women crew members at a bar downtown, and after a night of drinking, accepted their invitation to continue the party back at the ship. The story from here follows a plot line familiar to any occasional viewer of hotel Pay-per-view. For two days J.J. stumbled from cabin to cabin to cabin having so much fun that he actually refused to leave the boat even after it left port. We got out just about the sea buoy, which is about a mile off the jetties in the ocean. And I had a new suit on, new shoes. I'd been to a big party. They got me dressed, got my clothes all on, my shoes, and they opened the door hatch. I figure, well hell-- you know how drunk is-- they're taking me to better quarters if it's possible. [BLEEP] they just opened the side hatch and threw me overboard, bam, in the ocean. And then there's the story of Hitler's yacht, the most eye-popping, jaw-dropping story of all. The yacht arrived at J.J.'s dock in 1982. I didn't realize it was anything special. It was an old half-rotted sailboat. It was worm-eaten and sunk down in the mud. And the decks were all right. But it was junk as far as I was concerned. By the time the yacht made it to J.J.'s dock in Panama Park, it had had a number of American owners, I think around six or seven. Two had dropped dead of heart attacks shortly after buying the Ostwind. One had lost his left and part of his skull when he was hit in the face by the boat's mainsheet winch handle. There was a lawyer dude who supposedly used it for orgies, or prostitution, or something like that. And then there was Horace Glass. Horace Glass was a restoration enthusiast obsessed with a single purpose, to restore the Ostwind to its original glory and turn it into a floating museum of its own history. To reach this end, Glass sacrificed 14 years, $178,000, three homes, two businesses, and an antique camera collection. In other words, he bankrupted his family, lost almost everything they had ever owned. So after the whole floating museum idea didn't really work out, Horace needed a place to store the boat while he searched for a buyer. And this is how the Ostwind ended up at J.J.'s dock. So he asked me, could he store the boat at my dock. And I said, yeah. And he brought it around on drums. There was hardly no bottom in it. Well after it had been there a couple of months, people started calling me and saying, do you know what kind of boat you've got there, whose boat that is? And I said, yeah. It's Horace Glass. And they said, no, that's Hitler's boat. And I said, my god. Horace, meanwhile, was busy trying to get his family out of hock. He placed a series of advertisements in papers all over the country. And those advertisements attracted a lot of attention. In particular, they attracted the attention of a man from Massachusetts. Charles T. Sanderson of Kingston, Mass. He'd seen something about it. And he called and he arranged to buy the boat and get it off my property. Now Charles Sanderson of Kingston, Mass. was a man who'd been involved in a variety of questionable business dealings over the years. I have four solid interview tapes full of colorful examples, all of them highly libelous, half most likely exaggerated. A typical story involves a faux English businessman with fake accent, a historical landmark, Latin American smugglers, and a boat full of frozen flounder. But there are other flounder-free claims against Charlie, several of which actually made it into the legal system. In 1991, Charlie was found guilty of defrauding the First National Bank of Boston for close to $1 million and was sentenced to a year in prison. It's fair to say that Charles Sanderson was a controversial character. He was also a memorabilia collector. Airplanes, tanks, bazookas, handguns, medals, he's got a three-story house and I guarantee there's not a place in it you can't walk that there's that the Nazis made or had. It wasn't just Nazi memorabilia, not at all. Charlie loved history and owned a huge number of historical artifacts. He specialized in materials from Admiral Richard E. Byrd's arctic exploration. So naturally when he read about the Ostwind in the paper, he immediately contacted Horace and made a deal. Then Charlie went down to visit the boat at J.J.'s dock. When he arrived, he found it under 15 feet of water. After he'd spent about two weeks trying to get the boat up, he'd come to me in my office. He'd never spoke to me up until then. He was eating down in the restaurant and had his crew and he was staying in motels. So finally when he couldn't get the boat up because it was jammed between barges and a dock, he'd come to me and said, look here, what do you charge me to get that boat up? And I said, what are you going to do when you get it up? It's just going to sink again. He said, I'm going to take it to Boston. Like Horace, Charlie wanted to restore the boat and turn it into a museum. Specifically, Charlie proposed to display Hitler's yacht in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, at a location 15 minutes from the site where the Pilgrims first landed the Mayflower in 1620. It was an idea which didn't meet with much enthusiasm from the local population. City Council in Massachusetts or Plymouth had a meeting and wouldn't allow the boat in the state. That's a public record. The Boston Herald, Wednesday, March 20, 1985-- "Town fathers said yesterday that they would fight tooth and nail plans by a local developer to turn Adolf Hitler's yacht into a museum in the town where the Pilgrims landed the Mayflower. Local officials described the vessel as an affront to the Jewish community." "There are two chances we'll let that yacht in here," Plymouth Selectman, William Nolan, was quoted as saying, "slim and none". Charlie gave up on his plan to station Hitler's yacht at the landing place of the Pilgrims. But he didn't give up on his idea of returning the Ostwind to its former nautical majesty. He hired a famous yacht builder and undertook, what looked to J.J., like an extensive and very expensive restoration project. There were men working on the boat at all hours. Each plank was carefully removed, sandblasted, and stored. Screws, bolts, rust, everything was saved. What I didn't know until about two months later, one of the guys that worked for me said, you know what he's doing with those boards he's taking off , the planks? And I said, no. He's cutting them up, and marking them, selling them for souvenirs. I said, my god, who would buy them? He said, some of those little old boards are the size of a box of matches. He's getting $500 for them. And I had no idea that some damn fool would pay $500 for a little piece of teak. Charlie would sit sometime for hours at the foot of the boat and talk to the Fuhrer, himself. In his mind he'd sit there and talk. And then he'd chatter about well, Hitler walked here. Hitler did this. The Fuhrer did this. The Fuhrer did that. Did you ever kind of confront him and say, you're crazy? Well I'm a cracker. I kind of thought it was funny. It's kind of like a circus your kid goes to. First time you see somebody walking around in a cage with lions, you kind of think it's funny and stupid at the same time. And it was kind of a circus really. I tried to talk to Charlie about the Ostwind. I called four or five times and asked for an interview. But Charlie wasn't interested. He told me he'd only owned the yacht for a brief period, five or six months at the most, which I knew wasn't true. But when I called him on it, he just denied it. He also denied that he had ever intended to station the yacht near Plymouth Rock no matter what the paper said. And he even denied that he owned an extensive antique collection. Then he told me that he could barely remember a thing about the boat. It was such a brief period so long ago. And that in any case, he had nothing of import to say about it. That was the phrase that he used, nothing of import. Charlie, I'm told, is a very pleasing person, a man with charisma you just can't resist. Lots of people told me this, even the ones he had ripped off. They described some terrible con Charlie pulled on them, then scratched their heads and tell me how much they still liked the guy, all the while staring off into space with a dazed expression like they'd just hit their head on something really hard and they were trying to figure out who they were and how they got here. Charlie's magic certainly worked on J.J. After a couple of months they became friends and then business partners of sorts, which helps explain J.J.'s tolerance of some of Charlie's more unusual attitudes. You see, Charlie convinced J.J. that he was in a position to provide him with $50 million to develop the Trout River Waterfront into a high-end marine village, a dream which J.J. had harbored since he was a boy. In return for this promise, J.J. drove Charlie around and introduced him to Jacksonville's rich, powerful, and political-- men Charlie viewed as potential business investors. There's actually a long and sordid story to tell about Charles Sanderson and his con of the city of Jacksonville, a story which begins when Charlie convinces the city to sell him a valuable downtown property at a vastly reduced price, claiming he would bring jobs and economic opportunity by installing a world-class military museum. It ends, naturally, with a huge expose of Charlie and certain civic leaders in Jacksonville's newspaper, the Florida Times-Union. It turns out Charlie had neither the funds to pay for the property nor the objects he had promised to exhibit in the museum. So Charlie was run out of town. And J.J., through grit, and cunning, and a certain amount of river rat guile, ended up inheriting Hitler's yacht. Unlike Charlie or Horace, J.J. had no great plan for the boat. And so it sat, a rotting ghost of a promise made long ago on a piece of land near J.J.'s dock for close to two years until some neighborhood boys came by and decided that Hitler's yacht was an ideal place to start a fire. When these kids set it afire, the deck afire, at one corner, then people were scared to tie their boats to the dock. Because if one boat catches afire at a dock with all that gasoline, then they all burn. So then people wouldn't tie their boat there because they were afraid their boat would catch afire. Because they were afraid people would come set that boat afire and catch their boat afire. We had a very popular restaurant right nearby the dock, Jackie's, the original. Not where it is now. And then people started walking out and saying, oh, is this the boat, a lot of big shots, the higher class of people. And they started telling my sister, you ought to get that boat off this dock. It's just a terrible thing to have that boat here. And you know how things stockpile and keep blowing and getting bigger. After the fire, a whole cast of odd and blighted characters began to visit the boat. There was the Holocaust survivor whose wife had died in a concentration camp and who claimed that when he stood near the yacht, he could hear the voice of his long dead love. And then there was the old woman with a portable plastic lawn chair. German lady, and she spoke mostly German. And she would set there by the boat in a chair. She'd bring her chair and hold on to the boat and pray that she could feel the presence of the Fuhrer. So she would scrape little pieces of paint off the boat for souvenirs. One person had come down to the dock and pulled a piece of plank, and off and run up the dock and fell and broke his leg. He could have had the wood as far as I was concerned. But he thought he was stealing it. So we had to put a guard on the dock to keep people from vandalizing it or tearing up other people's boats. Even with the guard there were problems, fights, and thieves, and all kinds of strange people who appeared out of the woodwork, drawn for very personal, private reasons to what Hitler represented. Where were you born? I was born in a small city in Lithuania, Rokiskis. And what was your date of birth? My date of birth was 2/27/1924. The very personal, private reasons which drew Abe Resnick to Hitler's yacht can be found in a mass grave near Rokiskis, Lithuania, his father, his mother, his two sisters. In this interview with the Shoah Foundation, Abe describes the death of his family. He also talks about watching his neighbors dig their own graves, and saving his grandmother from some prison guards, and wandering for days in the woods cold, afraid, and half mad with hunger after escaping from his German captors in 1941. After his escape, Abe joined the Russian Army looking, he says, for revenge. And in a way, he found it. He was in one of the first army units to come across Hitler's bunker, the site of Hitler's last days and death by suicide immediately after the fall of Berlin. You should have seen the inside of the bunker. I mean, it was amazing. I didn't have a camera to shoot pictures. But it was a little city was in the city. And I want to mention to you that we have seen the corpses, the burning corpses of Eva Braun and of Adolf Hitler. It was an incredible experience for us, especially for those, the Jews who were in the camps. In 1985, 40 years after Abe stood over what he believed was the burned corpse of Adolf Hitler, he got a call from a rabbi in Mandarin, Florida. At the time, Abe was a real estate developer and the Vice-Mayor of Miami Beach. He was also very active in the movement to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. So active that the street next to the Holocaust Memorial in Miami is called the Abe Resnick Boulevard. So it was only natural for the rabbi to call Abe, only natural for the rabbi to ask Abe what he thought should be done about the problems presented by Hitler's yacht-- the constant traffic, the freak show atmosphere. It turned out Abe did have an idea for the boat. And after talking to the rabbi, he flew to Jacksonville to discuss his idea with J.J. Well he came up and asked me what I wanted to do with it, what did I think about doing with it. I said, well I had some offers. And we had dinner at my sister's restaurant, Jackie's, the original one on Trout River, and spent the afternoon talking and walking. And he was telling me, what did your daddy do? And I told him he was a seaman. And he said, well what do you think he would want this thing-- you know, he's good salesman-- he said, he's dead. Don't you think it'd be kind of a disgrace to give this something that represents this much tyranny and horror to the world and make a shrine out of it? I said, well, you're absolutely right. He said, let me tell you what I'd like to do with it. And he told me. Abe wanted to sink Hitler's yacht in the Miami Harbor, to blow it up while a group of Holocaust survivors watched from a boat nearby. He thought this act would provide the survivors with some kind of closure, with a sense that we now lived in a very different world. Abe told J.J. he wanted to plan the sinking to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Voyage of the Damned, when 900 Jewish refugees on board a ship called the St. Louis were denied entrance to the United States and forced to return to Europe. About 700 of the 900 Jewish passengers were slaughtered in concentration camps. And the idea was to collect whatever survivors there were and maybe some other dignitaries, perhaps even some Nobel Prize winners, and sail them all out to the point in the Miami Harbor where the St. Louis had been turned away. At that point, at that point exactly, they would demonstrate to themselves and to anyone else who'd cared to notice that the tide had certainly changed. In the words of Abe Resnick, words which were quoted extensively after his meeting with J.J. became public, "We intend to apply the final solution. We intend to apply the final solution to Hitler's yacht." It was certainly better to sink that boat off in Miami where it would do some good for some fish to breed and reproduce than to put it somewhere and make a shrine for a bunch of skinhead Nazis. In America we don't believe in that kind of stuff. So I said, all right. It sounds like a good idea to me. He said, well, what do you want to do with it? I said, well, I guess I'll give to you then. He said, you know people are going to offer you more money now that I want it. I said, do we need a contract? And he said, you shook my hand. I said, yeah. He said, then that's all the contract we need, ain't it? And I said, absolutely with me if it's all right with you. This is what is left of Adolf Hitler's once glorious yacht-- rotting wood, rusted steel, broken glass. It's enough, though, to remind a concentration camp survivor of Hitler's evils and to want the boat destroyed. That handshake got a lot of press. Jackie Judd from ABC News did a whole story about it. She explained how Hitler would stroll the decks of the Ostwind with his mistress, Eva Braun, and talked to a couple hollow-eyed Holocaust survivors who seemed to think that this sinking was a good idea. Then J.J. got up and shook Abe's hand again, only this time they did it in front of the cameras. They promised that within the year, Hitler's yacht would be at the bottom of the Miami Harbor, nothing more than a playground for interested marine life. And this is when the trouble really began. Coming up, lawyers, guns, and money, lots and lots of money, neo-Nazi money, in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. Its This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today we are devoting our entire program to the story of the boat known as Hitler's yacht. Alix Spiegel continues the story. The market for Hitler and Nazi memorabilia, as far as anyone can tell, is relatively modest, in the millions each year. And what dealers of these materials will tell you is that while a small percentage of their business is Nazi sympathizers, the vast bulk of the market is history buffs, the kind of people who can recite every battle in the Civil War. Hitler's yacht seemed to capture the imagination of these collectors and a lot of other people too, particularly after the boat appeared on television alongside Abe, J.J., and Jackie Judd. After that people really started sending letters, telegrams-- I've got boxes of them here-- of some wanting to buy it to preserve it, some thinking it was a good idea to destroy it, some thought they ought to burn it right there. And there were threats made in every direction. There were angry letters from historical preservationists and angrier letters from neo-Nazis. They're not going to kill you. But they just say that. Nazis are spineless anyway. They probably could beat up some old woman or something. But it's not an easy thing to go kill somebody that's prepared. And so J.J. got prepared. He stopped going out at night and refused to meet strangers unless they agreed to meet at his house. I just changed a few of my habits. I didn't eat at the same restaurants. I didn't, like I said, go out in the evenings or meet strangers. Of course I had fences, dogs, and security, and proper firearms myself. Despite these precautions, there were incidents. One of the windows in J.J.'s house was shot out during a midnight drive-by. And there was a similar attack on his office. Because J.J. is J.J., these late night shootings didn't really make much of an impression. In fact, I first learned about the shootings not from J.J. himself-- he forgot to tell me-- but from his companion, a woman named Linda he's known since he was a teenager. Of course, Linda didn't seem particularly impressed either. I recall one particular night, someone drove by his office and shot a gun. And I said, small caliber. It was just a small caliber. It was a .22. It wasn't a big gun. Hell, it might have even been one of my neighbors. But they called up and took credit for it. When somebody shoots one of my windows out, I just move my chair over to another spot in the house and board that window up. At this point in our story as events begin to spiral, I'd like to take a moment to point out just how unlikely it is that the Ostwind was actually used by Adolf Hitler. Horace Glass, the man who first brought the boat to J.J.'s dock, not only went broke trying to restore the yacht, he also spent over 20 years collecting information about the Ostwind's history. He hunted down newspaper articles, blueprints. He even initiated a correspondence with Nazi architect Albert Speer. But the closest he came to proof that the yacht ever felt the weight of Hitler's foot is this: the German shipbuilders who constructed the Ostwind, people who had never met Adolf Hitler themselves, told him that they were told that the boat was very important to the Fuhrer. That's it. And although the Ostwind was built for Olympic yacht racing, almost immediately after its completion it was painted gray and used in the war effort, mostly hauling stuff back and forth for the German Navy. So it's hard to imagine that it got much use as a pleasure craft. After going through 50 years of newspaper clippings about the Ostwind, I can tell you this. When the boat arrived in America in the 1940s, it was advertised as the yacht of Admiral Karl Donitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, a claim which was probably also untrue. Later in the decade, an enterprising Baltimorean dubbed the Ostwind the Nazi yacht and sold tours to visitors in the Baltimore Harbor. So it wasn't until the 1950s that the Ostwind became known as Hitler's yacht, probably for simple commercial reasons. In light of this evidence that the Ostwind was probably not Hitler's yacht, the events which follow are all the more incredible. We started getting inquiries from all over the world. I recall seeing an inquiry fro-- China. Maine, New York, Tallahassee, Alabama, Mexico, New Mexico, Texas-- we got stacks of cards. And it was people who normally I don't think had an interest particularly in ships and sailing. "Dear Mr. Nelson, I talked with you two weeks ago about the abandoned Ostwind. I'm with a nonprofit group called the Keike Enrichment Foundation. We put on special programs and events for Hawaii's handicapped children. We just had a Christmas event for the Shriners Hospital down the way. There was tons of snow, crushed ice, and a snowman building contest that was really fun. Anyway, we're a new organization and thought the Ostwind might make an interesting exhibit for the kids. Any idea what you're going to do with the boat? Please advise." "Dear Mr. Nelson, I realize that my interest in the Ostwind yacht is probably not unique. I'm sure you have plenty of people calling with offers, et cetera. But please allow me to make a case for myself. My wish to restore the craft is driven by my need for a project to occupy myself during the long illness I have. I am young, 32, and on social security for the rest of my life. So I thought it would be fun to restore a part of history that could otherwise be lost forever. My funds are low but regular as clockwork. And I promise I will work very, very hard." There were other letters, boxes upon boxes of them stored in the mobile home parked behind J.J.'s house. They were from people who couldn't understand what all the fuss was about or people who thought that the boat should be burned where it stood. Every state, every race, every position and policy was represented, usually it was represented emphatically. And the violence at the emotions puzzled J.J. I mean, I couldn't see how a resting relic of a piece of junk boat could mean so many different things to different people. In other words, the Jewish people hated it because it belonged to Adolf Hitler. And they wanted it destroyed and gotten rid of because of some psychological connection of Hitler. And the Nazis and the skinheads looked at it as a shrine like a holy place. And it was just a boat. Then J.J. got another letter. Or actually J.J.'s lawyer got another letter. It was from a neo-Nazi group in the Midwest. They wanted to buy the Ostwind. After I had handshook and gave it to Commissioner Resnick on the deck of the boat in front of ABC News, Jackie Judd, they contacted the lawyer and offered a half a million dollars for the boat. And what did you think when you heard that? Well, half a million dollars is nice to have. But it wasn't that important. First of all, I already gave the boat to the Jewish people, Resnick. So I couldn't go back on my word. And their idea was you didn't sign any papers. I said, no. But I shook hands with the man. And I gave him my word. But the offer created its own problems. J.J.'s sister Jackie, owner of the original Jackie's restaurant on Trout River, had died a couple of summers before when the cigarette she was smoking set fire to her bed. Her death left the family in debt, a towering mountain of debt, including a sizable bill to the corporate lawyer in charge of her estate. Here's Linda. The attorney for her estate actually sued him to try to keep him from giving the boat away. He was indignant and mad because I gave away a corporate asset for a half a million dollars for nothing, he said, which was bad business. I said, well it's a matter of principle, not so much the money. Of course I could have used the money. But like I said, I already gave it to the man. So I couldn't very well change my mind if I wanted to. Florida Times-Union May 31, 1989. "Hitler's yacht was moved by barge from the Trout River to the Intracoastal Waterway during the weekend and is scheduled to begin its final voyage today. 'Finally', said Rabbi Gary Perez of Beth Shalom Congregation in Mandarin. 'Hitler's yacht is getting what it deserves." When the boat was being transported to Miami by barge, they had threats-- like at St. Augustine, there's a narrow bridge at 210. And some people called and said they were going to blow it up. People on the boat were watching. It never stopped. It just went day and night straight through in the waterway. My lawyer was calling every 15 minutes when the boat was going down the river telling me I was making a terrible mistake. And I wouldn't have a pot or a window when he got through. On June 4, 1989, over 100 people, including 27 survivors of the Voyage of the Damned, boarded a Princess Line cruiser to witness the sinking of the Ostwind yacht. As an airplane passed overhead towing a sign branded with the words "never again", the cruiser set sail. Rabbi Barry Konovitch of the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center in Miami was at the sinking of the yacht. Was, in fact, one of the event's organizers. He says that the cruiser trolled back and forth in the harbor for about an hour before the sinking. They wanted to give the survivors time to absorb the meaning of the day. Then we came to the point where the yacht hove into view. And there was an announcement on the loudspeaker by the captain, what was about to happen, that everybody should go out on deck. And all of a sudden, there was a tremendous quiet that settled over the boat. Nobody said a word. And I must tell you that when the moment came for the yacht to be observed and then sunk, one person turned around, and then another person turned around. And the entire deck just turned their backs on the ship. They didn't even want to look at it as a symbolic gesture. Before the ship went down? As it was about to go down. And I don't remember any cheering. I just remember the silence. And why do you think that they did that? They wanted to demonstrate rather graphically their revulsion at the Nazis and at Nazism. And this was the symbol that represented Nazism to them at that moment. And it wasn't choreographed or anything? Not at all. It was just an amazing thing. Spontaneous. Spontaneous disgust. Yes. Abe Resnick died in 1998. But I talked to his son, Jimmy Resnick, who attended the ceremony with his mother. It sank. Everybody threw flowers or lilies or whatever into the ocean. And everybody started screaming. I believe, then, we went into a rendition of-- I believe if I'm not mistaken-- the Hatikva and then the National Anthem. And people started to sing and started to hug each other. And it was very touching, very very touching. J.J., whose travel arrangements and suite at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami were provided free of charge, says he enjoyed his afternoon with the survivors. He was the hero, the man who had made the right choice. They were thanking me and telling me I did the right thing, and there should be more people like me that had put principle before money. Of course I was crying out of one eye and laughing out of the other. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, there's $500,000 going down the pipe there. And you always have second thoughts even though I wouldn't have taken the money. But it's something to think of when somebody is reminding you every hour. Abe Resnick also apparently enjoyed the day. His son, Jimmy, says he was elated. I remember vividly what my father had said and what everybody had said was this will finally be the end of it. After this, that's it. Nothing will come back to haunt us. As I said, I went down to Jacksonville to visit J.J. and we spent two days in his truck driving around. There was no particular plan to our driving. I had mentioned that I wanted a tour of the city. And so J.J. gave me one. He showed me the Northside of town, where rich people lived in Spanish mansions with water views. Then he drove me down to the neighborhood where the Ostwind had spent its last days, to the dock he didn't own anymore. Over the 12 years since the sinking a lot had changed. J.J.'s house had burned down. And the popular seafood restaurant his sister had owned was closed and just beginning to crumble. J.J. pulled into the lot next to his old place, a small junky yard filled with rusted cars and boats of all shapes and sizes. There was a little girl playing in the yard, dragging a long jumprope back and forth in the dust. There was also a man who looked like her father, 30, maybe 35, with his jeans hanging low on his body and his hands covered in boat grease. J.J. pulled alongside this man and rolled down his window. I want to pull over on the other side where the fire station is going to be built, show the little lady some of this stuff if you don't mind. Soon J.J. and the man fell to talking-- about the weather, about nothing in particular. Then J.J. mentioned that he used to own the next lot. And the man nodded his head. He said he remembered J.J. and mentioned the boat that used to sit in the yard. You remember that boat, Hitler's yacht? Yeah, I got a piece of wood off of it. Oh, you were one of those thieves. No, you gave it to me. The man said he took the wood in the Ostwind's last days when its death was all but certain. He said by the time he got to it most of the interesting stuff, the portholes, for example, had already been stripped away by more enterprising souvenir hunters and he had grabbed what he could. It was just Hitler's boat over there. And everybody wanted a piece of it. So I went over and got me my piece of it. It was a piece of teak off the deck. Where do you keep the little piece of teak now? Do you know? I think it's in the trunk of that car right there. Really? Yes, I think so. Can we see it? If I can get my trunk open, you can see. Which one are you in? I'm in that little Mustang. The lock is broken on it. It might be lying in the back. You want me to look around? The teak wasn't in the backseat. It was in the trunk. And there was no way to get it out. But I didn't mind much. At the time, I thought this was just a pretty piece of coincidence, some dumb luck without any real significance, kind of funny actually. I didn't realize it was the beginning of a pattern, that at almost every stop in Jacksonville, we would find some remnant or echo of Hitler's yacht stored away in car trunks or kitchen cabinets, wrapped in cloth, and laid carefully alongside family silver. After the man in the boatyard, there was Howard, a wrinkled old man who showed me the wood from the deck of the Ostwind he'd stored in one of his outbuildings. He told me he didn't believe that Hitler was ever on the boat but had decided to keep the wood anyway. After Howard, there was Walter. Hey, Hey. How you doing? J.J. and Walter had known each other for a long time, ever since Walter was a kid and worked on J.J.'s dock. When we drove up he was out front draining the oil from a car parked in his driveway. But as soon as he spied us, he marched out to the street and asked me what I was doing with a tape recorder in my lap. When I told him I was talking to people about Hitler's yacht, he smiled and said he had a funny story about that. Yeah, I went to a garage sale I guess about maybe a month ago. And the strangest thing happened at the garage sale. I noticed this dish sitting up there. And the guy said, I cannot tell you who owned the dish. But it came off the Ostwind. The lady that donated to the church the particular item, her dad worked on the Ostwind as one of Hitler's servants. Did you get the dish? I've got the dish. I'm hanging on to it. I forgot he told me about that. Walter disappeared into the house and returned carrying a small bowl. It had a top with a decorated handle and a trim of braided metal a dirty yellowish color. That's gold and that's gold. To check it I went ahead and put acid. Because gold will not deteriorate under acid. If it's fake gold, the acid will eat it up. But this right here, I put acid on that and that, sulfuric acid, and nothing happened. Walter held the bowl up with both hands so we could get a good look at it. It twinkled and shimmered a little in the late afternoon light. And it was clear from the proud way he held it high in the air that Walter believed the dish was authentic. I, on the other hand, wasn't so sure, especially after he told me he'd only paid $3 for it. But I was going to have it checked out to see if it was authentic. But I have ideas it's authentic. See the thing on the back? I was going to take it to an antique dealer and see what he said about it. After four months of research, I called Rabbi Konovitch, the man who helped Abe Resnick organize the sinking of the Ostwind, and told him I believed that Hitler's yacht was a fraud. I explained the boat's history and made clear I thought that the Ostwind had gotten the name Hitler's yacht because one of its owners realized the name would add to its mystique and value. I see, interesting. So my question for you is does that change your feelings about whether or not the yacht should've been sunk? Not at all, because it was merely a symbol to begin with. Can you expand on that a little bit? Well, a symbol is very powerful. It doesn't make any difference whether it's historically valid as long as it's a symbol. So for the setting, for the moment, that symbolized Hitler's regime and its destruction. I had expected a different reaction-- anger, disbelief, or outrage that the survivors had been duped, perhaps even some kind of remorse. I certainly didn't expect amusement and indifference, didn't expect the rabbi wouldn't care. But he was unequivocal. It didn't make any difference to him that the yacht wasn't real. The point, after all, was that the yacht had become a gathering ground for Hitler lovers and misdirected neo-Nazis. Once these people embraced the fantasy of Hitler's yacht, there was no turning back. The Ostwind would be sunk, and its sinking as meaningful as if it were the real thing. There's a biblical injunction about destroying entirely evil because if you don't it comes back to haunt you. The rabbi told me that he thought all Nazi materials, real or fake, should meet the same end as Hitler's yacht. Then he suggested that I read the biblical story of the Amalekites. He thought it might give me some perspective. Like the Nazis, the Amalekites sought the eradication and enslavement of the Jewish people. They met often in the open desert for battle. And when the Israelites won one of these fights, there was an absolute rule governing their behavior. They were instructed to obliterate any and all items which might have been captured in the heat of battle. Everything-- trinkets, jewelry, gold, silver-- anything that the Amalekites revered was to be destroyed, even if its acquisition might profit the Jewish victors or help them in their future battles. I think it's like touching poison. It has to rub off on you either consciously or unconsciously. That's dangerous. So after I talked to the rabbi, I called Walter back. I wanted to see if he was being poisoned by evil, corrupted by the presence of the $3 bowl he stored on the shelf in his bedroom. I asked Walter why he wanted the dish, if it was simply the drama of celebrity which excited him, any celebrity, or if his interest was more specific, if there was something about Hitler in particular. Do you think you'd rather have a dish from Hitler or from John F. Kennedy? Oh boy. Well, I think you'd get more value out of the one that Hitler had, as far as the monetary value. How about, would you rather have a dish from Hitler or from FDR? Oh boy. I think I'd rather have it from Hitler to be honest with you. FDR wasn't all that wise. Hitler was a pretty smart guy. You know, Einstein and him were side by side with intelligence, I believe. I've got one more of these questions. Would you rather have a dish from Churchill or from Hitler? Oh boy. I'll stick with Hitler. Do you think that Hitler is cooler than FDR? He was kind of an outlaw. Maybe that's what I like about him. I don't know. But I think Hitler was cooler. And do you think that Hitler was cooler than Kennedy? Well, Kennedy was born with what they call a silver spoon in his mouth. Adolf Hitler wasn't. So you identify with him in that way? It could be, yeah. Kennedy never had to work an honest day in his life. Whereas Hitler had to work every day of his life. Kennedy did some stuff that I didn't necessarily approve of, like his being an infidel. He was not very true to his wife. He just philandered around. Adolf Hitler didn't philander. He was just a true guy, you know, my kind of guy. But he killed six million people. Well, I didn't agree with that part of him. He didn't have to do that. He didn't have to kill them. He could have put them in slave camps and just let them be. But to actually exterminate people, that is wrong. Do you think that people are more attracted to evil or more attracted to good? Depends on the person. Do you think that evil is more exciting than good? Oh boy. You would have to drag that up. Well, the majority of people are good. Let's put it that way. I think the majority of people want to do good. I try to do good. I go out of my way to be good. But I do have, I guess you could say, a bad part about me. Walter works full-time as a lineman for the electric company. On weekends he goes fishing. He also enjoys fixing cars and long visits with his family. Now Walter is not a neo-Nazi nor is he a fascist. If you ask Walter to explain his fascination with Hitler, he won't talk about Hitler's politics, he'll talk about Hitler's power, that Hitler could quote, "do whatever he wanted." What do you think it is that's so-- Fascinating about Hitler? Yes. Well, when you think about what he did, look at the people that he organized just on a whim. He had a million soldiers just like that come up that believed in his views. And how one man can dictate someone's life like that and just get all these people to believe in him and actually go fight a war. Walter keeps the bowl locked in his bedroom, hidden from thieves, but positioned so that each night when he goes to bed he has a view of it from his pillow. He doesn't show it to people because, he says, he doesn't want to cause trouble between the races. Walter doesn't want to upset anyone. He just likes being close to the dish he believes is a little piece of history. To me it's kind of intriguing that I own something that he actually had in his possession. He might have eaten soup out of this stupid bowl. I don't know. It's just something that not everybody has. I mean, do you have a bowl form Hitler? I suggested to Walter that the Ostwind wasn't actually Hitler's yacht. I told him I believed that Hitler had never actually set foot on the boat. Well, now I heard he was on it. And when I was in history class, I remember seeing pictures of him on the Ostwind. Oh really? Yeah, I remember seeing a vessel. I wonder what Hitler would think now if he knew I had his bowl. Do you ever think about that? Yeah. And what do you think? How does this grab you, man? You were on the ship. Your boat is out in the ocean sunk in like 250 feet of water. And I've got the bowl off of it from a guy that you gave it to on the boat. I got it from his daughter. I mean, when you think about it, it's really fascinating. What's fascinating is at the end of the day, it didn't really matter to anyone involved with the Ostwind whether or not the boat or any of the material that came off the boat was real. Both those who reviled Hitler and those who worshipped him had agreed to play out their passions on this half-rotted sailboat. And in doing that, they made the question of its authenticity obsolete. They didn't bother, didn't want really, to think about the possibility that the boat in question was a fraud. The battle they felt they were fighting was too important. And when confronted with evidence that it was a hoax, one side resolutely denied its reality. The other simply didn't seem to care. And that's where this story ends, this biography of an extended collective fantasy with one postscript. J.J. told me that months after the yacht was scuttled, people continued to write. Many wrote wondering where precisely the boat had been sunk. It seems they wanted to fish it out and stage a resurrection. J.J., of course, wouldn't say. He told all comers that the yacht was nothing but, and here I quote, "a pain in the ass that made an excellent fishing reef." It made an excellent fishing reef. It's probably just one big barnacle now. Alix Spiegel, she's a mental health reporter for National Public Radio. Her story was part of a series called the America Project. She got funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and me with Wendy Dorr, Jonathan Goldstein, and Starlee Kine, senior producer Julie Snyder, production help form Todd Bachmann, Laura Bellows and Paul McCarthy. You can download today's program at our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who explains why he can't meet with you. My wife is a millionaire. She's a nymphomaniac. And she's an alcoholic. And it's all I can do to handle her. I can't put up with you. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI Public Radio International.
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If you think about it, it's a strange thing for a very rich man to do to run for president because it means throwing yourself into a thousand tedious and potentially demeaning situations. For instance, you show up at a debate with the other millionaires who are running for president, and you try to make a joke out of the negative ads they are running against you. "You didn't even use a good picture of me," you protest, "so I brought you some pictures." You wave a few snapshots into the air. You try to turn this debate into something on your own terms. You try to seize the moment. You pass the photos to one of your millionaire opponents. He does not even look at them. He tells you that no pretty pictures are going to change your lousy record on taxes. You come off terribly. Another bad moment. Well, this actually happened to Bob Dole just last February. Bob Dole, now the presumptive Republican nominee to the presidency. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it is This American Life, your weekly program documenting life in these here United States through whatever radio storytelling means we believe will amuse you and ourselves. I'm Ira Glass, and today we consider the stories of three men who had the option of comfortable, decent lives and decided to do something wildly eccentric instead, like run for president. Act One concerns a politician you have probably never heard of. Act Two is a man who wrote a very strange letter to his yet unborn, yet unconceived, children. Act Three, another mixed legacy of a rich guy. Stay with us. Act One, The Grizz. Over the last few months, a reporter named Michael Lewis has been publishing campaign diaries in The New Republic. I don't know if you've seen these or not. They're pretty great. He's also a columnist for the New York Times, a commentator on Marketplace, author of three books including one called Liar's Poker that is a pretty hilarious account of Wall Street in the '80s. This is a guy whose reporting reads like a novel, usually a pretty entertaining, funny novel. And on the campaign trail, he has noticed a hundred telling moments that no other reporter has documented. Like, for example, the day that Al Franken of Saturday Night Live showed up at a Pat Buchanan rally and picked a fight with some pro-Buchanan military cadets. Like, for example, Pat Buchanan railing against a Detroit steel mill closing but then quietly turning down the offer to actually sit on the board of directors of the mill and try to save it. And then, at some point, Michael Lewis became fascinated with some of the candidates that everyone else was ignoring. And by everyone else, I include both the reporters and the voters, OK? There were nine Republican candidates back in Iowa. And if you can name all nine of those candidates right now, I've got a crisp $100 bill right here in my hand. Call this station, and no, I'm not going to give you the phone number. Please consider now, when you consider these nine candidates, what could be a better subject for an entertaining, novelistic kind of writer than someone running for president who has pretty much no chance of making it? There you have a truly American story. There you have a classic American dreamer. And Lewis became so interested in one of these certain losers-- a guy named Morry Taylor-- that at some point, Lewis' editor got completely fed up with him and ordered him never to follow around Taylor anymore. "I did not send you out there to write Morry Taylor's biography," the guy said. But it is easy to see why Lewis became so mesmerized with Taylor. Taylor would give away cash prizes to voters at his rallies. Taylor would burst onto stages reciting the words to his campaign theme song, Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark." He would say, "You need a spark to start a fire, and this gun's for hire." Taylor spent $6 million of his own money on the campaign. As Lewis points out, of nine Republican candidates, Taylor was the only one who had actually been a success in the real business world. Taylor began as a tool and die maker, bought failing companies, made them profitable. And by last year, his own company, Titan Tire and Wheel International-- I'll just say that name again, let's just pause on that name, Titan Tire and Wheel International-- tallied $620 million in revenue, no debt, and one of the highest profit margins of any company on the New York Stock Exchange. Morry Taylor has spent his whole life in the Midwest, and that is where Michael Lewis' diaries on him begin. Michael Lewis agreed to come into our studios and read. January 11. Within minutes of landing in Des Moines, you know that you have arrived in the American Midwest. The Midwest is the straight man of the Western world, millions and millions of square miles peopled with Abbotts without their Costellos. It's not that Midwesterners lack a sense of humor. It's just that they regard humor as a second-rate behavior, the opposite of rather than a complement to seriousness. It's no wonder that professional Midwestern humorists like Garrison Keillor and David Letterman have a feel of men who have spun out of some orbit. I've come to Iowa to find Morry Taylor, the man who by a landslide won the hearts of the United We Stand delegates at Ross Perot's convention last fall. After hearing him speak, 400 of the 2,000 people present signed up to work on his campaign. The strange thing about Taylor is that he hasn't gotten more play in the press or the polls. He's the real thing, an extremely successful businessmen who has behaved about as well as an extremely successful businessman can. He employs 5,500 people at a wage rate of $12 to $17 an hour, all of whom are included in a profit sharing plan. He pays himself a modest salary and argues forcefully and often that CEOs of publicly held corporations should never be paid more than about 20 times the wages of their most menial workers. Actually, that's probably one of the reasons no one has heard of him until now. January 12. We start our day just before 8 o'clock inside a motor home plastered all over with Morry's favorite screaming eagle logo, the one his campaign staffers plead with him to abandon. A ferocious-looking bird flies out of the T in Morry's last name, which is painted in huge letters across the side of the colossal machine. Morry's campaign manager tried to talk him out of the expense, but Morry insisted that the best way to start running for president was to buy six RVs-- landyachts, they are called-- and race them in a convoy across each of Iowa's 99 counties and through every New Hampshire hamlet. Six monstrosities all jammed together and churning down the highway at 80 miles an hour with the Pointer Sisters blaring out of the lead vehicle, drowning out everything but Morry. Morry figured that he'd roll them into town, surround the courthouse, flip on the loudspeakers, tap a few kegs of beer, and everyone for miles would be talking about Morry Taylor for the next two weeks. He was right. Today, like every other day, Morry is wearing his American flag tie. He's shouting over music and the roar of the landyacht into a telephone at a radio talk show. "Anyone who wants to come and help, call 1-800-USABEAR. The talk show host asks him some question. "Well," replies Morry, "I use the bear number because my nickname is The Grizz." "Why do they call you The Grizz?" I ask after he hangs up. "I got that when I took the company public," he shouts. "At the closing, they gave me this plaque. It says-- and they did it in Latin, which language I can't speak, but this is what it says-- in North America, there is no known predator to the grizzly. So I became The Grizz. Then I thought about it. Up until that time, I kind of liked my other nickname, Attila. People think Attila the Hun was a barbarian, but he's not. He's the guy who ran the Roman legion out of town. At 9 o'clock, the landyacht rolls up beside the front door of the Ames High School and disgorges Morry. Morry then does his usual trick of startling the locals. He bursts through both double doors leading into the school, which, like all the doors he will open for the rest of the day, slam violently against the wall behind them. He marches off down a long corridor with the rest of us trying to keep up, leaving a trail of startled adolescents in his wake. He swaggers like a quarterback on the way to a huddle. "Did you play sports in high school?" I ask Morry, or rather, the back of Morry's head. He doesn't even look around. He's shaking his head. I have no trouble imagining the scorn on his face. "Did I play sports?" he asks. "I am the biggest jock who ever ran for president. I can beat you in anything." And with that, he blows through the double doors leading into the auditorium. About 30 kids file in, slump down into their seats, and settle in for a snooze they'll never have. "Your school is too big," booms Morry. "This is what is wrong with America," he says, pointing at the kids. "Big, big, big. A place like this breeds weirdos." The students are now fully alert. "I never could enjoy going to a school like this," concludes Morry. The kids seem to concur. "How many of you ever take accounting?" he asks. The kids are now squirming and ducking. He's breaking down their resistance, making them nervous. Two hands go up. Morry shakes his head a little sadly. His tone changes. "I know you've got a lot of these teachers." He waves nonchalantly at a couple of uneasy-looking older men in the rafters. "And they tell you a lot of--" he doesn't use the word "crap" but he might as well-- "things. But in your whole entire life, you're only going to use one or maybe two of those things." He pauses and seems to reconsider. "Now, we all agree that the most important thing in your life is your family," he says. "Your mama and your daddy, your brothers and your sisters. But right after that, there's something else. We all know what it is, and it's green." With that, he reaches into his pocket and produces a fat roll of $100 bills. He holds it high so that everyone can see. Five grand, cash. The kids are now perched on the edge of their seats, giggling nervously. "It all comes down to accounting," says Morry. "Accounting and money. You can't live without it. And the minute you make it, someone is trying to take it away from you. So for god's sake, find out about money." "Can I have some?" asks a kid in the front row. "It's mine!" shouts Morry and puts the money back in his pocket, a nice illustration of some general business principle. Morry's positions are somewhat quixotic. He's running on a platform of balancing the budget in 18 months, not by eliminating programs but by firing a third of the best-paid government employees. "How many of you want to give the government 40% of what you earn after you get out of here?" he asks the crowd. One of the kids raises his hand. "Mark his name down," says Morry. "An institution needs him. We're going to study his brain. He's not human. He's an alien." January 13. Tonight, we flew in one of Morry's private planes to a Republican county dinner at Storm Lake in Northwestern Iowa. After dinner, Morry rises to speak. He's on. Within minutes, he has the crowd laughing and clapping. They agree with him about everything, especially the lunacy of the Forbes tax plan. Then, in the midst of the fun, a woman rises and challenges his pro-choice position. "It's a religious issue," Morry says, "not a matter for the federal government." She presses him. You can see she's used to making public speakers either come around to her way of thinking or regret ever opening their mouths. She's picked the wrong guy today. Instead of backing down or wiggling, Morry goes on the attack. "Look, ma'am. I think 99% of women never want an abortion. They go through a lot of mental anguish. They suffer a lot. I say leave it to them." She tries to speak. Morry interrupts. "I said, leave it to the women." And there, at a banquet filled with Republican party hacks, the sort of people who are meant to be rabidly pro-life, who Morry expected to be rabidly pro-life, a volcano of spontaneous applause erupted. All over the room, women were clapping so hard I thought they'd break their hands. Here, I thought, is the benefit of having someone around who feels free to speak his mind. He liberates, however momentarily, those who don't. January 14. I was waiting at the front desk of the Des Moines YMCA when Morry arrived just before 9:00 AM. "What, do you think I wouldn't show?" he says. The racquetball game took just under 22 minutes. Morry won, 15-zip, 15-5. I had figured that between the 25 extra pounds he's carrying around and the 16 years he has on me, I could out-hustle him. I was wrong. He knew every angle and trick on the court and played each one with relish. "Too good," he'd shout after he'd drop the ball into the corner for the 10th time. As the rout progressed, he shouted to his aides. "14 to zip. Not bad for an old guy," he shouted. And then, under his breath, "Some of my guys are betting on you. Dip [BLEEP]." As we crawl through the hole out the back of the court, he says, "Don't you go write that you lost because you were nervous a presidential candidate was going to have a heart attack." Camus identified the love of winning at games as one of the prerequisites of happiness in the modern world. And he did that without ever meeting Morry. More of Michael Lewis' campaign diaries and Morry Taylor later in our show. Stay with us. So Jack, let's start here. This is the case of Hecht v. California, right? Right. The facts of the case-- and let me just go straight to the unaffected prose of the judges. This introduces all the characters and the essential events of the case. "At the age of 48, William Kane took his own life on October 30, 1991 in a Las Vegas hotel. For about five years prior to his death, he had been living with a petitioner, 38-year-old Deborah Hecht. Kane was survived by two college-age children of his former wife, whom he had divorced in 1976." OK, so now we have a dead guy, his girlfriend, two kids, and a former wife. But that is not all we have of citizen William Kane's life. We also have-- 15 vials of his sperm in an account at California Cryobank, Inc. And this is where the story of this willful man with money begins. It is our contributing editor Jack Hitt who reviewed the case for us. Jack's work regularly appears not just on this program but in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Lingua Franca, and too many other publications to name. But let us get back to citizen William Kane. Mr. Kane does not have Morry Taylor's kind of money, but he did have enough. And in his will, he declared that if his girlfriend would use any of the-- 15 vials of sperm. --and succeeded in getting pregnant, then the resulting child would get some of Kane's personal mementos and possibly the rights to some money. This is an odd case of American jurisprudence, and the legal opinion includes the letter that William Kane wrote to his unborn, yet to be conceived child, Wyatt. Jack Hitt reads. "I address this to my children because although I have only two, Everett and Katie, it may be that Deborah will decide, as I hope she will, to have a child by me after my death. I've been assiduously generating frozen sperm samples for that eventuality. If she does, then this letter is for my posthumous offspring as well, with the thought that I have loved you in my dreams, even though I never got to see you born. If you are receiving this letter, it means that I am dead. Whether by my own hand or that of another makes very little difference. I feel that my time has come, and I wanted to leave you with something more than a dead enigma that was your father. I am inordinately proud of who I've been, what I made of me. I'm so proud of that that I would rather take my own life now than be ground into a mediocre existence by my enemies who, because of my mistakes and bravado, have gained the power to finish me." How many people do we know in our lives, Jack, who can say a sentence like that? Every sentence in this letter is worthy of study. I mean, from "I've been assiduously generating frozen sperm samples for that eventuality," to "If you are receiving this letter, it means that I am dead." And it goes on, Ira. Check this out. So he has several pages about his childhood memories and the family history. And then, quote, "So why am I checking out now? Basically, betrayal, over and over again, has made me tired. I've picked up some heavyweight enemies along the way, ranging from the Kellys of the world to crazies with guns to insurance agencies to the lawyers that have sucked me dry. I don't want to die as a tired, perhaps defeated and bitter old man. I'd rather end it like I have lived it. On my time, when and where I will." [SINGING] Regrets, I have a few. But then again-- But Ira, listen to this next sentence. --too few to mention. I've lived a life that's full-- Oh, yeah. But we digress. He says, "I'd rather end it like I have lived it. On my time, when and where I will, and while my life is still an object of self-sculpture, a personal creation with which I am still proud. In truth, death for me is not the opposite of life. It is a form of life's punctuation." End quote. I like him. It's like a Martin Scorsese film. Yeah. And he's got this tough-guy thing. Here he is talking to his kid. I love that phrase, "So why am I checking out now?" Oh, by the way, just to make it even more interesting and soap opera-ish, the lawyer for the two kids, her name is Sandra Erwin. If you read carefully elsewhere, you find out that she is their mother. and Mr. Kane's original wife. Wow. So the lawyer suing the girlfriend is, in fact, the first recipient of Mr. Kane's sperm. And then, in a footnote, you sort of discover just what the relationship is between the Kane children-- the existing children, as I call them-- and Deborah. So this is just a footnote just dropped in the text. And this pretty much says everything you need to know. "On November 12, 1992, decedents children filed against Hecht a complaint for wrongful death and intentional infliction of emotional distress wherein they allege that their father, who had been unemployed for some time, became deeply depressed and began to seriously contemplate suicide about September 1, 1991. For six weeks before his death, Hecht was aware of decedent's quote, 'disturbed plan' end quote, to end his life, that Hecht convinced him to allow her to have his child after his death and leave her a substantial amount of his property to raise and care for this child. In the week before his death, Hecht encouraged and assisted decedent in transferring property to her." And she also generously helped him, quote, "empty his personal checking account by issuing a check to Hecht for $80,000," which you learn elsewhere she signed herself. And then here's my favorite sentence. "Hecht assisted decedent in purchasing a one-way ticket to Las Vegas and took him to the airport." I wonder what that curbside conversation was like. Can you imagine? She bought a one-way ticket to Las Vegas, knowing that he was going to go sit in a hotel, take pills. She also, by the way, bought him the plastic bag that he put over his head after he took the pills. She gave him a copy of Final Exit, which is a suicide manual. The plastic bag to put over his head after he takes the pills? Isn't that the whole point of pills is that you don't have to do the ugly thing of getting a gun or plastic bags? I mean, isn't that the whole point? Ira, you're not up on your suicide manuals. According to Derek Humphry-- I believe that's the man's name who wrote Final Exit-- quite often, if you take a lot of pills, a lot of people will just end up getting sick, and you will live. So the idea is, yes, you take the pills to make sure that you will die, and then you suffocate yourself-- With the plastic bag. --in the bag so that you don't wake up and vomit. It's pretty grim and certainly not the province of this discussion. All right. Well, I'm learning just so much here. Yes, right. So the thing is, they're not really concerned about the money, because they cut a deal with Debbie. The deal was, we get 80%, you get 20. What they're worried about is that if she gets pregnant-- and this is where this whole case opens up a bizarre form of new law-- what they're worried about is that the child would have a claim to the estate, to their 80%. And, in fact, the child probably would. And that's because under his will, he says that if she gets pregnant and has the child, then the child gets some dough? Well, it's just that it's an unresolved matter. So it's likely that the child would be able to sue later on for the kind of benefits that any natural biological child would be able to sue for. Mr. Kane is the biological father. He just participated in this new science which is referred to in the case with the phrase "post-mortem insemination." We return to our own post-mortem examination when our program continues. Act Two continues our discussion with journalist Jack Hitt about a dead man and his sperm. So here's what the lawsuit's about. The lawsuit is the existing kids want to destroy the sperm, all of it. 15 vials "assiduously" deposited, as we know. In the course of their complaint, the existing kids say that they seek to, quote, "prevent the disruption of existing families by after-born children." "After-born children." There's another new-- this case, in terms of what it's doing to the English language, is just groundbreaking. Forget about what it does to the law. "After-born children." Now, all of this is complicated by the fact that Debbie is 38 years old in 1991. And she makes the claim that she must have the sperm at once because of advanced maternal age. Right. In other words, if she gets a little bit older, she's not going to be able to have any babies. So now, the court realizes that they've got a big issue at hand here. What is sperm? Is it property? Is it something bigger? I mean, it exists, at least symbolically, on this kind of Darwinian level about preservation of species and perpetuation of one's own genetic line. And they're very nervous about just saying, let's just destroy this sperm. They don't really want to do that. That's clear. Wait, let me just be sure I understand this. Because if they say that sperm is property, his wife and children probably can lay some sort of claim to it or say that this is property, and we have some sort of final word over this property. But if it is somehow part of his personhood, then it transcends the category of property. Right. And so they go back to the precedent. And they find some law regarding human tissue. But most of the law regarding that says that once tissue has left your body, then it can be destroyed. It's not yours anymore because who cares, right? But they point out that you can't just say that about this particular tissue because Mr. Kane, as we know, "assidulously deposited" these particular tissues outside of his body with the intention that it be used for procreation. It's not just, like, sperm sitting around. It's sperm sitting around with great intent. You understand what I'm saying? Intent to become a child. I charge you of sperm with intent. Yes, right. Possession of sperm with the intent to inseminate. OK, so elsewhere in this case, the two existing kids plead with the court that it's just weird to have a kid after you're dead. Is that the word they use, or is that just kind of what it comes down to? Well, no. They just say it's just wrong. They don't know what else to say. They just say, we all can just look at each other in the eye and we know what we mean we say this is just too weird. That's what it comes down to. Exactly. Yeah. And in a funny way, on that level, I completely understand them. So the court reflects on this issue historically and points out something that you probably did not know, which is that, quote, "According to the Napoleonic Code from the early 19th century, any child born more than 300 days after the putative father's death is deemed illegitimate," end quote. And what that means is that the guy goes off to war, he gets killed. Well, the clock starts ticking the last day he was in town. And 300 days after that-- in other words, nine months of pregnancy-- any child born after that can't claim the father's goods. In other words, nine months after the guy's dead, his estate is closed and shut, right? But this is where this case gets very troubling because it keeps it open for potentially ever. As long as the sperm is sitting in the bank with great intent, the estate can't be closed. So in other words, what seems like a very simple, though odd, family dispute actually raises quite a broad and profound question of the law. Absolutely. In fact-- and I'll get to this in just a second because there's another thing here that might make your heart stop when I tell you what it is-- this thing, at first when I first read it, I thought OK, this is just a funny little case. No, no, no. This is overthrowing millennia of settled common law, in a funny way. Now, the existing kids, they make all these claims. But there's some that you just have to hear just to think about. One is, quote, "The child could suffer psychologically from being conceived by a dead man." Now, I never really thought about that. But imagine if you grew up, and you knew that your father died five years before you were conceived. It's not like being adopted or where your parentage is somewhat mysterious. That's kind of glamorous in its own way. And at least it's a story you can tell yourself. You can fantasize about who your parents might have been. No, no. Well, I mean-- No, but I'm just saying that that has-- --I believe that this-- Mr. Hitt? Yeah? The courtroom of this radio studio rejects that argument on these grounds. Because your mom would tell you from the time that you are old enough to understand that your dad wanted to have a child with her and just for some reason was very, very busy and just couldn't get around to it in life. Which, I have to say, is one of the stranger parts of the case, that if he was so intent on having a baby with Ms. Hecht, why didn't he just-- Have a baby with Miss Hecht? Do we know that? No, that's not even discussed. OK, let me just go back to our bigger-- the point that-- No, wait. You don't think that being conceived by a dead man-- I don't care what the mother's explanation is. I'm sort of on the existing kids' side on this particular part of the argument. It's just strange. Well, no, because I could imagine very easily the mother saying to the kid-- I don't know, Ira. I think the court of this correspondent just wants it stated for the record that it's weird, it's freaky. This guy, he "checked out" by his own description. He "checked out" because of all "the Kellys of the world" and all that. He couldn't even hang five years to see this kid into kindergarten, OK? I mean, I don't know. To me, something about being dead before you were conceived is very weird. OK, here's what's beautiful. What's the resolution eventually? This court dilly dallies and hands it off to another court. But that court finally says, you know what? It's property. Frozen sperm is a special class of property. And so we divide it up according to the rules of the will. 20% goes to Deborah, 80% goes to the two existing kids. So Deborah got three of the 15 vials of sperm. And presumably, the existing children, not that they had anything to do with it, received 12 vials. Then Deborah apparently, at age 42, last year, went into a clinic and proceeded to engage in the first instance in American law of post-mortem insemination. That was last fall, I believe. Now, I just want to say one quick thing here. I can't wait. I just want you to consider, Ira, what this could lead to. As I said earlier, death was always the key indicator that an estate could be closed out. But now this loophole, frozen sperm, opens a door that could just keep these post-mortem lawsuits going for decades. It reminds me my friend, Peg Perry. She lives in Northern Connecticut and raises milk cows. And one time, I was up there visiting, and she was inseminating some of the cows. And it turns out the bull semen that she uses is from this bull. He had a name like Ferdinand. Oh, it was like Ferdinand. It's the only bull name I know, Ira. I was going to say, I'm sure you were paying careful attention to that detail. But this bull-- can I get to the point, Ira? This bull died, like, 40 years ago. He died in the '50s? He did in 1956 or something. And he had spent his entire life, essentially, assiduously depositing sperm at the local bull bank. And apparently it's really, really good sperm. You really get good milk cows from this particular bull, OK? This bull has several thousand offspring, probably tens of thousands of offspring all over the country producing milk. So as of this lawsuit, as of this case, as of this court's ruling, for example, a rich man in California could now leave an estate of, say, $1 billion and many vials of sperm, "assiduously deposited," with the instructions that any fair maiden who wished to carry one of his children to term would receive, let's just say, $500,000, a one-time gift. And given his estate, he could conceivably sire, what is that, 2,000 children over the next century, all now potentially legal in California. See, now, if this catches on, these guys are going to stop running for president. Exactly. I was just going to say, Perot and Forbes could do something better with their time. They could assiduously-- well, anyway, let's go on. Yeah, let's just move on right past that joke. Well, we'll just bring this to a close. I found a Legal Weekly in the library yesterday. And I did find that Wyatt Kane may find one other venue of existence after all. Apparently, Deborah Kane has been offered a handsome sum of money by Hollywood producers for the movie rights to this story. Well, that is the logical place for it. And I say-- Well, what is the proper medium for this story? I guess it is the TV movie of the week, really. No, Jack. You think it's bigger than that? Jack, the proper medium for this story, as for any story, Jack Hitt, is radio. And we've just done it. And thank you very much for joining us on our program. Thank you, Ira. Well, this is "Beatus Vir." And when one of our producers, Nancy Updike, got the notes that came with the song, she was really excited because she looked it up. It apparently said that it was Psalm 3-- that was her interpretation. And she looked Psalm 3 in the Bible, and she was astonished at how perfectly ironic the words of Psalm 3 were when put against the story of Citizen Kane. The words of Psalm 3, "Lord, how they are increased that trouble me. Many are they that rise up against me. I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people that have set themselves against me round about. Arise, O Lord. Save me, O my God. For Thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheekbone. Thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly." And the Kellys of the world. It doesn't really say that part. Unfortunately, closer inspection of the notes that came with the song reveal that it is not Psalm 3, the words to this song. It's actually Psalm 111, whose words cannot possibly be read in any sort of ironic way against the story of Mr. Kane and his family. But by then, we had fallen so in love with this song, we just had to play it here. February 8. A losing political campaign must at some point cease to be about winning and start to be about something else. A moral crusade, a chance to be on TV, a fundraiser for the next election. In Morry Taylor's case, that something else is fun. We now resume Michael Lewis' campaign diaries about failed Republican presidential candidate Morry Taylor. We entitle this act of our program A Candidate, a Voter, and a Room Full of Pigs. To attract attention during the Iowa caucuses, Morry Taylor held five rallies where he gave away a total of $25,000 in a lottery, $5,000 at each of these five rallies. And one of the winners of the $5,000 was a pig farmer named Wilfred McCreedy who just happened to be the host of the Iowa caucus for Republicans in the little town where he lived. These diary entries are from February when the Republican field was still full of people like Lamar Alexander, Phil Gramm, and Alan Keyes. February 8. At last, we arrive at the airport. Waiting there are several vans and cars plastered with stickers for Lamar Alexander. Lamar is going places, but as he rises, he is coming under attack, not only from Morry but from Steve Forbes, who has a new commercial explaining how Lamar turned $1,000 into $620,000 with the help of a few friends. We enter the terminal. Lamar's jet is circling overhead. He is preparing to land. Lamar does everything with exclamation points. At length, Alexander emerges and is surrounded by the cameras. You can see he is looking for some way to take advantage of the new camera crews. Spotting Morry, now lingering disinterestedly on the tarmac's fringe, Lamar strides over to shake hands. He offers Morry a phony smile and a line from his stump speech. "Just bought my mud boots for all that negative advertising up in New Hampshire." Morry stares at him for a few seconds like he's some kind of nutcase. "That's not negative advertising," he says. "They're just telling you the truth." Lamar's happy face vanishes. Poof. A truly nightmarish sound bite has just occurred. The CBS cameras are rolling. The familiar fight-or-flight instinct takes over. So what does Lamar do? He simply ends the conversation, turns, and racewalks into his car. "Got to go," he hollers over his shoulder as he disappears into the back of his car. "That's what happens when you meet The Grizz," Morry booms after him. But the night is still young. Thrilled by a rare, authentic moment, the CBS crew newly assigned to Lamar phones New York. New York orders the crew leave Alexander and to follow Morry wherever he goes next. Morry takes the crew on a tour of Alexander's jet, which looms massively beside Morry's own small plane. "Tell me what is wrong with this picture," I hear him say. "Here you've got a little plane made right here in America, belonging to a guy who has just made his own money. And over here, you've got a $25 million Falconer made in Canada being used by a politician." Four or five carloads of Alexandrians gaze on, helplessly. Meanwhile, overhead, Bob Dole's jet is now circling. Unwisely, it decides to land. There on the tarmac, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, one third of the Republican field has now assembled. Even more astonishing, the one national news network on hand is trailing around behind the surest loser. Dole's plane rolls inexorably towards Morry and CBS, oblivious to the danger. "And here," says Morry, "we have another politician. Has he ever made any real money? No. So what's he flying in? A $19 million Challenger. This one is made in France." But then, just as it appears that Morry will have one last chance to ask Dole about his $4 million government pension, the front runner spots Morry, dives straight into his car, and beats Alexander to the airport exit. February 10. On to a church in Des Moines to celebrate heterosexual marriages and protest homosexual ones. Together with a crowd of maybe 800 people, Alan Keyes, Phil Gramm, and Pat Buchanan have all turned up to take their whacks. All the rest except Morry have agreed to sign some pledge to make homosexuals as miserable as possible. "Who gives a [BLEEP]?" Morry said when I asked him why he wasn't going. "If you want to be fruity-tooty, so what?" February 12. When I phone Wilfred McCreedy, the winner of Morry's $5,000 drawing, to ask if I could observe the caucus on his farm, I could barely hear his response over the squealing of pigs. Upon my dropping of Morry's name, he said, "That Morry Taylor, he has it exactly right." I was in. The McCreedys have been farming the same land in the middle of nowhere for 128 years. They have both traveled some, but it's been 10 years since the McCreedys last had a vacation. And their farm hours make investment banking seem like a walk in the park. Unlike their neighbors, and just about everyone else in Iowa, the McCreedys do not participate in any federal farm programs. Before long, the talk drifts to politics. On the phone, McCreedy became a bit worked up about the marriage rally at the church in Des Moines. "Those gays and lesbians are going to protest that meeting?" he said in a tone of utter disbelief. "God damn, that makes me angry." He said he would've driven the two and a half hours to Des Moines to throw his support behind the straights, but his sows were pigging. Now, once again, he says how angry the gays made him. But in the flesh, his anger comes across differently. At some level, he may be angry. But his prejudice seems mainly to give him pleasure. As he lays into Clinton, homosexuals, and the US government, his real emotion is more like delight, the delight of a good fan rooting for his team. Go straights! "Is it true that Forbes owns a Mapplethorpe photograph?" he asks. I say it is. "Dad gum it," he says. "Oh, Wilfred. What does that matter?" asks Mrs. McCreedy. "That man took pornographic photographs of homosexuals," bellows Mr. McCreedy, at which point Mrs. McCreedy just rolls her eyes. I've tried to make myself as agreeable as possible, but it's only a matter of time before I have to come clean with my left-leaning associations. The tension builds as Mr. McCreedy stakes out a political position on the other end of the spectrum from mine. But it's nearly two hours before I discover that the McCreedys have no idea where I am from or what I do, only that I am a friend of Morry Taylor's. "You're not from PETA, are you?" asks Mrs. McCreedy, finally. I have no idea what she's talking about. "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals," she explains. "You just never know when they're going to interrupt. Lately, they've gone to our schools dressed up as carrots to tell the kids not to eat meat." It's truly astonishing. As far as these people knew, I was some protester who had come to disrupt their lives. And yet they still fed me and humored me before venturing to ask. One of the few things I recall from college was that in the Homeric universe, the mark of a civilized persons is his kindness to strangers. The good king feeds Odysseus first, then asks questions later. The cyclops questions him first, then tries to eat him. The McCreedys have the gift of kindness to strangers. I put PETA on the list of things to be against. But now there's no getting around it. I must explain what the hell I'm doing in their kitchen. I mention The New Republic and hold my breath. "Is that Fred Barnes' place?" asks McCreedy. I say that until very recently, it was. "Oh, man," says McCreedy. "I love that guy. Really? Fred Barnes?" It is true. "He's my man," says Mr. McCreedy, slapping me on the shoulder. It's all very Japanese. Neither of us wants to put a fine point on political disagreement, and so I've been granted the status of conservative by association. After a bit, Mr. McCreedy announces that it's time to "go choring." On the way over in the car, he gives me an idea of what it's like to host a caucus. In the past couple of days, Phil Gramm has called six times, Pat Buchanan twice, and Alan Keyes once. Lamar Alexander has sent McCreedy two books about himself and a videotape. Pollsters call the McCreedys about eight times a day. On the way down the driveway, McCreedy spots a FedEx package poking out from his mail slot. "Maybe it's one of those shirts from Alexander," he says, laughing. It is, or at least it's a collection of Alexandriana. At length, I ask him who he's for. "I'm undecided," he says. "A week ago, I was for Forbes. Then I got my check. I was for Morry Taylor. Now I don't know. You've got to find me one who's going to beat Bill Clinton. Which one do you think?" "None of them," I say. "Damn," he says, slapping his hand on the steering wheel. But he's a good sport about it. He's unhappy for about four seconds, and then he's rueful. At length, we arrive at the pig sheds, long, low-slung buildings lined with six-by-five-foot metal troughs filled to the brim with oinkers. McCreedy opens the first door. I recoil and gag. The blast of odor is the most moving thing I've experienced on the campaign trail since I last heard Alan Keyes speak. While I choke in the corner of his office, McCreedy marches through the pens unfazed. "I don't understand," he hollers out over the noise of the pigs. "When that McLaughlin hollers out 'Fred Beetlebum Barnes', what is that 'Beetlebum' business? What's that about?" I have no idea. In the first week of each piglet's short life, Wilfred takes a pair of steel clippers and cuts their eye teeth. "I'd like to do that Eleanor Clift," he booms out as I make my way down the row. "Clip her eye teeth. Get Fred Barnes to hold her down." A few hours later, at around 7 o'clock, 25 voters arrive in the McCreedys' living room to discuss the candidates. Only three are even mentioned-- Richard Lugar, Bob Dole, and Alan Keyes. From the sounds of their talk, the people in the room are divided between Keyes and Dole. Just before 8 o'clock, Mr. McCreedy passes around a pad of yellow post-its. Two men then collect the votes in a silver pot and adjourn to the dining room table. There, they quietly add the totals. Dole, 11. Keyes, 7. Alexander, four. Lugar, three. I ask Mr. McCreedy who he went for, and he laughs and says, "Guess." When the tally is announced to the room, there is a murmur. And then someone shouts, "Wilfred, does that mean you've got to give the $5,000 back?" It's clear they all think that Morry was a fool. He spent $5,000 on the guy, and he couldn't even buy his vote. I prefer to see it another way. Who else but Morry Taylor could give a guy $5,000 and still leave him free to vote for whom he pleases? When Morry Taylor finally dropped out of the presidential race on March 8, Michael Lewis wrote, "We all have a fantasy, and it is profitably exploited by Hollywood, that if only an honest and genuinely free man with a heart of gold ran for president, everything in the world would be put aright." Well, now we know what happens when an honest and genuinely free man with a heart of gold runs for president. He spends $6.5 million and gets 7,000 votes. Michael Lewis' campaign diaries will come out as a book next May from Knopf. Act Three, Another Mixed Legacy. What are we to make of the rich, the successful, the powerful? How should we think about them? Take Ron Brown. Ron Brown is someone who could have had a comfortable, low-stress life. But he is one of those people who threw himself into difficult tasks like, for example, taking over the Democratic Party at one of its lowest moments, uniting it, raising tons of money for it. And when his plane went down, it was a tragedy. But some people have been disturbed at the way many are now eulogizing the former Secretary of Commerce. Brian Gilmore is a legal services attorney in Washington, DC, a writer, and a poet. And he says that in this moment, when so many people have been praising this successful, powerful man as a kind of post-Martin Luther King saint and role model, his feelings are more complicated. I would be a liar if I said I was a political disciple of Ron Brown. In fact, I cannot ever recall thinking that his particular approach to politics was the answer for the widening woes of black America, or anyone who is deprived in this society, for that matter. It might enable a few privileged, upper-middle-class African-Americans to get richer or gain a foothold into the walls of power and might provide some jobs to a small segment of the population, but I have grave doubts that this approach alone can ever change the fundamental problems the masses of African-Americans face on a daily basis. But despite this glaring difference in our political ideals, I was deeply saddened by the death of the man who I admired greatly and who was clearly a role model for me. In his own way, on his own terms, he seemed to solve the W.E.B. DuBois dilemma of double consciousness that we African-Americans are born with and face our every waking moment in this country. He was a man who mastered the art of floating carefully between black America and white America. His way of accomplishing this most difficult task was to get inside the huddle and become a player in American politics and society. Though my life is seemingly taking a vastly different path than his, I have to admit that in a lot of ways, Brown and I are very similar. Both of us were born in Washington, DC, attended private schools where middle-class kids were urged to succeed. And like him, I, too, have become a lawyer. But that is where many of our similarities end. Ron Brown was a partner in a law firm that represented some of the richest clients in the world. I have been an attorney for the past three years representing some of Washington's poorest and most destitute residents. Brown came along at that brief, magical time in American history when the civil rights movement had reshaped the country and opportunities for educated African-Americans seemed to be unlimited. He worked for a traditional civil rights organization, the Washington Urban League, and eventually became part of Edward Kennedy's congressional staff. Like so many other minority professionals at that time, he honestly believed in America and its opportunities following the '60s. By contrast, when I came along in search of my position in the world, Ronald Reagan had become president, and the civil rights movement was over. My friends and I were convinced he was going to cut all educational funding for African-Americans and make us join the Army. I can never forget hearing, while I was in college, of the Reagan administration's open assault on educational grants and social programs that would ultimately change the face of the country. To me, Ron Brown represented a certain type of African-American politician, the kind that emerged from the riots of the '60s, with so much promise in the '70s, only to watch black communities nationwide crumble and self-destruct in the '80s under Reagan. This is the world of my clients. A public housing tenant that I represented had her apartment taken over by drug dealers. The city refused to help her get the dealers out, but they did try to evict her. Another tenant's ceiling caves in and injures her daughter after she had complained for months about a leaky ceiling, and the city doesn't respond. The city sued her too. One wonders why we have scenes like these all over Afro-America with so many African-Americans now inside the huddle just like Ron Brown was. Seeing the headlines about his plane crash, I'm struck now by how black America has deteriorated to the greatest extent economically, spiritually, and socially, precisely in the years since so many black Americans gained access to the club. Brian Gilmore is a legal services attorney and author of Elvis Presley is Alive and Well and Living in Harlem. Our program was produced by Nancy Updike and myself today, with Peter Clowney, Alix Spiegel, and Dolores Wilber, contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt and Margy Rochlin. Musical help from Rumpty Rattles and the Blues Before Sunrise Radio Network with Steve Cushing. Some music today in our Michael Lewis story was composed for our program by Chicago composer Eric Leonardson. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. See you next week with more true stories of This American Life.
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Tito's 18, lives in Los Angeles, lean and handsome and dark with a bear claw tattooed onto each cheek. And when he talks about his life thus far, he says he just didn't have a choice about certain things. Basically, when I was locked up in juvenile detention I was there for a year and I really believe that if you locked up a year just with a whole bunch of guys, it really can mess with your mental stage. Because I act all hard. I act like a dude. Most likely I dressed like a guy. I tried to do everything like a guy. Play basketball. But deep inside, these real males can really know that. It's just an act. It's like really, you're a girl, but you're acting like a dude. It can be very, very, very frustrating and confusing when you are around a whole bunch of males. Because what starts to happen when you're around other males, it's like the deep side of you, the female part's trying to come out, and just try to say something. But deep inside, you're pushing that person back down. It's like the egg will crack and the female is becoming birthed. I know it sounds very freaky, but this is totally real. If you're trying to figure out who you are, it's funny what can inspire you. What can be helpful and give you strength. Tito, for example, is an Eminem fan. The night Eminem performed at the Grammy's, drunk protesters, gay protesters, who called him homophobic and misogynist. Tito was at a party with gay kids and bisexual kids and transsexual kids. Kids who are actually born as boys but live as girls, who were all watching the Grammy's on TV and cheering for Eminem. Tito explains it this way. Here's this white guy, Eminem, who somehow felt that part of black culture was just inside him, and decided that he would rap like a black guy. And ended up able to pass in that world. Transgender people, it's the same way. It's a boy that feels like a woman inside. And want to be free to go ahead and explore that. So they want to dress like a girl and acting like girl. It's in the same category for somebody that feels black inside. I feel so. I'm Caucasian, but I feel black inside, and I want to explore my side. And I think if Eminem can do it, anybody can. I mean, transgender should too. There's a deep part of American culture, which is all about the idea that you can make yourself into anyone. How many of our movies are about the idea that I'm going to be a star? I'm going to sing, dance, take Wall Street by storm. Own this crazy town. See my name in lights. Someday be a gangster. Someday be a real boy. Someday get to Washington and make a difference. Someday leave my uncle's farm in Tatooine and become a Jedi knight like my father. Well, today on our program, stories of people who felt this very American call to be something that they were not, and who then willed it to happen. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three acts. Act One, Girls, Girls, Girls. The story of teenagers who were born as boys, but live as girls in Los Angeles. Act Two, Agent to the Stars. A fan's unlikely dream to meet his favorite movie star accidentally works. Partly to his delight, partly to his horror. Act Three, Airel Sharon, Shimon Peres, David Ben Gurion, and me! An American teenager who dreams someday of becoming the prime minister of a nation where he does not even reside. Stay with us. Act one, Girls, Girls, Girls. Over the last 10 years in Los Angeles, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of transsexual teenagers. These are both boys and girls. You see them on the streets. Both are on the rise, but the boys who live as girls are a little more visible. As you might expect, they prefer to be called "she" not "he." And "girls" not "boys." Cris Beam has spent the last two years getting to know these kids, interviewing them, writing about them, and she tells this story. I'm writing a book about transsexual youth. In Los Angeles where I live, there are hundreds of them, noisily laughing on street corners. Runaways or castoffs from families who can't possibly understand. There have always been transsexuals in Los Angeles and everywhere else, but never so many kids, so visible and so determined. They come here because they hear they can find underground hormones, or friends. Or simply because this is the biggest city they can think of. And because they fall under the radar of regular social services, on the street they're playing doctor, beautician, health advisor and shrink to one another. I posted fliers around asking them to share their stories. I got one call from a 20 year old woman who agreed to meet with me. Her name was Foxxjazell and she told me she was going to be the first international transsexual pop star. She described herself so I could recognize her. I'm very beautiful, she said. I'm tall and black with butter pecan caramel skin and long, luxurious, silky hair. She suggested we meet at the Red Lobster. When I got there, I saw she wasn't lying. She was really pretty. She wore glitter on her eyes and had silver charms braided into her hair. On her ripped jeans she had scrawled the words "Latins do it better." She'd grown up Dwight Eric Jackson in Birmingham, Alabama. As early as she can remember, she felt like a girl. When the teacher would parcel kids off into boy and girl teams in kindergarten, Foxx stood there frozen, not knowing which group to join. And when she hit adolescence, Foxx had to invent herself like any other teenager, but without the templates-- prom queen, brainiac, jock. Foxx had to make up a whole persona that fit with the gender inside her. It's a trait that attracts me to these transgender kids in general. Their intense drive to develop their own reality, and then their own rules to get there. For instance, for a few years in high school, inspired by Prince, Foxx replaced her own name with a symbol. I did not use my name at all. I would use a pink triangle. I would always carry this pink marker around with me every day. And if I wanted to sign my name or did my homework or something like that, I'll put a pink triangle on there. Because the pink triangle was originally from the Holocaust. Because back then, a lot of the gay people there in the concentration camps got pink triangles put on them. But being the creative soul that I am, I put something a little bit different on there. I put a sign of a woman on there. And don't you know, it's like the same sign that you see like when you go into the women's bathroom it has that little symbol of a woman. Like the woman in a skirt? Yes, exactly. It looked exactly like that. And that's the symbol I adapted. And I even got a necklace like that and people would ask me, what does that mean? What does that mean? Everyone would ask me that. And I would love when people would ask me that because I would love to just tell them. I would say this. I would say, it means that I'm a woman trapped inside of a male's body. That's what it means. Foxx cross-dressed in secret. And alone in her room, pretended to be Janet Jackson. Sometimes she'd sneak out her window late at night in cheap Halloween wigs and halter tops, and just walk around her neighborhood. She wouldn't run into anybody, she just liked how it felt. Unlike the parents of many of these kids who will throw them out at first discovery of a stiletto in a school bag, Foxx's parents were supportive of their only child. They just worried for her safety. But she worried for her sanity. She knew she had to go someplace where the unusual was more usual. So as soon as she graduated, she got a job, saved her cash, and bought a bus ticket to Los Angeles. And this is where her story really begins. Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard is where I first got off. And this is where I had said to myself, my name was going to be paved down there on one of these stars one of these days. The corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood is part of the famous Hollywood Walk of Stars. Every square of sidewalk is embedded with a polished star and a name. Madge Bellamy, I don't know who that is. Harry von Zell, I mean, Alfred Green. If these people were so famous, why haven't I ever heard of them? Oh my God. Foxx was just 18 when she got to LA, but she arranged to stay in a group home called Covenant House, where a lot of stray gay kids go. In some ways, it's easier for trans kids to hook up with other girls like themselves than it has ever been. Foxx found where to stay in LA from the gay yellow pages before she ever left Birmingham. Some trans kids use the internet to figure this out. But the jump to full tilt womanhood came on a casual Friday at the telemarketing firm where Foxx was working at the time. On Fridays, employees were told they could wear whatever was comfortable. Most people showed up in jeans and loafers. Foxx showed up as a woman. It finally just came down. And it was just like Foxxjazell. I mean all those years trapped inside of that boy's body. I mean, 19 years to be exact. She just couldn't take anymore. She just couldn't take just dressing up on nights, just dressing up on weekends. She wanted to be out all the time. Since that day last January, Foxx never dressed as a man again. She's fully Foxx, even when she goes home to Alabama for Christmas. Then what happened? Did you decide to go on hormones pretty soon after that? It would be five months to be exact before I actually started hormones. I went to the LA free clinic. I went to Dr. Victory. I got a prescription for Premarin 2.5, the pills, the little purple pills. And I waited until my insurance kicked in in the middle of May at my job, and I went out and I bought my first bottle of hormones. I was just so happy. I really wanted to just swallow the whole bottle. Taking hormones, which gives them breast, redistribute fat in a more feminine way, soften the face, are only one part of transitioning. There are all kinds of unwritten rules to keep the girls in check. And mainly, they center round appearance and passability. When someone recognizes you're genetically male, it's called getting "clocked" on the West Coast or "spooked" on the East. And no one ever wants that to happen. One girl I talked with described having some guy at a restaurant taunt, "Hey, dude" as she passed by. And it was so traumatizing it kept her from dressing for months afterwards. So the girls are always monitoring each other, keeping an eye out for bad makeup or fake looking boobs, and showering praise on anything fishy. Being fishy is the highest compliment you can get. It means you look like you were born that way. That you were born a girl. It starts with the voice. If you really don't have a fishy voice that can really just destroy the whole image. A lot of times you can have all the makeup in the world, but if you look like a brick, or you're just not passable, I mean-- What does it mean to look like a "brick?" To look like a brick, that's a term that a lot of girls use as far as a man in a dress. It means that you may have on a dress and makeup, but yet it's so obvious that you're a guy. Do they say that to each other? Do they call each other that? Yeah. A lot of them will say it behind their face and stuff like that. "This dame looks like a brick! This dame, she's bricking it up!" But that's how a lot of girls say that. Do you think that girls are critical of each other? Because it seems to me when I see them on the street, there's a whole lot of criticism if one doesn't look the right way or one doesn't fit into a certain image. I'll say this about myself. I do feel insecure sometimes if I go out with another girl that isn't as passable as I am. Because for one thing, it's bad enough if you get clocked. But if you're with another girl that is not passable that's going to get you clocked even more, that brings your self-esteem down. So a lot of girls and even myself, won't even go out in public with less passable girls. Or girls that are going to bring ridicule to them. That seems pretty harsh. It's harsh, but you have to realize. I mean, being a transgender woman is bad enough, so why would you want to put more gasoline on the fire? There's a certain strip of Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood that Foxx says is famous worldwide. It's where straight, often married men, come to pick up young, transgender prostitutes. It's also where just out transgender kids often first spot their own kind and can imagine a place to blend in. They hang out at Benito's, an all-night taco stand. Kids will stand around gossip and laugh, go turn a trick, hang out some more, bop into nearby dance clubs on and off the boulevard. You look so good. It's been so long since I've seen you. When Foxx and I dropped in at Benito's this month, she ran into an old friend she hadn't seen in ages. Where you living at now? Where am I living? I'm living with my man. I've got a husband that I've had for two years and we've got a house and got an apartment. And the months really slow, so we got to come up with half of this month's rent and still got to go come up with next month's rent on the first. So you're out here getting your work on? I don't work all the time, but just some time. I know the feeling, girl. I mean, sometimes I have to work. I have to do it too. You smoke weed? No. Oh, OK. I was going to say-- It's been so long since I've seen you. Girls who have just derived in LA might show up here to socialize for a few weeks, and then turn a trick for some cash. It's by then that they've learned how hard it is to get a legitimate job when you're 17 and have both a male ID and C cup breasts. So sex work becomes the option. It can be dangerous, especially for the younger girls. Some of whom have been kicked out by their parents at 13 or 14, and are looking for a place to stay when they're talking to johns. Foxx used to work with the Boulevard, but now she's moved onto office jobs. Whenever I do work the Boulevard, whenever I have to work the Boulevard, I have a purpose in mind. And that's to get money for that point in time, whether it's to booked studio time, or whatever. And most of the time I really try to stay away from the Boulevard. I haven't worked it in a long while. Especially since I've had a stable job. Basically, it's something that all of us girls have to do because for one thing, we're not sought after as like, the number one type of employee. What is it like trying to get a job as a young, transgender person? It can be very frustrating. Because I would say that the last couple of jobs I've been at-- last couple jobs, I've had a big problem with using the women's restroom. It's like, genetic women, they can be very supportive for transgender women as far as our whole transition, helping us out with our makeup, giving us tips on men. But it's like when it comes to the bathroom, that's like off limits. It's like, we've just intruded their personal space and I don't understand that. And the last two jobs I was at, a lot of women had a problem with we using the women's restroom. And I'm like, OK, I look like a woman. I'm build like a woman. I have breasts like a woman. And you want me to go use the men's restroom? If anything, that's going to mess up a little kid. Just imagine some little boy going to the restroom and he sees this really nice-looking Jennifer Lopez look-alike woman standing up urinating at the urinal. That's going to just destroy his whole mind concept. The girls on Santa Monica can make $200, $300 in a night, but will talk surprisingly casually about their job. For some, there's a bit of a thrill to tantalizing the straight men who would normally rebuff them. And for others, it's an unfortunate pause on the path to day work. So many girls come to Santa Monica Boulevard and they have that Pretty Woman concept that oh, I'm going to go out here and work the Boulevard. I'm going to meet a Richard Gere look-alike and he's going to be a millionaire. And he's going to marry me and we're going to have children. I think that's what a lot of girls really think. They have that Pretty Woman concept. Do you have that fantasy? I tend to have that fantasy from time to time. And I've actually met a couple of men on the Boulevard that have a little money and they want to spend on me. Everyone, come on. Everybody in the arena come on and watch me do my thing. Watch me do my thing. I like to do my thing. It's Friday night at Foxx's tiny studio apartment. And while Foxx sings and raps with her friend [UNINTELLIGIBLE], two of her drag daughters, 15 year old Angela and 18 year old Ariel, are getting ready to go dancing at an underage club. Luckily, both kids are petite and the onset of puberty has been slow. Their faces are soft and in their clingy nylon dresses, bobbed wigs and knee high boots, they pass amazingly well. They dress like any Latina high schooler in LA would-- baby doll cute-- but a little more trampy than a mom would like. Do I look pretty? Do I look pretty? Does she look pretty? Yes you do. Angela and Ariel, like a handful of other local kids, keep their wigs, heels, handbags, and makeup at Foxx's. Angela and Ariel both still go to high school and live at boys during the day, and don't want to risk getting caught by their families. While some of the other teens who live on the streets just don't want to get their stuff stolen. So Foxx's place is a sort of de facto dressing room come clubhouse, where kids come in and out to dress up, eat Foxx's food, get some motherly advice, and often crash on her couch. I was there for hours watching them do and re-do their makeup, primp and fluff and gaze into the mirror. And pull an astonishing number of gogo boots out of Foxx's closet. You don't have a bra on? You can put the water balloons, so they can look big and soft. At the same time when you walk, they'll move. They fill their bras with water balloons. Hormones would get them breast in a matter of months and would add weight to their narrow hips and backsides. But for now, neither has started taking. There's a thriving black market for hormones here in LA. And, like many prescription drugs that are purchased over the counter in Mexico, estrogen is smuggled across the border and is sold in the swap meets with other Mexican pharmaceuticals. In the rush to fill out and pass, girls will shoot massive amounts of hormones into their butts every week. Often causing PMS-like mood swings. Sometimes they'll also inject silicone and oils directly into their hips, butts, knees, and even cheeks, all to round out the harder edges. There are a few doctors who will prescribe hormones to kids, but the waiting lists are long. And some feel the doses are too conservative. Foxx is going the legal route with an estrogen prescription and her doctor tells her to expect breasts about the size of her mother's. After all, you can't override genetics. This particular Friday is special, as the girls are celebrating Ariel's retirement party. Ariel is 18, small, Latina, and even when she wears her baggy boy clothes, looks like a shy little girl who curls herself into her chair when she talks. She tell me she's decided to retire. To stop dressing and live as a boy for one whole month to see if she can make it. Tonight is her last night in drag. Put powder on your face, your ears. Behind your ears and your neck. And your chest. Ariel named herself after the Little Mermaid in the Disney movie. For so many transgender kids Ariel's age, The Little Mermaid is hugely significant. After all, the film came out when they were 9 or 10 and give them hope. The cartoon Ariel is a mermaid who hates the body she was born with and wants nothing more than to be a real girl. She was sitting in the ocean. She wanted to be a human being. And at the end, she turned into a girl and she just looked like a girl. And she never got clocked. And then she went for what she wanted and she did what she wanted. At the end she was happy. Everyone's happy. Her story is just-- I don't know. It'll be like my mom telling me I can be a girl and you can do this. Like that. Do you think your mom ever would say it's OK to be a girl? No. Foxx thinks there's no way Ariel's retirement is going to last. She remembers her own teenage-hood and how she would vow to give up dressing as a woman, but she could never help coming back. Today was-- I don't know if it was the rain. But it was just a depressing day for me. A few days after the retirement party, I met up with Foxx again at her apartment. We drank her Kool-Aid from plastic cups and sat on her secondhand couch with the shades drawn. Everything just seemed to be coming together now. But I still have this sense of emptiness inside because apparently Valentine's Day is coming up. Plus my birthday's going to be right after that. And it doesn't make any things much better that I haven't had my first relationship yet. Whenever I see Foxx she talks obsessively about finding a boyfriend. She's visited psychics and grilled all her friends for leads and can't figure out why nothing has panned out. As she's gotten older, transitioning into a woman is no longer the central drama of her life. Getting a boyfriend is. Today's story is typical. She tells me about a guy down the street who introduced himself as Christopher Columbus. He told her she looked good and they exchanged phone numbers, but he never ended up calling her. It was probably, at least a month after that, he still didn't call. And I was walking on that same block and he was out with a bunch of his friends. And one of his friends I think wanted to talk to me. He said, hey, what's up? And the guy that identified himself as Christopher Columbus, he came out of nowhere and said, that's a man. That's a man. You're a guy. You're a guy and you're ugly. You're ugly. And I just walked away. And my heart was just so broken. And like now, every time I pass by his house and everything he's standing outside with his friends or something. He still teases me and say things like that. The last time he talked to me was probably like three weeks ago. And he asked me, let me ask you something. Have you had it cut it off yet? And he was referring to have I had the surgery yet. And I said, that's personal. And he said, well, I guess that means that you haven't had it cut off. And I just walked away. How do you handle that kind of sadness and that kind of rejection? Well, it's been the inspiration for five songs that I've written. Foxx wants to be a huge star. She's a singer and a rapper and she spends all of her money on studio time, recording songs about coming out, and being transgender, and wanting the world to understand. She imagines being somewhat of a sex symbol too, and knows her future boyfriend will have to put up with that. She constantly worries about when that boyfriend will come. It was a few weeks after her 21st birthday that Foxx called me up all excited. It had finally happened, she gushed. Everything she dreamed of. She told me she had met a man. Actually, they met a week ago and he was now living in her apartment. It's really exciting because I mean, it's like last week I'm single and now this week I have a boyfriend and he's cooking for me. And I'm falling in love with him and he's falling in love with me. It's just happening so fast. It's like a dream. If there's any question in your mind at all about straight guys going for transgender girls, remember, these girls are fantastically adorable. Foxx's new boyfriend, Sergio, is 23. He's a Puerto Rican guy from New York with an ex-wife and a daughter. Foxx is the first transgender woman he's ever dated. He's straight and sweet and totally in love. I even tell them it's like, I don't believe you some time because of the fact that you're so fine and you can get any real girl that you want to. But yet, you're here with me. And I just want to pinch myself and just wake up. How do you feel when she says that you could get any real girl? What does that do for you? Well, I actually said that maybe she's true about that, but my feeling is I can never find someone like her. And I think I'm going to be all right after this. I wanted to comment about something. Sergio was listening to my song, "If I was a Real Girl" and he made a comment that just struck me. And I forgot what he said. What did you say, baby? When you listened to my song. Oh, I say, you don't have to be a real woman to somebody like me who cares and love you. I don't see what she has outside, I see what is inside of her. That's the point. That's the view that I see about all this thing. Like I always say, the heart doesn't see, only feels. When I tell people about this book project they all want to know which of the kids are really women or really men. By which they mean, who has had the genital surgery. But the surgery is irrelevant. Lots of trans men never have it because it costs $70,000. And plenty of trans women, like Foxx, don't want it. It's funny, feminism has worked so hard to prove that women are more than what's in their pants. But when it comes to transsexuals, it's all people can think about. So I counter crudeness with crudeness and ask them, if you somehow got into an accident and lost everything below the waist, would you be any less woman, any less man? If you think you're a woman you are one. We're not used to that idea. We're not used to believing that gender is determined only by our hearts. In Ariel's case, she couldn't suppress this heart and her retirement turned out to be more of a pause then a real break. So the last time that I saw you, you were deciding to retire and stop dressing. And how long were you going to take your retirement for? For a month. And how long did it last? It lasted for like a week. A few days after her retirement party, Ariel's friends started calling her, asking her to go out, and dress up, and take pictures with them. So she went and it felt great. Though it scares her that if felt great. I failed. I did fail. It's like I'm going to go to hell. That's what I think in my head. Why would God disapprove? Because it's in the Bible that you were born a man and a man you are. Did you learn anything from your retirement? Did you learn how to golf? Did you learn anything from your retirement? Yes, that I'm a boy. I'm a woman. Ariel is struggling back and forth, dressing some days as a boy and some days as a girl. But guiltily. Ariel as a boy is withdrawn, blinking vacantly and drowning in baggy, hide-everything jeans. He almost disappears. But as a girl, Ariel is vibrant, believable, sassy. Claiming space with her walk and challenging you to meet her eye. When Ariel was going to a rough inner city school a few years back she tried to be tough and masculine. But the boy's still harassed her for acting too girlie and she had to drop out. To get even, she showed up one last time dressed up, as she says, hoochie, in a tiny dress and heels. The boys didn't recognize her as she walked around the quad. And some even asked for her number. I love this defiance, this revenge in the face of such pain. Ariel recently had to leave her sister's house and south central neighborhood because neighbor boys, once again, we're threatening to kill her for acting too gay. She's now living across town in her own apartment with an older transgender woman. Ariel's still not dressing full time, but the other day she did call me up to see if I would take her out for her 19th birthday. She wanted me to buy her a wig. Cris Beam is a writer living in Los Angeles. These days, Foxxjazell has a day job doing street outreach to transgender youth. To hear her music you can download MP3 files from the This American Life website, www.thisamericanlife.org. Coming up, somebody famous you've never heard of. Somebody who wanted a job you probably don't want. And the well-known catchphrase, "this is my boomstick." You know, this is my boomstick. In a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Living the Dream. People who decided to remake their lives around some new vision of themselves. We have arrived at act two of our program. Act two, Agent to the Stars. John Hodgman tells this story of a dream that was a modest dream. Modest enough that it could actually come true. If there's one thing you learn the day you start working in publishing, it's that everyone wants to write a book. No matter how lowly your position, the moment you get that first job you can be sure that 18 of your father's friends will soon be calling you about how to get their spy novel published. There's something so alluring about becoming an author, and it's something so daunting and enigmatic about the process of getting published that even the most accomplished men and women, world travelers, captains of industry, cower before it. This is how the greenest publishing recruits end up editing the inner musings of gangsters, telling millionaires to kill their darlings, spell checking presidents. And this is how, with little training, less experience, and only a vague idea of what I was doing, I became the professional literary agent for the world famous movie star Mr. Bruce Campbell. You don't know who Bruce Campbell is. That's fine. As his agent, I've had to explain it a lot. Bruce Campbell is an actor. He was Ellen's boss on Ellen, Jack on Jack of All Trades, Autolycus, King of Thieves on Xena: Warrior Princess. In the movies Maniac Cop 1 and Maniac Cop 2 he played the cop who was not a maniac. He's the sort of actor who dies in the first 10 minutes of the movie Congo. Which he did. The music you're listening to right now is the theme from The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr. in which Bruce Campbell played a cowboy. It was canceled after one season. We still use the theme song though, from time to time, to introduce sporting events, like the World Series or the Olympics. If none of this rings a bell, perhaps you've seen a movie called The Evil Dead or one of its two sequels. In Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn there's a character named Ash, whose hand is infested by an evil spirit. After the possessed hand slaps him all over the house, he cuts it off with a chainsaw. But it still isn't dead. Ash goes out to the work shed and what follows is one of the great parodies ever to be filmed of the classic hero gets ready to kick-ass montage. Close up of Ash gathering his tools and ammunition, modifying the chain saw. Which he then straps on to the stump where his hand used to be. Pulling the rip chord, he uses it to saw the end of a double barreled shotgun. He twirls the gun cowboy style around his trigger finger, slips it into a holster on his back. As the chainsaw's engine roars, he stares into the camera and deadpans the immortal line-- Groovy. That's Bruce Campbell. And with that line, a B-movie star was born. Because if you don't know who Bruce Campbell is there's a growing circle of devoted fans who do, and they want you to meet him. They build websites in his honor. They make refrigerator magnets with his picture on them and they sell them on e-Bay. When Napster was on its last legs this past spring, the only thing you could be sure to find there were German drinking songs and Bruce Campbell's most famous lines. "Groovy." "This is my boomstick." "Hail to the King, baby." Hail to the King, baby. Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun. Give me some sugar, baby. I got news for you, pal. You ain't leading but two things right now, Jack and [BLEEP]. And Jack left town. On their own or dropped over homemade techno music, they're the passwords into the inner circle of the cult of Bruce Campbell. The cult is nearly equally men and women, perhaps because Bruce's charm fall somewhere between Cary Grant and the Three Stooges. And maybe it's because he's not very well known that you end up feeling that he's your own personal celebrity that no one else knows about. Even if you're aware that Bruce Campbell has a small army of avid fans, there's something about him that makes you think that if you ever had the chance to meet him, the two of you would definitely hang out. You might even watch Bruce Campbell movies together. That was my line of thinking anyway, in early 1997. I was a young, literary agent who had never sold a book, and a Bruce Campbell fan. That spring, my office finally was hooked up to something I had only heard whispers of called the World Wide Web. It didn't do much for office productivity, but on that first day I typed in the words Bruce and Campbell and it changed my life forever. It turned out that Bruce Campbell had his own website. And by his own, I mean his own. Not some slick corporate product, but a homemade looking affair maintained by volunteers, and featuring long essays from Bruce, advice to aspiring actors, notes on how much orange juice costs at the Cannes Film Festival. Reports from the set of McHale's Navy, a terrible Tom Arnold movie that no human would ever see. There was a link to an email address and I clicked on it and I stared at the empty form. I didn't know what to say. But then, of course, I did. I'm not only a fan, I wrote. I am also a professional literary agent. Have you ever thought about writing a book? I didn't really expect him to write back. It certainly never occurred to me that this book nonsense would be something I'd ever have to think about again in my life. But after all, one man's B-movie god is another man's lonely working stiff factor stuck in New Zealand filming Xena: Warrior Princess, taking digital pictures of the strange southern hemisphere electrical outlets and posting them on the internet. He must've been bored out of his mind. So the next thing I know I'm chatting with my hero on a crackly overseas connection about why the world must hear the confessions of a B-movie actor. People have celebrity dreams all the time. David Letterman moves into your apartment building. The Pope calls wanting to know if you need him to cat sit. But this phone call was the real thing. There I was telling him how a book proposal is written, what an editor does, and on the other end of the line it's Bruce Campbell saying, "Uh huh, I see. A proposal you say." When he actually said groovy, it was very unsettling. I wanted to draw our conversation out in part because I thought I would probably never speak to him again, but I also wanted it to end as quickly as possible so I could put it behind me, make it into a story, get back to my normal life. To do this I even tried to discourage him. You should probably know I said, I've never sold a book before. But when we hung up, it wasn't over. I wouldn't go back to my normal life for a long time. Somehow, I don't remember how, I had sold him on me. After that, it was all downhill. And for a reason that I was too much of a fan to anticipate. The nature of B-movie stardom is such that you can be a celebrity on one hand and a nobody on the other. In a hotel that's hosting a horror movie expo, Bruce Campbell may not be able to get arrested in the lobby, but in the conventional halls he's a living god. Turns out though, that most of the editors I sent his proposal to don't live in the conventional hall, they live in the lobby. If they were aware at all of the world in which Bruce is a star, it was only to take the time to sneer. Even those who were closet Bruce fans like me, were either unable or unwilling to take a stand and let their geek flags fly. So this project, which initially seemed to spell easy money for both of us, gradually became a painful exercise in enduring rejection. Which put me in a complicated position. I had achieved my dream the moment Bruce first called me. The rest was gravy. But now, against all common sense, Bruce was entrusting me with his dream and I was letting him down. It was time to bring out the big guns. Or, as we say in publishing, it was time to bring the pope over to cat sit. Bruce had to put himself in front of those few remaining editors who hadn't passed. Make them feel as giddy as I had during that first phone call. He had to come to New York. I had obviously always wanted to meet Bruce in person, but not like this. Not when the sole reason for his coming was because I had to date, been failing miserably. So I tried to distract him with a quick tour of my office. We reached my cubicle at the top of the stairs. That's me, I said, with a quick wave to my sad, little chair. Let's go to dinner now. As we walked down Sixth avenue, my girlfriend and Bruce's wife a little ahead of us, Bruce and I painfully tried to make small talk. At dinner, I finally got the experience every Bruce Campbell fan dreams about. I was hanging out with Bruce. Specifically, I was eating hummus with him. Does that sound exciting? Of course it doesn't. Everything was normal, completely un-dreamlike. And that's what made it great. We were two couples having dinner, talking about the books we had read. The only thing that skewed the night slightly towards surreality was my shaking need for a cigarette. I was holding off. I thought it might offend him. But even after, when Bruce and his wife caught me and my girlfriend frantically lighting up on the street, it wasn't weird. We all had a laugh about it. The book finally sold tot he last editor we met that day. The one who had brought in the Bruce Campbell issue of Fangoria magazine for an autograph before introducing Bruce around to his bosses. Actually, he didn't even buy it at that house. He had to quit first and take a job at another company, and then beg his boss before he could even make a modest offer. We quickly accepted. It was a huge weight off my shoulders. It's not usual for a book to take almost two years to sell. Typically, it's more like two weeks. I was hoping that Bruce didn't know this as keenly as I did, but I could never ask him. If you're someone's literary agent, the one piece of advice you can't give them is, go get a good literary agent. The day we sold the book I was on vacation with my girlfriend, whom I'd been dating for 10 years. The next day, I asked her to marry me. We can invite Bruce, I said. Hey Bruce, how you doing? Greetings. Greetings. Enter. Thank you. I see you've brought goods. Yes, I brought a few sandwiches here. This room is pretty nice. It's been four years now since that first email and I'm visiting Bruce at The New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. The book is about to come out and Bruce has come to push it with a Q&A, an autograph signing at the Fangoria Weekend of Horror. Give it up for Bruce Campbell. I'm not his agent anymore. For various reasons I've left the business, but Bruce and I have stayed in touch. Mainly because I refuse to let him go. I want everyone to stand up. Stand up. Every single one of ya. Raise your right hand. Repeat after me. I. State your name. State your name. Comedians, huh? Bruce is famous for antagonizing his fans, and they love it. They love him. In this room, Bruce Campbell is the biggest star in the world. His book is the most important book in the world. And I am his esteemed colleague. His former professional literary agent. Be better over here. Yes sir. Are there any plans for Evil Dead IV? God, that's so weird. I've never heard that question before. As the convention continues, Bruce signs posters, head shots, DVDS, bootleg scripts, bared breasts, anything the fans have to offer. The line goes to the back of the room and out the door. In this crowd, there's almost a paternal sense of pride and even concern. They feel that Bruce has never had the big break he deserves. You're brothers? Are you a Bruce Campbell fan as well? Oh, big time. Yeah. My brother and I, we're like-- he's like our idol, basically. Really? We pretty much grew up watching the horror movies. That's like totally won my brother over with the whole Evil Dead series. In fact, I hope one day when I get really big in the money in the stock markets and everything, I'm going to buy a studio like, for example. And I'm to make him a star, like one of the big movies. Top notch. Right now I'm a freelance writer, but I used to be a literary agent. And in fact, I represented Bruce's book. I sold his book to the publishers. And I'm going this show about how four years ago when I first started talking to him about doing a book, for me I had the same impulse. It was wanting to bring him to a bigger audience. And you're saying how you'd like to-- Exactly. That's awesome, man. Way to go. Definitely. I just think it's interesting because obviously, other people feel the same way. That he deserves more exposure. He definitely deserves more. Yes. Definitely. He's really a top notch actor in reality. So you start the studio. You get a Bruce Campbell vehicle going and you hire me to do the book. There you go. That's about it pretty much. And then we'll all hang out. We got to hang out, definitely. This, I, realize is the paradise that all Bruce Campbell fans want to reach. They all want to hang with Bruce, but they want to earn it. They want to help him. And if the book is a hit, then I will have done exactly what that kid dreams of. What I wanted to do all along, help, and then hang out. Finally, the convention is over. A few fans try to shadow Bruce up to his room, but he evades them. I, however, am still able to follow him through the back passages, the freight elevators, the restricted access doors. Then we run into some trouble. Bruce's key card won't open his room door and the organizer has to go down and have it reprogrammed at the desk. Bruce and I stand there in the shadowy hallway locked out of his room. He seems fidgety, exposed. There's still quite a few fans roaming around and now I realize I'm one of them. I'm not his agent anymore. When the organizer comes back with the key Bruce will go in, get changed, head out to the airport. I'll go back to my apartment, watch him on television just like I did before I ever met him. Pretty soon, I'll run out of plausible excuses to email him, to call him, to get the special treatment I've come to expect from my friend, the movie star. Is there anything you won't do for a fan? They got in their head about saying these lines of dialogue. Like what lines? Like groovy or give me some sugar or something. Those are tough just because it's hard to have the same feeling. And plus it's like, you've rented the movie. That's where it comes from. That's the original. I would just be giving you sloppy seconds. Would you say groovy? No. Come on. No. For your old literary agent. I said no. John Hodgman lives in New York. Bruce Campbell's book is If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor. Act Three, Airel Sharon, Shimon Peres, David Ben Gurion, and Me! Well, you've heard about a number of different kinds of dreams in today's program. There is also a kind of dream that we have to protect ourselves from seeing who we really are. December 3, 1986, Wednesday. Another fascinating day in the life of Adam Davidson. I have a math test tomorrow. I'm going to school early to tutor a girl in my class for the aforementioned test. My math class, a joint precalculus and calculus class, consists mainly of seniors not especially interested in learning. I guess that I'm the quote "class expert" unquote, in that I always do the math problems which no one else can. And for this, I'm disliked. I guess that because I apply myself, think clearly, and do a little work, as well as some intelligence helping out, I am a geek. In truth, I am far from it. When you first read that to yourself, when you first saw it, your reaction was? It was pure horror. Recently, Adam Davidson, an occasional contributor to our program, found his old high school diaries. Adam's mom is Israeli, his dad is American. Adam grew up in New York. His body was in New York. His brain, as the diaries reveal, was somewhere else entirely. I remember when I was writing it, I remember very clearly. Although I don't say this in the diary that it was very clear to me that this was the diary of the future prime minister of Israel. Me. That I would one day be prime minister. And it would be very important for history, for people to know the deep thoughts of a young Zionist as he prepared his way to lead his nation. Now, our regular listeners here in This American Life might remember that you've been on our program describing your experience in Israeli army summer camp. That was right before I started writing this diary. Read me another. Sure. Let's see. There's so much wrong with Jews in Israel that I'm going to have a job ahead of me. One thing is the lack of any strong Jewish identity among most Jews. This attitude sickens me. You Jews of the world, stop worrying about money and well being. I do not know what exactly I'll do. But if this situation continues when I'm a bit older, then watch out world Jewry, here comes Adam. And "watch out world Jewry, here comes Adam" was all in capital letters. Wow. It's interesting that you actually are addressing a readership. I know. That's what kind of amazing. And that readership is world Jewry. Yeah. The Jews of the world will one day read this book and will say, if he knew this at 16, how could I be living so badly? Can I ask you to just read one of the passages where you talk about Israel? Sure. Let's see. I mean I have this thing from January 4, 1987. I memorized "The Hope", Hatikva, which is the Israeli National Anthem a few minutes ago. That will help me in Israel. I find that really amazing that here I am, the future prime minister of Israel and what are the things I need? Oh, God, I need to know the national anthem. I'll probably be called upon to recite that at some point. Or they'll be a ball game or something, you'll need to stand up and sing it. Right, exactly. At 16, I had such an inflated sense of myself. There was so much going on in my life then that I can remember and I wasn't recording it. Instead, I was creating this ridiculous fantasy of I'm not just a 16 year old kid who's having crushes and a hopeless geek who can't get a girl to kiss him. And being scared and confused about growing old. I'm the future prime minister of Israel and everything goes through that. But I don't know. But maybe keeping a diary where one tells the truth, maybe that's a luxury of being a certain kind of person in a certain kind of situation. Maybe other people in another kind of situation need to actually make up a little fantastic. Yeah. I didn't have much angst about being the future prime minister of Israel. I was very calm and confident and comfortable with it. And I had so much angst about every other aspect of my life. So I now see it as just kind of-- maybe it was a good solution. It was a good way to deal with what I was going through. To have this space where I could just be one of the greats. I wonder what the 16 year old Adam Davidson would feel in knowing that finally, an audience of a million people was getting some of the reading from this diary. I think this would feel so small to that 16 year old. This would feel so nothing. This would be so unimportant. Being on the radio? Being on the radio, a million people. What's a million people? I mean, we're talking about history. We're talking about sweeping changes. I'm pretty sure that he would be thoroughly unimpressed. And Adam, what would the 16 year old you think of you now? I think he'd be really disappointed. I think he'd be really sad. Because you're not the prime minister of Israel? Yeah, because I just have such a small life. I mean I remember I was very disappointed and very sad about my parents. I was reading biographies, of course, of all the prime ministers of Israel. And I would just think about my parents and just think, how do you wake up every day knowing that your actions won't affect millions of people? How is that enough motivation? Just to have your petty little craft and your petty little family and your small little apartment. It just seemed pathetic. I mean, they have the kind of life that, I mean basically, I want for myself. What you're saying though, is that the 16 year old you would be cringing at your 30 year old version just as your 30 year old version is cringing at the 16. Yeah, that's very true. He would be very, very disgusted if he heard this radio piece. It would seem like I had settled in a pathetic way. Adam Davidson in Los Angeles. Well, our program was produced today by Jonathan Goldstein and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr and Starlee Kine. Senior producer Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Paul McCarthy. Original music in our story on FoxxJazell by TRS-80. That's Deb, Kent, and Jay. To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago 312-832-3380. Or visit our website where you can also listen to our programs for free at www.thisamericanlife.org. Don't forget those MP3s. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who explains himself this way. Last couple of jobs I've had a big problem with using the women's restroom. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. It is just so hot. That's my big thought. It is just so hot. And so, together, everybody. One, two, three. Everybody. One, two, three. Ah, that's better. Here at the Holstein Park pool here on Chicago's West Side. Here in Chicago we've had some truly horrible days this summer, days where the air has had a kind of meaty thickness it is so humid. No wind off the lake. Thank you very much, Mr. Weather. Torpor sets in. Torpor, actual torpor. After jumping into the swimming pool, Vanessa, Elizabeth, and Patrice do one bracing lap, and then spent, hang on the side inert for four hours. Next to the pool, the lifeguard that everybody is in love with, Adrian, lays on his side among a group of intensely captivated 12 and 13 year old girls, plus a few little boys. Not one of them can move. Sing that one song, a kid asks. Nah, [SPEAKING SPANISH] my Mexican song? Yeah, sing it. Adrian looks up at the group. See, what? Armondo, are you falling asleep? I'm lullabying you to sleep? For real, man. Who can blame Armondo? Who, for that matter, can get up the energy to give a damn in this heat? Today on our program, what to do in the hottest heat of summer when you're not sleeping right and simply walking to the car or the bus takes it all out of you. And you know that you're not thinking straight and there is not a thing that you can do about it. We know what you did this summer. Our program today in three acts. Act One, Just Three Thousand More Miles to the Beach. In that act, Scott Carrier on a road trip. No air conditioning. Too hot to stay in the car, too hot to get out of the car. Act Two, It's Not the Heat, It's the Humility, in which we move into an environment that is so fantastically, oppressively hot that the people there have convinced themselves that sweating-- sweating by itself-- is actually getting something done. Act Three, You Can Have Your Cave and Eat It Too. Sarah Vowell brings us the story of a national dispute involving a cave, a sandwich, park rangers, scientists, and, yes, always good for a laugh, the world famous United States Congress. Stay with us. Act One, Just Three Thousand Miles to the Beach. Like so many summer stories, this one from Scott Carrier, starts with a whim and ends with a whimper. It was summer, the middle of a hot summer. I drove to San Francisco to visit a friend and escape the heat, but when I got there, almost right as I got off the Bay Bridge, my truck began to die. It lost its power, and I could barely make it up the steep hills. I was stalling traffic, throwing out big, black clouds of smoke, forcing people to cover their faces and walk on the other side of the street. It had never been a good truck, always a collector of bad luck-- dents, cracked cylinder block, broken clutch push rod, broken brake lines, and smashed head lights. All sad stories. I considered driving it to Fisherman's Wharf, taking the plates, ceremoniously shooting the horse, and walking away from it. But then, I slept on it, and in the morning I thought, maybe a mechanic can fix it, someone who actually knows about engines. I pulled into a Quick Tune, and a guy there put it on the scope. His name was Chien from Vietnam. He didn't speak a lot of English. He said my EGR valve was working too hard, putting too much oxygen or not enough oxygen into the combustion chamber, but that he'd fixed it by plugging a vacuum hose with a spark plug he'd pulled out of the garbage. The car more power. Right now more power, OK? Now, he said, the car had power. And he was right. The car did have power. I got on Interstate 80 headed toward Sacramento doing 85 miles an hour going back home to Salt Lake City. But then in Sacramento, I saw a sign that said US Highway 50, Ocean City, Maryland, 3,073 miles, and I took the exit. 3,000 miles. Not that far. I knew there was a strong possibility that the spark plug in the vacuum line was only a temporary fix and that the engine might lose its power at any moment, and I'd have to walk away from it. But it was summer-- the middle of a hot summer-- and I didn't have anything better to do. Highway 50, where it runs across the Basin and Range, is known as the loneliest road in America. It's an old route, probably ancient, first used by white men in 1849 on their way to Sutter's Mill, then the Pony Express and the Overland Stage in the early 1860s. Mark Twain rode the Overland Stage in 1861, and he hated this particular stretch across the Basin and Range. He said it was worse than the horrors of the Sahara. That's one reason it's so lonely out here. The other is that almost all traffic to the coast now follows Interstate 80 to the north or Interstate 15 to the south leaving this huge open space containing 100 separate mountain ranges and 150 separate basins, sort of like the surface of a golf ball. On a clear day, on this part of Highway 50, it's easy to see 50 miles in every direction, sometimes 100. But it was a summer of forest fires, seven million acres burning throughout the inner mountain west, all caused by dry, violent thunderstorms that blew through in June leaving smoke in their wake. Then it got hot and windy, and every day just got smokier and smokier to where in the morning and evening you could stare straight at the sun, to where it was like you were living through the final days of a dying planet. From the desert of the Basin and Range, Highway 50 enters the desert of the Colorado Plateau through sandstone canyons, like from the Planet of the Apes, across the Green and Colorado rivers and then following the Gunnison River up the Western Slope of the Rockies to Monarch Pass, crossing the Continental Divide at 11,000 feet. My truck ran with the check engine soon light blinking on and off, gasping and coughing its way over the pass. But it made it up and over, and from there it was downhill for 100 miles along the Arkansas River-- people in kayaks running the rapids-- to the town of Pueblo on the Eastern Slope of the Rockies looking out at the Great Plains. I stopped there to see a friend, Albert [? Pichak ?]. We ended up in his backyard where he showed me his rock collection. Here's some rainbow obsidian, really beautiful stuff. I'll strike a little chunk off if I can find my sandstone. OK. It's not safe to do this without some sort of protection, because it's very sharp and you can get cut. See. You can see the color. It's really a beautiful stone. It's a black rock, but at a certain angle to the sun it reflects-- what colors do you see there? Green, blue, purple. Here we go. Is that amazing or what? When I first started flinting that thing, I thought that obsidian came in black and black, you know. It's amazing the colors that you can see. I find that it's like a meditative state working with the stone. It gives me a sense that there's more to everything around us than just-- more to stone than just being an inanimate object, that actually there is energy with it, that when you make something, that energy is transferred to it. Albert made me a five inch Clovis spear point, black obsidian that reflected tiny rainbows in each chip and groove, sharp as a razor. I put it on my dashboard hoping its energy would somehow transfer to my engine. From the Rocky Mountains, Highway 50 runs across the High Plains in sort of a connect-the-dots between small farming and ranching towns, mainly Hispanic, a landscape once famous for buffalo but is now famous for cantaloupe. Leaving Pueblo, the weather was partly cloudy, 90 degrees, and low humidity, but it became hotter and more humid with every mile to where in central Kansas it was over 105 and very humid, no clouds, a little wind. And it had been like that for a long time, several weeks anyway. The fields of corn, six and seven feet tall, had turned brown. The stocks and the husks around the cobs were dry as a bone. To deal with the heat, I poured water on my clothes and drove with the windows down, and I sought refuge in Walmarts on the edges of the small towns. Every town had one, although some towns had Walmart supercenters, a disaster for Main Street, but they were like oases to me. I'd go in and get hit by a wave of cold air that was like jumping into a mountain lake. It took my breath away. I'd take a cart and walk through the aisles selecting items like a sleeping bag, a fishing rod, 100 feet of rope, spray paint, watercolors, a six-quart cooler, power drill, clock radio. And then, when the cart was full, I'd backtrack, returning everything to its place on the shelf. If I concentrated and thought carefully about my selections, the whole process would take a couple of hours. Then I'd get back on the road and drive through the sweltering heat. My truck, surprisingly, ran without overheating, but I was so hot, I went brain dead. At one point, I found myself off the highway driving along a back road going east, but I couldn't remember how I'd gotten off the highway. I came to a small town, and there were some cars parked in front of a bar. The sign at the bank across the street said it was 106 degrees. I'm Sam Kennedy, and I live up around Big Springs, and we're in Overbrook, Kansas right now. I'm Crystal Kennedy. I believe this is our 16th day of over 100 degrees. We haven't had weather like this, they say, since 1936. We're getting pretty well burnt up now, pretty dry. I've got beans that are probably five foot high and they're probably the size of buckshot right now because they've all burnt. And the chickens are panting. They stick their little slitted tongues out and huff and puff. And my bees, they were just all over the hive last night, and they're trying to keep everything cool in there for the queen. But I'm going to harvest probably this next weekend. I'm going to take the honey and start feeding them, because there's no plants here for them to live on. Everything's dried up. And here we buy all this seed, buy all this fertilizer, buy all this spray to keep everything nice and weed free, and at the end of the year, you take the crops to the elevator and you sell them, and you get this check, and it looks like a really big check. But then when you take it to the bank, a lot of times you'll just barely break even. You might have $50 left. So that's when you come over here to this place and drink a few beers and talk to your friends. And they're all in the same shape. Everybody's been the same. I saw two cars spontaneously combust in Kansas. They got so hot, they lit on fire and burned, spewing black, toxic smoke from under the hoods. One was in a parking garage in Lawrence near the Natural History Museum on the university campus. The other car exploded on the freeway around Kansas City, two teenage boys in an old Mustang. East of Kansas City once over the Missouri River, Highway 50 winds through the hills and forests of the Bible Belt, the Ozarks. Dead turtles upside down and bloating on the side of the road, live rattlesnakes in the churches, bugs frying in the blue light zappers of Sedalia. Churches with signs out front saying, dusty bibles lead to dirty lives. Free trip to heaven. Details inside. And the crickets or locusts or whatever they were was like a jungle. I stopped in Jefferson City at midnight. The streets were vacant and smelled from the mud of the Missouri River running just north of the capitol building. I tried to go down to the river to sleep, but there was no way to get to it from the city. I ran into fences and thick forests, and so I drove on, stopping at a convenience store to buy three beers which I proceeded to pound back while cruising through a fog. I beg you, my children, as your mother, your mother's mother, who cries tears of sorrow upon you all, please remember this. The time is growing short. I have wandered throughout earth trying to warn you, my children, depending on a small handful of moral souls to bring these messages to you. But what does he really have? Nothing, because when he wakes up after death, he wakes up in hell. On the other hand, here's the poor man, Lazarus, who has none of the needs, the physical needs satisfied. He lives out of the garbage pail. The dogs lick his sores. And it looks like the Lord just has forgotten him, absolutely forgotten him. --unto them, because it is given unto you to know the mysteries-- You know that says. I can't quote the whole thing, but you know what that says. A lot of people-- Oh, I don't understand. It's [UNINTELLIGIBLE] so hard, that it [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] has always had it hard before they came to Christ like myself and others. I understand the example you were giving a few sentences ago about Ethiopia and so forth and so on. I can relate to that. I'm black. I can relate to that. I mean-- East of St. Louis after the Arch and the Mississippi River, Highway 50 gets crowded. What was once the loneliest road in America becomes America's Main Street, or that's what I read they call it, and it's appropriate. Some people might think it quaint to drive through the downtowns of one small town after another, but I was hating it. There was a lot of traffic, a lot of cops, used car lots, strip malls. Sometimes the highway was a four lane freeway. Sometimes it was a neighborhood street running by driveways and front lawns and big houses. Sometimes it vanished altogether, and I'd find myself on some other road with a different name. And my engine was running like the timing belt had lost its shape, running lean and then running rich. It was giving up, wanting to die, but I pushed it mercilessly scared of being stranded in middle America. I drove and drove, and it was like I wasn't getting anywhere. I drove without sleeping. It was too warm and sticky to sleep. Somewhere in Ohio I stopped to talk to a guy who was sitting by the side of the road whittling walking sticks. All of these are my sticks. This is apple wood, and this is sourwood. I bought 300 off my brother in '94 and 300 in '97. I've bought 780 sticks off of him for the last four years. I've got all different kinds of wood, just about. About any kind of wood you name, I've got it. I've got oak [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I've got them all initialed. I've got the year I've cut them. And I've got my initial on them. I've got a K on them and I've got them all dated. Now I've bought some that's got carved on. I don't do no carving. I'm a whittler. I call myself a whittler. I'm not a carver. I've bought some that's got carved on, but I don't put my initial on them. I don't date them. Why do you call yourself a whittler instead of a carver? Well, because I don't carve faces. I mean, I'm trying to get my son started doing the carving, you see. It makes a stick sell better. But I enjoy doing this. I've been doing it 13 years, so I must have-- I did this eight years. I didn't sell many sticks at all, but the last five years I'm well satisfied with what I'm doing. What made the difference in the sales? For the first eight years you didn't sell very much and then what happened? Well, the news got out what I do and everybody-- the public is funny. You'd be surprised how people is. I'm not trying to get rich. I've got $5 sticks there. I've got $12 in them. I bought three sticks and I sell them three sticks for $10. I spend anywhere from-- well, most usually I'm out here eight o'clock in the morning until eight at night. I sit here and whittle. I enjoy it, really, really. I woke up in a parking lot next to the Ohio River at Clarksburg, West Virginia, a quiet morning. The word Ohio comes from an Iroquois word meaning beautiful river, and it was, big and sleepy. You grew up here. I grew up here. I love it. That's all I need. I was reading in a book that the word Ohio comes from an Indian word, meaning beautiful river. Is that right or is that-- That's probably true, because there's a lot of history of Indians up through the whole Mid-Ohio Valley here. There's Indian mounds that go up further north and there's history that goes down south. My grandmother herself was an Indian. If you was to go into the corn fields after the farmers plow, you can actually find arrowheads, perfectly preserved arrowheads that the Indians made. So what tribe-- what tribes are from around here and what tribe are you descended from? I don't know what tribe. My father's deceased, but he had mentioned several times and I don't know actually what tribe. I didn't even know my grandmother. She was already passed away by the time I was born. But I know there's definitely history. I would love to do-- I didn't even know a whole lot about my father, and I wish I knew more about that, too. From the Ohio River, Highway 50 crosses the Monongahela Valley and then begins winding up through the Allegheny Mountains, following a route originally surveyed by 16-year-old George Washington in 1748. He was a friend and employee of Lord Fairfax who used to own this land. Washington ended up with 30,000 acres from the Potomac to the Ohio, and when he became president, he authorized funding for the construction of what was then called the Northwest Turnpike, which is how Highway 50 began, a route to the Ohio and the wilderness beyond. Crossing the Alleghenies was more difficult than going over the Rockies. The road is narrow and winding with a lot of up and down, thick forests, crossing a number of passes, and a lot of logging trucks and coal trucks. And then my truck was just pitiful. I'd be going 40 miles an hour, and there'd be a big truck right on my tail trying to get around. In the small town of Mount Storm at the summit of what seemed like the highest mountain, I stopped to take a break and let a coal truck go by and watched an old man mowing his lawn. That's a Chief, Lawn Chief, True Value Lawn Chief. That's sold by several local hardware stores in this area. I've owned it for two years. I start on my outer edge of my property and I make circles inward. I like to throw my grass one direction all the time-- same direction-- so that I don't mow the same grass over and over. Some people like to mow it over and over. That's called mulching. I don't care much for that. I killed a small snake over in that area a while ago. I ran over him with that. You saw it go under or you heard it get chopped? I saw him go under. I drove into Washington, DC in the morning and spent the day walking around the Smithsonian Mall, visiting Kenneth Snelson's tensegrity needle outside the Hirshhorn. And then, I drove out of the city at night over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-- all lit up and beautiful-- to Ocean City, Maryland. Highway 50 ends there at the boardwalk along the beach, 3,200 miles from the Pacific at San Francisco. I slept in my cab. In the morning I watched a guy building a giant head of Jesus out of sand on the beach, and then I went swimming. It was the first time I'd cooled off in days. And then, my truck died. It spewed out a big, black cloud of exhaust and gave up the ghost. It was over. I pulled the plates, stuffed my things in a bag, took the stereo and my rainbow obsidian spear point, and left the key in the ignition. It was evening, raining hard, but I was only 2,300 miles from home. Scott Carrier lives in Salt Lake City. Coming up, what the park service has against crumbs, and a place that's so hot and humid even the crumbs get sweaty. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. This is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, We Know What You Did This Summer, stories of mind-altering, body-stopping, torpor-inducing heat. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, It's Not the Heat, It Is the Humility. During the hottest days of August here in Chicago, Jonathan Goldstein sought out an environment that was yet hotter. It was not hot enough. He sought out yet hotter, and he found a place, the Division Street Russian Bath. The place is so hot and humid that literally our equipment does not work there-- tape recorders cannot function-- so Jonathan is here to tell the story. Jimmy Colucci is sitting bare-chested behind his desk wrapped only in a tiny wet sheet, and there's something about it that says there's a better way to live, a way that's more brazen, more comfortable, and quite frankly, more naked. Jimmy's the owner of the Division Street Bath, and his office is right upstairs of the steam. He's just come up from his daily sweat, and sitting there at his desk dressed only in a sheet, he looks like the guy who does paperwork for the Pharaoh. When I ask him what makes the heat at his bathhouse so special, he tells me that he provides a heat that's different than anything else offered around the country. If blindfolded, would he be able to tell his heat from other heat? Absolutely, he says. But what about the other kind of heat you hear so much about, I ask. The kind that's claustrophobic and unbearable, the kind that causes the elderly to drop like flies and the young to scream at their boyfriends just because they got them the wrong kind of sandwich. I don't make that kind of heat, Jimmy answers. To better understand the power of this heat, Jimmy sends me down into the steam with a towel, a sheet, and a bar of soap. First I shower, the wet sheet around my waist feeling so wrong yet so right. I ask myself, how does one comport oneself clothed only in a sheet? Like a stoic Roman senator? A caught lothario shimmying down a boudoir drainpipe? I decide to clinch one hand around the tied knot and play a situation comedy guy locked out of the house wrapped in a welcome mat. The place has the all business utilitarian look of a boiler room, cracked concrete tiles and mildewy wood. And then Jake appears. He is a small Jewish man from the old country. He is naked except for his flip flops, gold chain, and sun hat, which he keeps drenched in water. Last week, I ate a big thing of spinach, Jake informs me by way of introduction. I ate like a pig. It gave me diarrhea for two weeks, then they gave me something for that, and now I'm constipated. He pauses a beat to allow the irony to be absorbed. When he's not in the bathhouse, Jake wears two hearing aids. Without them he can't hear a thing, so he talks, and I listen. Over the sound of the shower and the echoing voices, I only catch bits. As we talk, Jake moves closer and closer, and as he does, I slowly, unconsciously inch backwards until finally I'm in a corner under a shower with Jake, and we are chest to chest. Even though his mouth is only a couple of inches from my ear, I continue to catch only pieces of what he's saying-- 45 years, the heat, four shots of whiskey after the shevitz, seven, eight rubs I used to rub, the heat. I can't remember the last time I spoke to anyone so close, but Jake's so comfortable with it that it makes me comfortable, too. People just don't talk like this anymore. It makes me feel like I'm in an old photograph. The water falls down on us and it's like we're two sleep walkers bumping into each other in the summer rain of the shtetl. It all feels dreamy and long ago, and Jake's taken me there, and I'm glad I'm with him. Right here, this is life stripped of all the fat. It's the best part of being at the gym, a good sweat without any of the exercise. It's probably even the best part of prison, the showers and the fresh soap. I'd even go so far as to say that this would be the best part of hell as you step into the first blast of soothing womb-like heat. So we sit and we sweat. It's what we do. It's like we have an assembly line production going. We sit all hunched over with our brows knit. We stare down at the floor with a ponderous, quiet intensity. We are engaged in serious business. Sweating makes us feel productive, like we're doing good work down here, getting things accomplished. Jake's younger son, Willy, calls me over. He's giving a large, hairy man a massage with an oak leaf brush and wants me to see. Have you ever seen a real Russian-style massage, asks Willy, as the naked, 300-pound man lying on his back that he's attending to obligingly raises his legs in the air like a baby about to be diapered. Willy lifts the brush over his shoulder and brings it down between the man's legs over and over. He does this with a kind of casualness that suggests whipping a naked man in the privates is the most normal thing in the world. And I watch them completely and utterly freaked out, which is, I think, the result Willy was going for. The men in the bathhouse watch the massaged one get massaged like it's TV, like they're watching an infomercial when there's nothing else better on. And then suddenly-- and by suddenly, I mean not suddenly, because everything down there happens as though submerged in cherry sauce-- they are all pitching in, and you can't tell who works there and who doesn't. They're all over some guy just for the thrill of doing the job right. And then there's the buckets. Sitting in the heat, the old men take old-fashioned buckets of ice cold water and dump them over each other's heads to cool down. Seeing this is like stumbling into a long running performance of the world's oldest joke. It reminds me of how, when I was seven, my grandfather in a remnant of such old country playfulness dumped a bucket of garden hose water over my head at a family barbecue, and how I spent the rest of the afternoon all traumatized and generally spazzed out vowing never again to trust anyone over 75. Jake and his sons invite me upstairs to eat with them. Dressed only in our sheets and towels, we sit around a table in the dining room off the locker room, and we eat. Eating bare-chested at home by yourself makes you feel like you've simply given up on life, but eating bare-chested in a room full of other bare-chested men makes you feel like a Greek god among other Greek gods. Jake pulls out a plastic container of homemade herring. I made that, he says poking his finger into the piece on my plate. We pass around bread and club soda, big silver bowls of salad-- steam bath salad it's called in the menu posted on the wall. There's also one called the garbage salad. These are the kinds of names men give to things. This is what all of life would be like if it were a world of only men. In a world of such men, a Havarti with sprouts on oat bread would be called a foot sandwich. There's simply too much work to be done and no time to invent clever names. Give me two feet and a side of garbage, they might say after a 15-hour day of raking farm soil with their fingers. We watch a Clint Eastwood movie on an enormous screen. We read magazines while talking about other movies. We let our stomachs pour over what would, that we were wearing pants, be our belt buckles. It is a world governed entirely by testosterone. Oh, I'm not talking about the chest pounding, loud-mouthed testosterone that gets so much press these days. I'm talking about the other kind of maleness, the gentler, more utilitarian maleness. The unselfconsciously picking the teeth with a playing card to get out the last stringy bits of roast beef kind of maleness. An old man passes our table on his way downstairs. How's the heat, he asks. Hot, I answer. You think this is hot? Wait till the Russians come, says Shelley. He lifts the sheet from around his waist and wipes his mouth with it. I've been hearing this all day. Everywhere I turn people are talking about the Russians. They're masochists, says a graying fire hydrant named Seymour. Where's the enjoyment in breathing 180 degree heat, demands a water buffalo of a man named Yussy. When the Russians come, the insides of your nostrils will feel like lit match sticks. It has to do damage to the bronchial passage. I'm told they come on Fridays, and I decide to go, too. It suddenly feels as though all the facts of my life have been leading up to the moment where I pass out in a scorching room full of naked Russians. What should I do to prepare, I ask. Go home, turn on the oven, and stick your head in, someone says. I imagine them descending the stairs, these Russians, single file, slapping each other on the back, rolling hot coals between their fingers, each one manning a different thermostat. They pass buckets of water down the line like they're sandbagging a dam. They throw heat like gods, like bolts of heartburn. You can't touch your own skin without leaving finger-sized welts. I imagine winning them over with my amiable taunts. It's like a refrigerator in here, I'll say. Perhaps we should build some shelves to store open jars of mayonnaise. Had I known you gentlemen came here for the tepidness and not the heat, I would have brought a cup of hot cocoa and a shawl to drape across my lap. So I come back on Friday to see the Russians, and it's hotter, but only moderately so. The men sit around with the same indifference. An old man, who I'd like to think is Russian, sits in the corner brushing his teeth with his finger. And then something positively strange happens. As I sit there wondering if the old man in the corner will pluck a hair from his head and finish off his teeth with a good and proper flossing, out of the steam emerges the tall, naked body of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and no one gives him a second glance. Bath people truly don't give a crap, and even if they did, it would be too hot to do anything about anyway. They treat Jackson in the same way they treat everyone, with a pleasant indifference. They watch as Agi, one of the paid masseurs, works him over in much the way they watch anyone else getting massaged, but perhaps out of respect they do not pitch in. And afterwards, in the dining area, the Reverend has to wait for service like everybody else. He stands naked at the counter trying to catch the cook's eye. The cook sees him and continues to stir his massive pot of soup, and then finally, he comes over. I'd like a cheese toast, says Jackson. Grilled cheese, answers the chef pointing to the menu. Cheese, repeats Jackson, with toast. Grilled cheese, assures the chef. I find out afterwards that Jackson often comes to the bathhouse. In fact, I'm told, that when he got back from Bosnia, he came in for a sweat, and as he passed through the dining room, 20 odd men in their sheets and bath towels all rose up and without saying a thing, gave him a standing ovation. And then, wordlessly, they went back to their meals. When I leave the bathhouse, the 90 degree heat outside feels surprisingly cool and refreshing. It's the middle of August in Chicago, and yet the streets feel air conditioned. It's like being freed from a sweat box into a less intense sweat box, and I am inured. I stroll home feeling comfortable and good. As I round the corner onto my street, I see the fire hydrant across from my house is open, and neighborhood kids are jumping around in the stream. Brothers carry their sisters kicking and laughing into the water. Little kids run out in their pajamas. At home, my girlfriend, Heather, has just put her daughter, Arizona, to bed. If we wake her, she'll probably remember it for the rest of her life, I say. And so, we wake up Arizona. Outside on the street, Heather says she's never actually seen an open fire hydrant except for in the movies. When she says this, it makes me realize the same thing. Arizona rubs the sleep from her eyes and runs into the flood in her little nightgown. She jumps in beside a large woman bathing a small dog with her dress lifted to her knees. It feels like the whole city is getting cool for a while, and Arizona doesn't know where to start. Jonathan Goldstein is one of the producers of our program and the author of a funny and kind of great novel called Lenny Bruce Is Dead. Well, Act Three, You Can Have Your Cave and Eat There Too. So it's over 90 degrees outside. If you simply head under the earth into a massive cavern, the temperature drops to a comfortable 56 degrees. For a refreshing change to end this rather sticky and overheated edition of our program, Sarah Vowell headed into such a cave. I am a rube who reads guide books. That's how I learned that the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone National Park is the world's largest log structure, and that one may sit on its balcony and sip a gin and tonic while watching Old Faithful spout off. Another guidebook tipped me off that visitors to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota may partake in the nearby towns Pitchfork Fondue, in which rib eye steaks are speared on the end of pitch forks and dunked in barrels of boiling oil. Crispy, theatrical meat as the sun goes down over the Badlands. In this fondness for these things, I am not alone, for I have sat on picnic tables among my countrymen, some of whom stood down the Nazis, and we smile at the landscape and at one another, the grease trickling onto our souvenir T-shirts. Paging through a guidebook entry on New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns National Park, the words Underground Lunchroom caught my eye. The Lunchroom is smack dab in the middle of the caverns, 750 feet underground. The guidebook warned, to modern eyes this strange installation seems absurd, but moves to close it down have been stymied by its place in popular affections. As I would come to find out, it is a restaurant so oddly placed that it requires an act of Congress repeated every year to keep it going. $13.73. Would you like any barbecue or sweet and sour sauce for your chicken? Um, barbecue please. If the geological marvels of Carlsbad Caverns came into being in the time before history, the Underground Lunchroom represents the time before arugula. First established in 1926, the Lunchroom was renovated in the 1970s and it shows. The food and souvenir stations are housed in sandy, brown booths that remind me of the drive-thru bank architecture of my childhood. The food-- box lunches of cold chicken or ham sandwiches, wedges of pie in plastic wedge-shaped containers-- is the sort of fare my grade school washed down with Shasta cola on the Freedom Train field trip in '76. Not long after the bicentennial, middle Americans started eating better and dressing better and calling nature the environment, but the Underground Lunchroom is a throwback to our unpretentious if unenlightened past. The National Park Service wanted to get rid of it. In 1991, they began an environmental assessment of the Lunchroom. Money was spent, scientists conferred, it took two years, and sadly for them, they were unable to find any conclusive evidence that food particles, Freon gas in the refrigerators, or the use of microwave ovens were harming the ecosystem and climate of the cave. In fact, all sorts of things pose a bigger ecological threat to the cave than the Lunchroom does, like the existence of lights, of an elevator, of actual bacteria carrying tourists with their lint-covered clothing. In the end, the reason the Park Service wants to close the Lunchroom doesn't have to do with science. It has to do with aesthetics. In the years since the Lunchroom was built, we as a people have gone through a grand tectonic shift in the way we think about National Parks. Basically, we don't believe in putting crap in the middle of nature anymore. And we believe in taking out as much of the old crap as we can. This was codified in a 1991 Park Service policy called the Vail Agenda, which clearly states, "The National Park Service should use existing authority to remove wherever possible unnecessary facilities." Well, we're standing at the big room junction. This is where the natural entrance-- It's the aesthetics of all this that Ed Green talks about when we walk through the cavern and he makes the case for the removal of the Lunchroom. Green is in charge of visitor services at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. He contributed to that environmental study. And he spends so much time underground amidst the marvels of the cavern that he has a separate name for the world that you and I inhabit. He calls that world the surface world. It's hard to describe this for someone who can't see it, because there's nothing in the surface world experience that prepares people to see something like this. It just is unlike anything else on earth. There will be times that I will intentionally-- if I'm having a rough day or something is getting under my skin a little bit, I'll just intentionally come down in the cave and find a place just to sit and kind of soak this up. This resource and this kind of beauty keeps me humble and keeps me on the right path to do the things that I need to be doing here. Nobody created Carlsbad Caverns so that they could have lunch 750 feet underground. If you walk down through the natural entrance, what you are experiencing is this natural creation, and then as you exit out of that area and you walk into this area, there's a stark contrast. You know, that's the first thing you see when you walk out. You're coming to one of the world's great natural attractions, one of the greatest attractions in all creation, and what do you see? Something not unlike maybe a mall somewhere. If the Park Service reasoning for removing the Underground Lunchroom is essentially an aesthetic argument, the main reason to save the Lunchroom is equally aesthetic. Namely, it's cool to eat lunch in a cave. You can also mail a postcard from the Lunchroom and stamp it, mailed 750 feet underground. It's entertaining to mail a postcard in a cave. The Lunchroom even has a bank of pay phones. Why would you need to make a telephone call from the cave? Well, you wouldn't need to. You might do it because it's fun, and you're on vacation, and you're at a place with the word park in its name. The Carlsbad business community partly depends on vacationers for their livelihood. So when the National Park Service announced their plans to remove the Underground Lunchroom, the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce opposed them. Gary Perkowski is the mayor of Carlsbad. Like a lot of locals, he also worked in the Underground Lunchroom as a teenager. He was one of the people from Carlsbad who argued the Lunchroom's merits before one of New Mexico's congressman, Representative Joe Skeen. Well, I think Representative Skeen has always been on our side, and he works very closely with the leaders of Carlsbad on numerous projects. And we just went to Washington, explained our position, and what we thought, and he agreed with us. That's it? That's basically it. He agreed with our position and did everything he could to make sure that that was implemented. I'll say. I read to you now from the following legislation prepared by Representative Skeen's committee. "According to HR 2217, the Department of the Interior and related agencies appropriations act for fiscal year 2002, section 307, none of the funds made available by this act may be obligated or expended by the National Park Service to enter into or implement a concession contract which permits or requires the removal of the Underground Lunchroom at the Carlsbad Caverns National Park." That is the same language that has appeared in every appropriations bill since 1994, and what it means is that the National Park Service is barred from using federal funds to close down the Underground Lunchroom. Calls to Representative Skeen's office for comment were not returned. The National Park Service is obeying the will of Congress, but you don't get the feeling they're all that happy about it. If the Park Service were a person, the Underground Lunchroom would be one of the dumb mistakes it made as a kid. It's like Congress is telling it that it not only cannot remove the tattoo it got one drunken night in the '20s, it has to invite 300,000 people a year to look at it. And that's how a lot of employees think about it, too, as a youthful gaffe. Cave specialist, Ron Kerbo, who was one of the authors of the study calling for the Lunchroom's abolition, remembers going there when he was little. Like any eight year old, I thought it was pretty interesting to be able to eat in the cave, and I particularly remember the pickles. They used to have these shelves with these little paper cup things, little small paper cups with pickles in them, and you could eat as many of those as you wanted. So I was always very fond of eating the pickles in the Underground Lunchroom. Still, he says, there's no reason for the Lunchroom today. Food is available to tourists in a restaurant that's just 57 seconds away by elevator. And for all the visitors who enter the cavern through the elevator, the Lunchroom is the first and the last thing that they see. In that environment, it seems to me, eating in the Lunchroom mars the visitors' experience in the cave. And when you were eight years old, did you feel marred? Well, yes, as a child, I ate in there, and I enjoyed it, and I did remember it, but I have moved on. And the great thing that the National Parks teach us is that, if we are attuned to these natural processes, then we can move on. If your only memory of Carlsbad Cavern is eating in the Lunchroom, then you have missed the essence of the experience. Everything he's saying is true, but when I got off the phone with him, I was really frustrated because my only possible counter argument is that the Underground Lunchroom is really neat. And what's the dignity in that? Since the Lunchroom does no significant harm to the cavern's ecology, I'd like to believe that this is one of those lucky places where we don't have to choose between doing the right thing and enjoying a goof. I spent a couple hours walking down through the caverns, and this is what I saw. I saw 14 football fields of treasures, things with names like Witch's Finger, Totem Pole, Mirror Lake, formations described as popcorn and soda straws in places called the Boneyard or the Hall of Giants. I don't know how to describe the magnificence of Carlsbad Caverns without making it sound like a cartoon or a drug trip or a cartoon of a drug trip. The only thing I can say is that it is one of those dear places that make you love the world. So when I came to the end of the last trail, I wasn't quite ready to say goodbye to the cave. I felt all dreamy, and I didn't want the feeling to end. I look up at the ceiling of the Lunchroom, which is, of course, the ceiling of the cave. It looks so lunar I can't help but think of a certain astronaut. In 1971, Apollo 14's Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the moon. Gearing up to face the profundity of the universe, this man brought sporting goods with him into space. Who can blame him? That's what we Americans do when we find a place that's really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves, and we are a nation of fun-loving dopes. I sleepwalk to a picnic table in the Underground Lunchroom. When I first read about the Lunchroom in the guidebook, I'd never suspected it could feel so contemplative. Then I rip open a bag of barbecue potato chips and listen to the sound of my own teeth crunching. It is possible in the Lunchroom to chew and ponder at the same time. Sarah Vowell is the author of the book, Take the Cannoli. Well, our program was produced today by Wendy Dorr and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jonathan Goldstein, and Starlee Kine. Senior producer Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Paul McCarthy. Music help from Mr. John Connors. Hi, John. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who recently had a bucket fall on his head and woke up saying-- 45 years, the heat, four shots of whiskey after the shevitz, seven, eight rubs I used to rub-- I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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A few years back, a science fiction writer and fan named Stephen Goldin was preparing for an upcoming sci-fi convention. And he thought that it might ease some of the awkward situations that he had seen at conventions in the past if he would just write up a few simple guidelines for the fans on how to act when they get to meet, one on one, some of the professional writers who they admired so much. Some of his tips-- I have them here. Don't delay the pro on his way to the restroom and try to start a long conversation. If a pro is involved in another conversation, do not interrupt. Wait until a break. In talking to a pro, keep it light. If you want a detailed philosophical discussion, make an appointment. Don't be a sponge. Buy your fair share of drinks and meals. Twenty-three different rules, ending with the most important. Don't insult the pro. Why would rules as basic as this even be necessary? The science fiction fans are usually the people who have been sort of the social outcasts when they were growing up in school. When everyone else was out playing sports or going to parties, the fans were in their rooms reading. And so they didn't develop a lot of the social skills their peers did and they grew up being introverts. And so when you get to a science fiction convention, you get a convention of introverts, which is a very strange social phenomenon. Have you seen fans try to follow the pros to the bathroom? Yeah. Well, I bring all this up to say that it is not just science fiction fans who need simple guidelines like these. Reading Stephen Goldin's 23 rules online, I realize, to my embarrassment, that in putting together this week's radio show, we have violated eight of the 23 rules. Eight. This week, we visited with a variety of different kinds of pros, and we monopolized their time, we interrupted, we got into detailed philosophical discussions uninvited. We did not pick up the check. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, Meet the Pros. Stories of amateurs hurdling themselves at the professionals whose jobs they would like to have, for better or for worse. Our show today in three acts. Act one, Crispy With the Rock. The star of what is arguably the world's greatest sneaker commercial, and whether it is possible for our correspondent, little grasshopper, to grab the basketball from his hand. Act two, Know When to Walk Away, Know When to Run. In which I explain how I went to the World Series of Poker as a reporter and came away completely obsessed with the game, reading about it, playing online to an extent that I have not completely admitted to my own family until this very hour. Act three, Martha, My Dear. David Rakoff goes behind the scenes at Martha Stewart Living to find out the answer to the question, if his hobby became his job, would it still be fun? Stay with us. Act one, Crispy With the Rock. This is the story of two amateurs meeting the pros. One of the amateurs, a teenager in New Jersey. The other, our correspondent, Joel Lovell. And before we get started, I should say that today's show was first broadcast in 2001. And so the amazing TV commercial that they're talking about in this story, it's something that aired back then. OK, here's Joel. This is the sound of me dribbling a basketball. Now this is Luis Da Silva dribbling a basketball. Luis is in the Nike commercial-- Freestyle, it's called-- that ran on TV throughout the NBA playoffs this past spring. If you haven't seen it, the commercial features a bunch of NBA stars and some WNBA stars and a bunch of street ballplayers. Guys with names like Speedy and A Train and The Future performing a series of spectacular tricks. Dribbling and passing and twirling basketballs, sort of like the Harlem Globetrotters. But a lot faster and a lot cooler, and to this incredibly infectious hip-hop beat. So their dribbling sounds like music. In May and June, the ads were airing in pretty heavy rotation, and I found myself spending a lot of hours watching games I didn't really care about. Games involving the Indiana Pacers, for instance. Just so I could see the commercial. Technically, there are three different versions of the ad. A long two and a half minute spot involving all the players, then a similar shorter one. And then a 30-second spot that features only Luis, a 19-year-old kid from Linden, New Jersey who can do things with a basketball that if you're serious basketball lover-- well, they just make you want to die, they're so great. Linden is a working class suburb just south of Newark. Luis's family moved here a few years ago, so that he and his sister could go to a safer school. It's a nice neighborhood. The houses and lawns are well kept. It's not at all the kind of gritty, urban neighborhoods where serious street ballplayers make their names. This is actually my room right here. This is where I stand in the mirror. Because I'm always in the mirror trying to figure out new moves. It's like my workout screen. He shows me the walls of his room, and they're like the walls of a lot of 19-year-old guys' rooms. There are some photos of souped-up cars, and one of a motorcycle in mid-flight, and there are a bunch of posters of Luis's basketball heroes. You see a lot of Iverson and Steve France. Then right here you got Michael. Everybody got a picture with Jordan. And there, to the right of Jordan, a full-sized color poster of Luis. And to Jordan's left, some one-of-a-kind Luis memorabilia. And that's actually the same shorts I wore in the commercial. My mother did that for me. She put it in a little frame. This is the story of how Luis, who is not a basketball star, who in fact didn't even make the starting five on his high school team, ended up on the same wall beside all his idols. We sit in Luis's living room and he tells me his story from the beginning. He's been playing basketball since he was 11, when he lived in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The nearest park was pretty dangerous. And because his mother didn't want Luis going there alone, he ended up dribbling a ball in his own backyard, a concrete slab about the size of a Twister mat. He would dribble from morning till night, watching his reflection in a basement window. Trying to repeat exactly the same moves again and again. His neighbors, who were often kept awake by his dribbling, thought he was out of his mind. When my father called me in, he's like, son, it's time to come in now. I'm like, what time is it? He's like, it's 2:30. I was like, wow. Time just came by. Time just flew. And I would wake up the next day during sometime like 9, 10 o'clock and get like four or five hours of sleep. Back up. But I wanted it so bad. I wanted it so bad. I was just in my backyard. That's how much I loved it. I mean, nothing else mattered. Nothing else mattered. Wasn't on the phone much. I wasn't even concerned about going out with my friends and going to the movies. I loved it so much. And I just wanted to be the best at what I do and dribbling and having the nicest handle around and nothing else mattered. Nicest handle, maddest handle. Do him dirty, break him down. Like any specialized world, street basketball has its own language spoken by experts. And the lingo sounds so cool to me, but also sounds so uncool when spoken by me, that I ask Luis to elaborate on some of the phrases. It sends him into a kind of hoop slang spiral, in which it turns out, the lingo can only be explained by more lingo. There's so many terms. Having good handle or being crispy with the rock is having good basketball skills and fundamentally sound with the basketball. Everybody uses, but break an ankle is now having an opponent fall or they got the cowboy now. And when you're on the one leg, you're hitting a skip because somebody just broke you down. Broke you down means somebody just went by you real fast and shook you. And shook you means you're playing defense, you lost your footing, and it sort of looks like you're doing a dance step when you should have been playing defense. Dunk, make a deposit, x amount of sign. Money, Niagara Falls, reindeer games, those are all terms for making the basket in. Luis never had a shot at the pros. There was no way he was going to make a living at basketball. He 5'10'', a decent but not great high school player who mostly sat on the bench. Like thousands of other guys who played ball when they were young, Luis's basketball fate seemed clear enough. He'd play the occasional pickup game, maybe join a local rec league, and years from now he'd settle into a Barcalounger and watch hoops on TV and complain about how kids these days have no respect for the game. But then one night he got a call from a friend telling him about an audition for a Nike commercial the very next day over in Manhattan. There was a little gym on the third floor. And yeah, a little gym on the third floor. So we walked in. And I'm so used to my little bubble, I mean nobody around my area does the stuff that I do, I stand out. But then I enter a room where everybody's doing pretty much the same thing, guys doing this for a living-- Harlem Globetrotters and Wizards and NBA players. So I turned to my father and I was like, oh man. I didn't even think it was going to be like this. My eyes grew. And it was like a basketball court. Everybody was crowded around the court and I was one of the last ones. Everybody was starting to leave, the crowd was starting to go. I was actually the last one. I started doing my thing, doing tricks and things that most of the other guys they had never seen somebody do. Everybody started coming back in the room and filling up again. So I'm like, I don't know if this is good news or bad news. But I was so in the zone. And from there on, after I was done, everybody came up to me and was like, where are you from? They looked at me like I had three heads and I was from Mars. They were like, I never seen you around. I never seen nobody do the stuff you do. I had to call, the next day I was working part-time in a local mall at the Athlete's Foot, here in Woodbridge Mall. And I got on the phone and her name was Kim. And she saw me at the audition yesterday and she wants me to come to the studio. So I hung up on her. Wait, you hung on because you thought-- I thought it was somebody trying to clown me. One of my friends trying to pull a prank. Because if it was really her, then she would have been like, why'd you hang up the phone? So then she calls again and we got disconnected, she said. I was going, I guess it is for real. So then she's telling me if I could come to the Kaufman Studios in Astoria, Queens. Tuesday. Everybody thought you were the best one and they want you for this commercial. They want you for this commercial. March 20, I'll never forget. That was one of the best days of my life. Other guys came out. A Train came on. Chris Franklin, that was the one who was spinning the ball on the floor. Also PV Kirkland was there. He's a street diplomat with basketball. He started crossovers and all that. And they had Jackie, the famous Globetrotter. I'm in a room all full of celebrities and players that I grew up inspired by and want to be like and enjoy their style of basketball. We had a little water break. Actually, PV Kirkland, he actually got up off his seat and shook my hand and said, I've been around a lot of basketball players and seen a lot of things, but I ain't never seen somebody do the stuff you do. That was the ultimate. What about the pro guys, did they say anything to you? Yeah, Barry Davids is real cool. He's like, Lu, you got to teach me some of this stuff. I was like, Barry Davids, I'll teach you some of this if you do me a favor and pull it off at some of the games. And he started laughing. But he got handle. Paul Pierce though, that's my man. He couldn't spin the ball around his fingers if his life depended on it. It was so hard to get him to spin the ball. It was tough. He was getting it. He got a little dance going. Too much for the basketball, so he could sort of bob his head to the music. Right. They just have him dancing around the ball. It was real fun. It was real fun. A couple of months later, Luis was out driving around when he got a call from one of the guys in the ad. He's like, Lu, called me all excited. He's like, Lu, your commercial's on right now. He's like, the commercial is so hot. And he's like, hold on. He's like bowl commercial break your commercial's going on. Your commercials going on like eight, nine times. Every time they put in a timeout, the commercial's going on. And they got one just with you. I said, oh yeah? Click. Yeah, right. Stop clowning me. And I didn't see it till, I believe, it was a week later. But when I seen it, I was-- I had a smile. I didn't have a smile on my face, but inside I was so lit up. I was like, man, I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I came out to Luis's house with the tape of the commercial in my bag. I wanted to watch it with the man himself, have him describe to me in detail what went on the day they shot the ad. Starting off the commercial. Future with his little dance. That was Dottie and that was me right there. Everybody thought that was a camera take. They couldn't believe I could really do that. It's a little difficult staying calm as Luis walks me through it. I mean, I don't want to sound like a corporate flack or anything, but I think this commercial is just about the greatest thing that has ever been on television. It kicks the moon landing's ass. I also don't want to get too enthusiastic about something that ultimately exists to sell sneakers. But there's just no denying the way the commercial captures basketball's pure improvisational beauty. There's one trick Luis does that's a little hard to explain on the radio, but it involves him capturing the ball between his elbows and lower back, in such a way that the ball seems to vanish in thin air. The first time I saw it, I thought it was done with computers. Can I pause it for a second? Yeah. It looks like the ball is just like on a string hanging there. It's incredible. Thank you. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. This past month, Luis went to Taiwan with a few other guys from the ad to promote a street basketball event called Hip Hoop. The Nike commercial had just started running in Taiwan, and he wasn't really prepared for how he'd be greeted there. In the airport outside of Taipei, Taiwanese customs officials approached him and the other guys, pointing at them and dribbling imaginary basketballs. Saying, freestyle, freestyle, over and over. And repeating the rhythm of the ad's squeaking sneakers. Luis has a pile of snapshots he took on the streets of Taipei to record the hugeness of his celebrity there. They had posters and billboards of me all over Taipei. I was shocked. I was taking pictures all over. Everywhere I would turn there would be another posted of me. They had, actually, basketball courts in every park of my face on it. So here you are, it looks like it's about 50 feet high, this poster. I got to ask you about once specific move. You hold the ball in your hand and you go as if you're throwing it towards the camera. And somehow, the ball rolls back on your hand. It's like you're going to throw the ball forward. You roll the ball back, you get the spin back, and you try to stop it. But you do it with one hand, so it's like a motion-- Luis can explain to me all the tricks he wants. But what he can't really put into words when I ask him is what it's like to go so quickly from selling Nikes at the local mall in more of a one-on-one, is there enough room for your toes kind of way, to travelling halfway around the globe to a place where photos of him dominate entire city blocks? And what I can't explain is the effect this commercial has had on me. I've watched it dozens, maybe even hundreds of times. I keep trying to do tricks in my house that go badly awry and leave dirty basketball imprints on the walls. We're going to go outside and teach you a guys a couple tricks so when you go home, your wife's going to be like where you've been? Eventually, Luis takes me in his backyard to play a little one-on-one. I have to admit, it's the moment I've been waiting for. I'm 35 years old, a husband and father and total square. And I'm about to play ball with the kid who has the maddest handle in the world. He starts showing me a couple of tricks, and then starts dribbling the ball around, good-naturedly challenging me to steal it from him. I take a couple of half-hearted swipes and Luis taunts me little, dribbling the ball right in front of me, less than an arm's length away. And that's when I have this weird, slightly confusing pang. I start thinking, what if I steal the ball from him? I've played a lot of basketball in my life and we're in this tiny space that's about the size of a parking spot. There's actually a chance that I'll be able to take it away from him. Or that I'll look kind of like a chump if I can't get a hand on the ball at least once. But then Luis begins to dribble the ball faster and faster. Sweat stains his shirt and beads on his face, and his hands move so quickly they look like wild birds. He flutters the ball along the ground in front of me, then makes it rises up one arm and roll down the other. When I swipe at it, it somehow disappears behind my head. And then, like a nickel plucked from my ear, reappears in front of my face. So close that for a nanosecond, it feels like I'm about to kiss the grainy service of the ball. I lunge at the ball now, hoping that by sheer coincidence I might knock it away. But I know I won't. He's too good even for that, and I'm glad. When Luis got to meet the stars on the set of the Nike commercial in Astoria, he was excited, sure. But he also knew that at this one thing he was their peer. What I'm feeling now is totally different. This wave of relief and giddiness comes over me. There's something reassuring in the idea that someone, through sheer determination and will, can become so impossibly blow-your-mind good. And there's something so comforting about being in the presence of such goodness, I keep on reaching out my hands and groping around like a blind man. Sometimes goofy laughing and spastic like a kid, and sometimes dead serious determined. But no matter what, my hands come back to me as empty of basketballs as the day I was born. Joel Lovell in New York. If you're curious to see the Nike ad he's talking about, we have a link at our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. Coming up, I give all the good reasons for doing something very stupid. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Meet the Pros. Stories of aspiring amateurs dropping in on the big leagues. We have arrived at act two of our program. Act two, Know When to Walk Away, Know When to Run. In May of 2001, one of the then-producers of our radio show, Starlee Kine, and I went to Las Vegas to watch the World Series of Poker with this guy named Jim McManus. McManus is this novelist who had gotten sent to the World Series of Poker to cover it by Harper's Magazine the year before. And as part of his coverage, he entered the tournament playing poker. Now usually when a reporter does a stunt like this, he's knocked out of the competition pretty fast. McManus, who had played poker all his life, but had never actually played in a tournament with professionals, came in fifth. Fifth out of over 500 entrants. He flew home with a quarter million dollars in prize money. So anyway, Jim was introducing Starlee and I around to the various people who you're going to hear in this next story. People who make their livings playing poker. And some of these people, by the way, have become pretty well known in the poker explosion that's happened on TV and online and all over the country since we did this story back in 2001. So I'm talking to these poker pros and during one of the interviews I was asking somebody a question about, how much money they make? Or how many days a week do they work? And Jim, who's been listening to all these interviews, interrupts to tell the person who we're talking to, you have to understand, Ira is secretly considering leaving his job to play poker for a living. And up until the moment he said that, that thought had not fully formed in my head. And as soon as he said it, I realized he was completely right. There was a part of me that was working on this question, should I leave my job to go play poker for a living? Even though I'd only played poker like a half dozen times in my life. Watching these people play cards all day for their jobs, it just seemed so much better than any job I had ever seen or imagined. And the tricky thing is, it doesn't look that hard. It's not like pro basketball. It's not like hitting a fast ball like Alex Rodriguez. You know you can't do that. But poker, it's just cards. You know, it's only cards. How hard could that be? And so I spent a lot of time talking to people who had mastered the game-- my future colleagues-- trying to figure out if, in fact, it seemed attainable. They seem just like you and me when you meet them. But somehow they had figured out not only how to beat other people, but how to beat luck itself. You know, to what degree are they just regular people and to what degree do they have a kind of superpower? Like this woman. My mother started teaching me how to play cards when I was five. And then I have a really big family and a really close family and we used to always when I was 8, 9, 10 years old, just play poker for pennies. When I met her, Jen Harman had been making her living as a poker player for 13 years. Grew up in Reno. She was in her 30s, owned a bunch of dogs. Married. Do you see what I'm saying? She seems like anyone you know. Until she starts telling stories like this next one about how when she was 12, her dad would have poker games now and then. And if he started losing $300 or $400 or $500, she'd be allowed to play. He would put me in the game for him to get his money back. And I remember sitting with these guys who seemed like ancient because I was only 12 or 13 and thinking, wow, these guys have no idea what they're doing. And I'd take their money. Just I'd watch people's movements and I'd watch them how they bet their hands. And just the whole psychological thing about it. They'd bet and I'd be saying in my mind, he doesn't have anything. Just all that kind of stuff. I think I always got my dad even. I don't remember a time that I didn't get him even. Like winning $500 back's a lot of money and you're like getting an allowance. At 16, Jen started playing in casinos. After college, after studying to go to medical school, she started playing full-time. If poker's your job, you set your own hours, choose what days to play. Jen says it will be the perfect job when she has kids. Right now her daily routine goes like this. Wake at noon or 1:00 or 2:00. Hang out in the afternoon. Play with the dogs, run errands. Study Italian. Jen's new husband is Italian. Sometime between 7:00 and 9:00 at night, a few nights a week, she drops into the casino to see if there's a game or to start a game. Jen plays in what are probably the most expensive card games in the world in the poker room at the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas. She shows up on a Tuesday night. OK, I'm going to go to the box and get money. The Casino gives hard core players like Jen safe deposit boxes in a room next door to the poker room. Can I get black? She gets $40,000 in chips. She only needs $15,000 for this game, but she's hoping that a bigger game starts up. Let's start something, Freddie. Let's start something. You broke me, Freddie tells her. Huh? I surely didn't break you. Here's something I never would have guessed. The people Jen plays with are mostly other professionals. The same people, over and over, night after night. And then we go out afterwards and have a drink or we go bowling or we go to dinner. So you guys are all pros and basically you're just taking each other's money? Yes. Well, there's usually like one or two people that aren't experienced and are from out of town, or are businesspeople that aren't as experienced. And they actually supply the game for everybody to make a good living. Supply the game. A delicate way to say, they lose. It turns out there are a lot of very rich guys who want the thrill of playing against the best in the world. Some nights the game has a minimum bet of $1,000. Other nights, it's $1,500 for one bet. It's not unusual for Jen to lose $100,000 in a single night. It's like normal, so you don't even think about it. But you know, it's hard getting to this frame of mind. Trust me. Because the first time I lost $3,000, I went home and cried like a baby. And I said, oh my gosh, that's the biggest loss I've ever taken in my life. When I lost $10,000, the same thing. When I lost $30,000, I couldn't sleep for four days. When I lost $100,000 the first time in my life, I couldn't sleep for a week. But then, the next time I lost $100,000 and the next time I lost $100,000, it's like your pain threshold just goes up. Jen has made enough playing poker that she bought a new house, a huge house, with no mortgage. She just wrote a check. Play at her level, she says, she's not comfortable without $2 million as her bankroll. Most poker professionals, needless to say, play for lower stakes and make less money. A lot less money. I asked many different players what they made at the very beginning of their careers and the answer was usually about $150 a night. Coincidentally, about the same as casino dealers make. As you'd expect, poker is the kind of job where health insurance is sort of a problem. Even Jen, with all her money, is still on a family policy through her parents. And how much skill does a person need? How much is luck a factor in all this? Consider this story. At one point during the World Series of Poker, a pro named Linda Johnson and I are standing just a few feet away from one of the tables. The cards are dealt. The World Series, they play a kind of poker called Texas Holdem where each player just gets two cards, face down, and then five cards come face up in the middle of the table for everybody to share. Anyway, the cards go around and a guy in his 20s named Paul Phillips, makes the first bet on the hand, $7,000. A guy in a bush hat and sunglasses calls the bet. Puts in $7,000 of his own. The dealer then lays out the first three face up cards, what they call the flop, in the middle of the table. And Linda leans into my microphone. The flop comes queen, nine, three. Paul bet all in. Paul at least has a pair, I believe. I would think he has a queen. More betting happens. They flip over their cards. Paul actually has a pair of aces. The other guy has a pair of nines. Which, combined with the nine that's sitting on the table face up, gives him a set of three nines. Three of a kind beats a pair in poker, so Paul loses the hand. I can't believe it. Paul's feeling a little sick about this one. You're not supposed to lose with aces. Paul loses $20,000. The very next hand, each player gets his two cards face down. There's a flurry of calls and raises. Raphael brought it in. We've got some action here. It was brought in for $7,000. Daniel called $7,000. Tony D re-raised. He made it almost $80,000. Paul just moved all in. Now, remember, Paul got two aces beat last hand. A bunch of other people drop out, leaving just two people in the hand, Paul and the guy named Tony D. Each of them has $72,000 in the pot, which is every last chip for Tony D. Because Tony D couldn't bet any more-- even if he wanted to-- they each flip over their two face down cards. Tony D has two jacks. Paul has two aces. Again. Then the flop comes and another card. And then, the last card. Aces. Oh my God. Jack on a river. It's a jack. You've been flopping aces back to back. Painful. Back to back he had aces. Once against nines, once against jack. And both times they hit their miracle. Make three nines and three jacks. So he loses two pots in a row for a lot of money. That's a brutal beat. Oh my God. Oh, Paul. Oh my God. Paul's got to feel sick about this. Paul's standing up now. He's in pain. It's probably hard for him to breathe right now. Anyone who says there's no luck in this just doesn't understand. A few hands later, Paul's lost the rest of his chips. Then his friend Melissa Hayden, a fellow pro, takes us to meet him in the casino bar. What can you do? That's part of the game. It's just part of the game. It's hard to describe. When I saw that jack hit the table, I couldn't even see. I went blind for a minute. It was like it couldn't actually be a jack. It's as if you saw just something materialize out of thin air and said, that violates the laws of physics. That couldn't have just happened. This ball bearing just appeared in front of my face. That's how that jack felt. Like it just simply couldn't have happened. And then, standing in the bar, without notes, or pad, or paper, or anything, Paul calculates the odds that a person could get a pair of aces in two consecutive hands, and then lose both times. All right, well, the odds of getting a pair of aces. You look at your first card. It's 4 out of 52, which is 1 in 13. And then the next card, 1 out of 17 because there's 3 left. 3 out of 51. 13 out of 17 is 220:1. So it's 220:1 against getting aces. Then it's 220:1 against getting them the next hand too. So we're looking at over 40,000 here because 200 squared would be 40,000. So then we've got the odds of me having aces cracked back to back are 4 and 1/2 squared, which is about 18. Then we got 18 times 45,000. Brings us to right around a million. And it's definitely in the milliony ballpark. What happened to me we call a 1 in a million beat. This is the sort of moment that makes the aspiring amateur player feel suddenly awestruck and frightened at all the things that the professionals have running through their heads. And this is just the odds of the game. At the Bellagio, Jen is having a good night, catching good cards. And the most noticeable thing about watching her play is that, like a great ballplayer, she does not seem like she's trying very hard. All at the same time, she is watching the other players, figuring out what they have, calculating the odds in her bets, ordering hot tea, conducting an interview, chatting about her upcoming trip to Italy, making her own bets. You raise? Yep. You raise? Yep. Jen says that the main difference between low stakes games and the higher stakes games that she plays at, is that the better players at the higher money levels, play a way more psychological game. Here's the kind of thing that she's talking about. She knows that one of the guys in this game doesn't think much of women players. He thinks I'm the worst player in the world. That I don't play well. I get the cards and I win with them and I'm just lucky. I mean, he just hates losing to a girl. It just drives him crazy. He can't see clearly when he plays me. And it's been like that for years. And so, in one hand, she has terrible cards. And though this guy raises the bet over and over, she bets him back. And she only wins in the end with a lucky last card. Oh my gosh. She collects the chips that she's won. One of the guys at the table points at my microphone and asks her, would you have played that hand if the guy had a video camera with him? It wasn't a very good hand, let's put it that way. I was just wondering. Why would she play a hand like that? Well, the reason why she would play a hand like that has to do with that guy who doesn't think that women play good poker. She wants him to keep thinking she doesn't know what she's doing. That makes them make the wrong decisions, stay in hands that he should never stay in. I wasn't supposed to win that hand. He had buried aces. I had a dead three. And he was so much more of a favorite than I was. But I also knew that I'd make more money in the future from him if I play that hand. So if I lost the pot, I took a small loss for how much I'm going to make in the future because he thinks that I play those kind of hands against him all the time. So it's like putting myself in a negative equity situation to make more money in the future. Many poker pros we met have no interest in other kinds of gambling. They don't exactly look at poker as gambling. Others gamble compulsively on all sorts of stuff. One of the best poker players on the circuit is known to take his winnings and blow them at the craps table. During the World Series of Poker, at one of the breaks, producer Starlee Kine and I noticed Phil Gordon. For Phil, betting is just part of life. He bets on gin rummy. He bets on cribbage. He bets on golf. He bets on backgammon. I love gambling. You know, I'll gamble on anything. Really? Oh yeah. Like what? What's the smallest thing you've ever bet on? Well, I lost $5,000 in rock, scissors, paper last weekend. Wait, rock, scissors, paper. You mean the-- Rock, scissors, paper. The one, two, three. $5,000. To who? To this guy. This guy turns out to be his friend Rafe, who travels everywhere with him, in a free-floating, vacation slash gambling trip that never ends. Rafe, who can somehow out-think and out-strategize Phil in rock, scissors, paper. We've been playing rock, scissors, paper for 10 years and I've seen all the moves. You think that there's just rock, scissors, and paper. But when someone goes paper five times in a row, and you're like, OK, I know what he's doing next time, he's going paper. He's trying to sucker me into thinking he's going scissors. So you go rock and he goes paper again. It really can put you on the most serious tilt. Phil describes the strategy of rock, scissors, paper. And really, it's just like poker, he says. You only have three possible options. In one game, it's call, or raise, or fold. In the other, it's rock, or scissors, or paper. And how both are pysch out games. And before I know it, we're in the casino bar and Phil is rock, scissors, papering Starlee for a drink. She has just gone scissors followed by paper. Which tends to lead me to believe that she's going rock next. Just to do the full gamut of the moves. But that might be too obvious for her, so she might double reverse me. OK, I can tell her what you're going to go and I'll make it-- OK, I'm going to go rock. Now you better win this. I'm going to go rock. I have money on you. I'm going to go rock. People start placing side bets. Phil looks right in Starlee's eyes as he declares he's going to go rock. And this totally psyches her out. I promise you. Starlee gets this look on her face that says, is he going rock? Wait, is he? One, two, three. Oh. He did. He did. He goes rock. She loses. Now I'm on the juice and I want to keep doing it. Parents, see how kids get hooked? Phil and Rafe were in computers, their companies went public, internet boom. You know the rest of the story. Millions of dollars, no need to work. And they make a good case for why, given a choice of doing anything in the world, one might decide to play poker. It's a great life, Phil says. A constant field trip with your friends. Flying around the world, playing cards. And hearing him and Rafe describe it is really like listening to the devil telling you to quit your job, don't heed the advice of your loved ones, turn your back on everything you have ever fought for or held dear, to come and live forever on the Island of the Lost Boys. Not that Phil doesn't see the downside of all this. Well, I think that was probably the number one complaint of my ex-wife. I wasn't able to grow up as fast as the love of my life wanted me to. So I always want to live a life of fun and excitement and adventure. I'll do pretty much whatever it takes to make sure that continues. I mean, I have a failed marriage. I'd been married for six months. I got married October 1 and we just split up about a month ago. No, it's OK. I mean, it's very amicable. We just realized that our life goals are different. Phil's moving to Las Vegas. Where else can you get world class entertainment seven nights a week, he asks? It's getting late. Rafe turns to Phil before we go. $500 this won't make the air. What kind of odds are you willing to give me. Even up. I'll take 3:2. How about you give me 3:2? My $750 to your $500 that we never make the air. You're on. Sorry, Rafe. You lose. In the months since Starlee and I went to the World Series, we've both gotten hooked on poker. She now plays in a weekly game. I've played nearly every night. Sometimes with friends, sometimes on the river boats just 25 minutes from my office at the public radio station. But most often, online for real money. Sometimes I'll be sitting in my office or out to dinner with friends, and I'll daydream about poker. When poker's your job, apparently, you daydream about other things that gets taken from you. While Jen and Phil and Paul all still love playing poker, there are also guys like this longtime Vegas player. My name is Mike Laing. L-A-I-N-G. My dad always told me the I is for intelligence. For you, after playing for so long, how often is it just like a job? Every minute of it is a job. From the time I get up off my couch to where I have to go take a shower is a job. I don't feel like getting in the water, washing my hair, and taking a shower and getting dressed up and this and that and going out. That's when the work begins. Mike says that when he's playing poker, it is literally boring for him. In contrast to all these 20-something poker pros who are smart about their money and managing risk, Mike is old school. He never read a book about poker. Why read them when he plays against the guys who wrote the books? He's the kind of gambler who recently bet $24,000 on whether a coin flipped in the air would come up heads or tails. He won. That's part of a gambler. Then the next month you're broke. And that's the way it goes. It goes up and it goes down. Do you have a bankroll that you keep to protect you for a month, two months? Well, see a lot of guys keep their bankroll, their gambling bankroll and their spending bankroll. Me, it's like my bankroll is whatever I have. It's always up for grabs. Wow. I'll flip a coin for it or whatever. So you'll let yourself go broke? Well, yes. I have the heart to risk everything. If I think he's bluffing, I'll just move in on him. I'll just risk everything. It doesn't matter. If you get broke, you get broke. You just go on the next day, that's all. One day Mike was walking by his 11-year-old son at home who was playing poker online. Mike noticed his son had a killer hand, the best possible cards of anybody in that hand. Bets were happening. Mike suggested that his son raise. The son said, nah. I don't want to lose the guy, dad. Meaning he didn't want the guy to fold. He wanted to string him along, get more of his money. I'm thinking at 11 years old, to pick up this lingo and to realize this, I mean, he could have potential to be a great poker player. But I mean, it'd be nice for him to have that as a hobby, like a secondary thing. I'd like to have him go onto college and be a doctor or a lawyer or something. And would you be sad if he became a professional poker player? I don't want him in it. I don't want him in it. I mean, I got a lot of friends all over the world and I got a lot of respect from friends all over the world. And he'd have a lot of friends. And he'd hear stories of his dad all the world, and I'm sure of that. Because I mean, I put some stories out there. Not meaning to, but I've put out a lot of stories that people will be talking about for years after I'm gone. But I want him to have something else to fall back on that he knows is going to be there. Poker will bus you. It's built into the job that experienced players go on losing streak that last months. No player can avoid it. Think about what that does to you. It makes you mean with your kids, your wife, or whoever you're with and you're irritable. People come up to talk to you, you don't want to talk to them. You kind of like fly of the hand and say I'm sorry. I had a bad day. You know it's supposed to all balance out, but it's like you think, God, why? Why has it got to balance out now? Why can't it balance out a little bit later or not so strong? The night we went with Jen Harman to the casino she won $16,000 in two hours. But she spent most of the last three months on a huge losing streak. She says it doesn't worry her. She knows it will change. When she first started playing poker, it was different. She'd only been playing seriously for a year and a half when she went on a seven-month losing streak. You doubt yourself. I tried not to change my game for the worst. And a lot of poker players, that's why poker's so difficult, and so many people can't be successful, is because they go through these losing streaks and they start to play really bad. They really change their game for the worst. I mean, you have to be robotic. And that's very difficult to do. I don't know how many times I've said, man, I wish I was a robot. Why can't I be a robot? No emotion at all. She keeps track of her wins and losses. And in 3 of the 13 years that she's been playing, she took a loss. She's gone broke once. Nearly gone broke a second time. This is all very sobering news for the aspiring professional. I find it's hard to quit poker, though. Even though playing just these last few months, it's clear that I don't have a special gift for the game. I don't have the patience. I get bored waiting for a good hand, and then play all kinds of cards I really should be folding. This has cost me frankly, a bit of money. Another weakness of mine, I find I'm often more interested in knowing whether people are lying than I am in winning money. So if I have a pair of aces and then somebody keeps raising the bets as though they have a straight, or trips, or something that would beat my aces, the right thing to do would be to fold. I like to flatter myself to think it's a reporterly instinct kicks in. And then I simply want to know if they're bluffing. And so I stay in. If they're bluffing, it's so interesting. It's so interesting how people act in different situations. That is more interesting to me than winning the money. Starlee says that when I say in like this, I'm basically a girl. You know, watching sports for the personalities rather than caring about who is going to win. So I stay in. They are almost never bluffing. Just about two weeks ago, I started lying about money. I've been telling people that I'm down about $150 total for all this poker. But really, it's more like $300. OK, it's $350. That's bad, right? The lying. I asked Jen Harman how many hours an amateur like me would take to get competent at poker. And she thinks for a moment and then says, 2,000. 2,000 hours. Think of that. That's like a 40-hour-a-week job for a year. I only have 1,930 hours to go. Act three, Martha, My Dear. Well, David Rakoff is our third amateur today. An amateur who set out on the quest to meet the pros, to get a question answered. I have a cupboard in my living room, a freestanding armoire that holds, among a ton of other stuff, the following supplies. Six stamp pads, rubber linoleum printing blocks, seven boxes of Chinese flash cards, bindery fabric sample books from the garbage of the carpet and tile store on 20th, acrylic paints-- approximately 40 tubes-- rhinestones, pearl buttons, architectural balsa wood, pipe cleaners, and a tin cracker box of golf tees. Quantity, approximately 1,000 assorted colors. I make stuff. Boxes, lamps, mirrors, small folding screens, painted jackets for kids, that kind of thing. It's what I do in my spare time. Some people need to exercise every day, my salvation lies in time spent alone with an X-acto knife and commercial-grade adhesive. During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. I almost cannot get this feeling any other way. Certainly, it never happens in my job in writing. When seated at the computer, I have to either check my watch, eat something, call a friend, or abuse myself every 10 minutes. By contrast, I once spent 16 hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instant of that day tempted to check the time. Is it possible for one's job to be an exercise in having that feeling? Or does the act of doing something for money automatically rob you of that feeling? For me, there was only one place where I could find the answer-- the crafts department of Martha Stewart Living magazine. It's kind of messy. You're the luckiest person I've ever met. My voice is squeaking in Hannah Milman's office. Hannah is the editor who heads up the crafts department, and her workspace has me green with envy. There is the requisite desk with telephone and computer, but beyond that it's just an embarrassment of fantastic art supplies. Numerous apothecary jars filled with sea shells, bags upon bags of quartz, polished oyster shells, beads, vintage rhinestones, spools of ribbon, silk flowers. It is an astonishing array. Did you blow these eggs yourself or did you get them-- A lot of them, yeah. On one of the shelves is a series of decorated eggs that have been sawed open with the tiny bit of a dremel drill, painted, hinged, altered, and adorned in innumerable variations on opulence. Hannah explains that these were created in-house for a feature the magazine did on how to make your own Faberge eggs. When we did this costume story, one of our projects was a witch made out of plastic drawstring garbage bags, plastic drawstring garbage bags. The story was to do costumes out of found objects. Well actually, it was no-sew costumes. No sew costumes. The requirement is that they could not be sewn. So you're given a problem. That's the problem. Let's do it. That's a great idea. So I went to go look for garbage bags. And as everybody here does, you search for the perfect garbage with the right color drawstring and just the right sheen. So I was shopping and thought, there must be something else in the supermarket that would work as a costume. It wasn't really coming to me, but then there were the coffee filters. And I thought, those could be those Elizabethan cuffs around your wrist. I said, I'm going to buy these. There's something there. They remind me of the cuffs. It turned out, it was the perfect material. You should have worn it for your wedding, it was so beautiful. She regrets that. We have congregated in the main work room. The project currently underway is-- not surprisingly-- Christmas ornaments. Stalks of wheat have been soaked, folded, twisted, braided, and tied into an endless variety of shapes. Then dusted with differing shades of brilliant metallic mica powder, which requires a respirator. The women who work here-- there is one man, but curiously his name is actually Megan-- seem more like rizdy hipsters than ice cream social soccer moms. They all went to art and design school. They all seem to love their jobs. And they seemed to love them for a reason that's very familiar to me. When you're making something, do you ever achieve this state of mind where you've lost time? At 2 o'clock in the morning. You get really flushed and excited. You go into a deep level of concentration really, is what it's all about, I think. You really do. You have to be able to concentrate really deeply to the point where you don't even realize-- you're not self-conscious about what you're doing anymore. It's just flowing out of you. The actual name for the state of mind that Kelly is describing is called flow, coincidentally. It's a term you may have heard of without knowing where it came from. It was coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. For those of you not of Hungarian descent, let me say that name again. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi interviewed athletes, chess players, artists, rock climbers, and found that all of them, when engaged in the act of their choosing, spoke of reaching a level of engagement that is completely unself-conscious, removes them from their everyday worries, and alters their sense of time. I think the biggest challenge for us is that you have to have like insta-flow. You have to make things. You don't have a choice. That's what you're paid for. That's what your job is. But has that corrupted flow in your life? When something becomes from avocation to vocation, from the thing that you love to do to the thing that you may still very well love to do, but the thing that you're paid to do, can you still create it for yourself? Yes you can. Yes you can. But it takes a lot of discipline. It takes a lot of discipline to keep-- you can't just sort of do it when you feel like it. Dream over. I can't work here. I just don't want to expand that kind of effort to get to a place that I can get to without any work at all. Under that kind of pressure, I'm not even sure I could get there in the first place. To paraphrase that famous old saying, don't flow where you pro. Talking to these women, I do realize I have this in common with them. We all make stuff. We give most of it away as gifts. And for the most part, none of us seems to have a terribly clear idea of what happens to all of it after that. I have made and given away years and years worth of things, starting in earnest at least 15 years ago. Some of it to people who have moved almost that many times. Others have gotten divorced or been widowed. I've made things out of food, polyurethaned food, but food nonetheless. My hypothesis is that a lot of the things I've made spend a year on the shelf and are then consigned to the rubbish heap or the Goodwill or a box in the basement. I decided to test my theory. Hello. Deb? Yes. It's David. Hey. Hi. I have a question for you. You're being recorded right now. Oh, for crying out loud. Do you remember that birthday-- it might have been your 30th birthday. Do you remember what I made you? Yeah, I have it right here. You do? Yeah. I'm surprised that Deb still has the box. Especially so close at hand. What is it? It is a wooden-- is it a transformed cigar box? And it's painted in various lovely pastel shades. And then it's covered in Necco wafers. And they're topped with [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. It turns out that she wasn't the only one who could describe the gifts in detail. I call my friends James, Laura, and Margaret. They also kept the things I'd made for them. Not just kept them, but kept them out in their daily lives. On their bedside tables, in their hallways, on their children's backs. In between phone calls, I postmortem with my producer Alex Blumberg. He recorded all of these calls. He wasn't surprised at all that my friends kept the stuff. Because they love you and they're your friends and they're clearly-- you know, you're all very close. And they're going to keep everything that you give to them because they like you. All right, what did you do with the little linotype that I left on your desk? Fascinating. What did I do with the little linotype? I totally forgot that I was a gift recipient. I got to find it now. You don't have to find it now. This is the thing. You really don't have to find it now. Here's the thing. On some level, I actually don't really care what happens to the things, so long as what doesn't happen is the following, which is that 20 years hence, when these people are sitting around with their families, their new families, their children, that the sort of mythology of the object is not, oh, this was given to us by that sad, lonely loser. Do you know what I mean? Oh, he made us this thing, but he came to our wedding and got so drunk. Alex really shouldn't feel bad. It's a lovely moment when I give somebody something and they're appreciative, to be sure. But in some ways, their reaction is beside the point. I'll make things anyway. On some level, me giving somebody something that I've made, it's almost the equivalent of your fitness nut friend coming into your living room, dropping and giving you 25, and then shouting, Happy Birthday! Who's really gotten the gift in a transaction like that? You tell me. David Rakoff is the author most recently of the book Don't Get Too Comfortable. Original music for our poker story today by TRS 80. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, all he says anymore is-- I'm Ira Glass. The I is for Ira. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. This week we had planned originally on doing a show that would be kind of light and funny. But with the news on Tuesday, we all lost heart for that, and set about looking for material that would, in some way, reflect and illuminate what I think most of us are feeling in the wake of the destruction at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We're going to have a show of news stories on these things for you next week, hopefully. Until then, we put together this hour of stories in which people reflect on loss, and try to make sense of things that don't exactly make sense. For instance, this story. When Mark was 15, his father was shot and killed, and Mark reacted like a 15-year-old. He went up to each of his relatives-- to anybody who would listen, actually-- and he declared that someday when he grew up he would become a pro football player, and he would find the man who shot his father. It's really-- when I look back at that kid, that 15-year-old kid making that promise, it's pathetic in a way. Well, it's such a particular vision of what a pro football player is. Which is to say, as a kid you're trying to conjure the notion of somebody who's very powerful, but also pure somehow. Yes. And I remember even then some friends saying, now Mark, pro football is kind of a lofty goal. Maybe high school football. Years later, when I reflected back on that, I thought, jeez, the kid's dad just was killed. Why disabuse him of some vision he's got? Mark's dad was a bar owner in Fresno, California. Two men came into the bar, played a game of pool, ordered two beers, then came into the back room and shot him. They didn't take any money. It was a gangland-style hit. And there was talk that Mark's father must be caught up with organized crime. So at 15 Mark started calling around until his mother made him stop. 17 years later, he moved back to Fresno. By this time he was a reporter for the LA Times. And he wanted to write a book investigating his dad's murder. He was so skittish that he and his wife got their home under assumed names, did not tell people where they lived. It's hard to make sense of all that. But there was a great deal of paranoia. I didn't want family to really know what I was doing. And I thought that if there was some way to-- if someone got nervous about the questions I was asking, I wanted to make it difficult for them to try to find me. And I remember changing my sleep patterns, so that I was awake all through the night, and I was guarding the house. I had, actually, a gun that I had under the couch. I was sleeping on the couch. In a way, I became very childlike again. I really had to become a 15-year-old again in some ways to get at this thing. Like how do you mean? Well, I think it wasn't terribly adult to try to think that you could come back to your hometown and try to hide your identity. I don't think that was really adult. When somebody close to us dies, part of us can remain suspended there at the moment it happened. And we stay there. Part of us stays there, turning the whole thing over and over in our heads. Mark spent three years talking to informants about his father's murder. He went through police files, analyzed phone records, and in the end found credible evidence that his father was murdered just as he was about to blow the whistle on a drug ring, one with local police on its side, Mark believes. He wrote his book about it. It's called In My Father's Name. And still that was not enough. He's still not at peace. And have I been liberated by some of those answers? I don't know if liberation's the right word. But why? What would it take? I think there is a part of me that wants to sit across from the men who set this whole thing up and talk to them about it. You want them to admit it to your face. Yeah, that's right. That's what I want them to do. I have played over that encounter with the killers so many times. And one of the things that I would tell them going in is it goes no further than you and me. This is it. I just want to ask you one question. Were you responsible for the murder of my father? And so, actually, you've actually imagined this over and over to yourself? Oh, I imagine it all the time. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, people trying to make sense out of things for which they'll never get answers or real peace. All three stories on our program today are about people facing the idea of death, and telling themselves one thing about it or another. And is there anything that can be said? Is there anything that can comfort us in that situation? Act One of our program, The Disappearance, trying to comprehend what it means when people are there, alive in your life one day, and the next gone. Act Two, Look for the Union Label. A father and daughter sit down together for no real reason, just a whim really, to write his obituary, not really thinking about what it means. And then at some point someone starts to think about what it means. Act Three, Ashes. David Sedaris talks about the death of his mother. Stay with us. Act One, The Disappearance. One of the most remarkable books that I've read in a while is by a woman named Genevieve Jurgensen, about her husband Laurent and she lost their two daughters, Elise and Mathilde, at the ages of four and seven. The book is a series of letters that she wrote to her friend 12 years after their deaths. And one of the things that's so remarkable about it is how she still struggles. She doesn't want to keep suffering over their deaths. But suffering over them is the last way that she has to love them. She's also keenly aware that she wants them to seem, in these letters, to be more than just names. You know, when you tell a story about somebody, it's sometimes hard for them to seem more like just a character in a story. And she keeps trying over and over to find ways to make it real, that in fact they were alive. They are more than can be expressed on the page. You never knew our daughters. Neither did you know me as I was when they were alive. I will have to tell you everything. Can one really tell someone about very young children? I will not even show you photographs of them. All they show are two little girls barely distinguishable from each other, just like all the little blond children which people primary school classes and the beaches along the Atlantic coast in the summer. On the 29th of April, 1980, the official photographer for the school which my daughters attended came to take some class photographs. They were both dead the next day. Indeed, we did not receive these photographs until several weeks after the news of our solitude. Mathilde's class is in uniform. So it is a picture of a little girl in navy blue in a row, stifling her giggles in between her best friends. Elise, who was still in the nursery class, is wearing the dress with the sailor collar that my mother gave her. She's sitting in the first row, looking solemnly at the lens. I think that in this picture she's really very like me. In Mathilde's satchel I still have her school overall with her name embroidered on it, with its ink stains and biscuit crumbs in the pockets. In her exercise book, in her childish but careful handwriting, she has written the date which will be the date of her death and the death of her little sister, Wednesday, the 30th of April, 1980. What else can I tell you? I would like you to have heard me talking to them just once, even if only on the telephone. I feel powerless in trying to make you accept this evidence they were here, I was their mother. I went to pick them up at school. We stopped at the supermarket to buy two cheap waxed coats, one in red, one in blue. And I dropped them off with my mother, not before playing a practical joke on her on the landing. I bundled my daughters up in the coats with the hoods up, pulled tightly over their noses and tied under their chins. They rang the bell and I hid. And my mother pretended not to recognize them. Then I went home, because I was a speech therapist at the time, and I had patients waiting. My sister-in-law came, as intended, to pick Mathilde and Elise up to take them to their other grandmother. But they never arrived, because they died toward the end of the afternoon about 10 meters from each other on the side of the Northern Highway. I'm hesitating about what to write next. There is no common ground between before and after, or at least what they have in common strikes me as just as painful to excavate as the most deeply-buried relics of before. Yes, I'm hesitating. I'm afraid of failing. I'm afraid that you will believe more readily in their death than in their lives. A few years ago, I still used to drive out into the countryside and bellow at the top of my lungs, Mathilde. I was really calling her. Of course, she did not come. At least I had spoken her name once more. Sometimes I meet a little girl who has the same name as her, and I speak it. I say, hello, Mathilde, goodbye, Mathilde, with a smile. And I think, help. On the eve of that May Day holiday, we were not expecting anyone to call, and the ringing of the telephone awakened no feelings in us. We lifted the receiver without curiosity. A slight rustling on the line indicated that the call was being made from outside Paris. My sister? No, I knew she was on her way to Paris. An unfamiliar man's voice checked that we were indeed the people he was looking for. Then he told us to hold the line. The next voice was that of our brother-in-law, Christian, who had left with his wife, their baby, and our two girls. We asked him how he was. He said that he was not good at all, that they had had a very serious car accident. We said, yes, and? He told us our two little girls were dead. We thought he was playing a joke on us, and then thought no one would play a joke in such poor taste. Laurent said, but Christian, it's not true. He fell to his knees, calling his children. I asked for news of the others. Everyone was fine. Where did we have to go? To the hospital at Peronne. I did not know where it was. Christian give us a few directions. Laurent knew. We hung up. I immediately felt how impossible it was to raise myself to the scale of this event. The terror mounted in me out of all proportion to my own dimensions. I could not contain it all. I was still this little woman in her little apartment next to a little man in the same little apartment. The terror targeted us exclusively. We were its only prey, its only destination, the terminus. It was a giant, and we were dwarves. Laurent took me by the wrists and asked me not to scream. He said, to think we're going to have to get over this. A big part of us has stayed there forever. I will tell you what happened next, everything you want to know about what happened next. But at the moment I can not. Just as then, I am looking for the link between my daughters and that news. We arrived at the door of the hospital. Jean-Bernard asked where we had to go. And the porter replied, in surgery. Then I thought that my daughters had been operated on before they died. And everything expanded into infinity again. Corridors. It was difficult to walk. My sister-in-law at the end of the corridor, arms circling around her, a room. My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, a stranger. They ask us if we would like to see them, if we wanted to see our daughters. You would have had to drag me there with a tractor. They ask us if we would like to ring anyone to let them know. I then understand that this horror does not stop at us, that we have to tell my mother. No, it's the evening. She is not expecting any news this evening. Let her sleep one more time. I was right. They need the family record book. When they ask for it, and I reply, yes, we've brought it with us, I feel proud for a moment. We are good parents. We thought of everything. Aline and Christian are going to spend the night in hospital near their baby, Aude. All three are kept under observation. We are taken back. In fact, we came for nothing. Right from the first instant, death is this nothing. Mrs. L suggests that we stay the night at her house. I agree readily. She lost a son long ago. At the Ls' house, we eat what we are given, food and sleeping pills. It is not so much in words that I'm lacking to tell you all this, but in courage. When I realize that I have forgotten something, and I have to retrace my steps, I say to myself, is it really worth it? Before taking the sleeping pill, we thought that over at La Haye their grandparents were waiting for our daughters. Laurent's parents. Have I told you that they were attending the coronation of Queen Beatrix of Holland? Have I told you that on the 30th of April, 1980, this young woman was rising to the throne, and that ever since, this date has been celebrated there as a joyful anniversary of an event whose secondary effect was the death of the girls? That my father-in-law, the French ambassador, and my mother-in-law were attending the festivities? That all the embassy staff were busy, so we had found no one to go and fetch the girls at the airport? That resigned only at the very last minute, I had canceled the places reserved for them on the Air France flight? Have I told you that at my mother's house, before they were picked up by their aunt, they had watched the coronation ceremony on television, as I had done out of the corner of my eye at home? Have I told you that, seeing my father-in-law's very characteristic form and gait, I telephoned my mother to ask whether everyone had spotted him? And I can still hear in the background Mathilde's voice full of disappointment, no, I didn't see him. The very, very last time. My mother told me that at the time Elise was turned away from the television, absorbed in her drawing, but that that had not stopped her from affirming energetically, but I did. I saw him. Since then, I have not called Mathilde nor Elise. Or if I have called my eldest daughter, it was without the hope that she would reply. It was to feel the vibration in my larynx of those syllables chosen when I was 25 years old. The arrangement of clear vowels and aquatic consonants which were to name the first of my children, to accompany her all her life, to act as her passport, announce her arrival, to be said with only a hint of shyness, and finally in the mouth of the one who would love her, to betray all the emotions that this girl would one day elicit, that she alone would arouse in one young man, a young man who will never know her, who lives and who does not live to love her. After the funeral, I went over to my mother to see my aunt and uncle, who would soon be returning to Haute-Savoie. The concierge came out of her lodge to see me as I went into the building. Mathilde often used to go over to play with her daughter. She said, you will see. You can get used to anything. It is certainly the most simple, true, brutal, and perceptive thing that anyone said to me at the time. You could interpret it either as a message of hope or of crushing contempt for human nature. It is very strange, this double rhythm that I have with you. I write to you, forcing myself to clarify a period of my life that I've done everything I can to understand, but which has always been out of my grasp. It is said that reality outstrips fiction, but this is something else. The reality remains inaccessible. Since the death of the girls-- 12 years in 16 days' time-- I have honestly and constantly tried to unveil this reality without success. Perhaps I've already told you, sometimes I believe in them alive, my darling children, my darling little girls. These words which are so light and yet so burdensome cut through me then. And sometimes I believe in their death on the edge of the motorway, 10 or so meters from each other, their legs in dungarees, their arms and heads on the side of the motorway. There is never a link between the two. The other rhythm constitutes things I do in my current life, as if nothing had happened. Conversations, laughter, mutual friends, a double rhythm like a double life. You do not know whether they struggle against each other or enrich each other. Have I already mentioned Yasser Arafat to you? This is what made me think of him. When Elise was born, I found myself battling with a huge, hungry baby. The few odd ounces of milk that I was able to supply in the first 24 hours of her life in hospital were definitely not enough for her, and she screamed constantly. With Mathilde crying down the telephone because she felt lost without me, I quickly lost my patience. I found myself brutally grasping Elise's cradle, which was on casters, and furiously pushing it away from my bed, so that it was in danger of banging into the far wall. A second of silence, and then the crying started up again. On the third day, my mother came to see me. She sat at the end of the bed and chatted. We were cheerful. We, the adults, were talking to each other, but I was looking at my daughter, who was looking back at me. Drawn by her gaze, I leaned over her and rubbed my nose on hers. She said, huh, huh. I stared at my mother to reassure myself that I had not dreamed it. It had quite knocked the breath out of her. I did the same thing again, and Elise replied again. Third attempt, third exchange. And that was it, she was my child, my treasure, my stupefaction. For logistical reasons, it was my mother who came with Mathilde to pick me up from the hospital. I went down one of the big staircases. At the end of one of the ground-floor corridors, I saw Mathilde in her little green loden coat. She was watching silently, motionless, her nose pointing up another staircase. My mother pointed me out to her, and Mathilde started to walk towards me slowly. I handed Elise to my mother so that I could lift Mathilde into her rightful place in my arms. I can still feel to the nearest ounce the pressure of her legs around my waist. She did not say anything, but she slowly and silently felt my face with her hands like a blind girl. During this rediscovery, this tender and cautious reunion, my mother was smiling and whispering sweet nothings to Elise. She had brown hair, olive skin, and huge eyes ringed with black kohl. And to confront the October weather, she was wearing a woolen hat which was a bit too big for her, which skewed sideways over her ear. She could be Yasser Arafat's daughter, my mother laughed. The other day, the radio announced that Yasser Arafat's plane had disappeared in a sandstorm in the Libyan desert. A few hours later, although the members of his entourage were killed or injured, he himself was found alive and grinning. Every time that a tragic event affects him but spares him-- the murder of an adviser, all sorts of attempts on his life, or an airplane crash-- I feel that hug again. When I think of the life he leads and the life that Elise led, when I think of the life expectancy they each had on that October day when my mother teased me about my daughter, to think that she is dead, and he is here. I've been careful. I've never watched the home movies in which my two daughters appear, nor have I listened to their voices on the answering machine tapes that my mother kept. The messages to Granny are at her house, accessible, but I do nothing about it. How many catastrophes have there been since I began this correspondence with you? Football stadiums collapse, young motorbikers kill each other at the 24-hour race in Le Mans, and here I am with the children and you. And I tug at my net, which has plunged so deep in the water. Last week, I spent a long time looking at a car exactly like the one in which my daughters fell asleep, from which they were thrown, in which, leaving their parents to go to their grandparents, they left Paris never to return. I was there looking at the back seat, the seat belts that we had not done up, the right-hand window out of which they would have both been thrown. The letters on the number plate confirmed that this Renault 5 was from the same year as my sister-in-law's. They're still on the road, those cars. When there are none left, I will no longer be able to ask questions of them. Someone will have to keep one somewhere for me. After the impact, when my sister-in-law managed to bring her car to a halt, she and her husband turned with relief to smile at the children, but only their baby was there, sitting in her little seat, stupefied with some fragments of glass spread over her. Have I already told you that? I tell it to myself so many times. When I was near that Renault 5 the other day, I wanted to lie down on the rear seat and wait for the end of time. In short, back to square one. I have some work to hand in, a lot, but nothing will get done until I've written to you. At first it was the other way around. Everything came before writing these letters. I used to tell myself, why suffer? What's the point of this artificial rendezvous with these long-lost children? I always had something happier to do. Now, even as I get up, I am carried by the things I want to write to you. I should have gone to see in that room in the hospital where they put my daughters. I knew as soon as they suggested it to me. I knew that by refusing I was setting a precedent for a future of weakness because I was not worthy of-- I do not know what, just not worthy. So I did not go to see them dead. They were there, and Mummy did not come. They were only one or two rooms away. They remained alone. Mummy did not cross the doorway. I know nothing of their faces as they were at the end. They had the strength to die, and I could not match their strength. I know nothing of their last great achievement. Wherever they went, they went alone, together or apart. And I'm inclined to believe it was apart. Ignorant of their own heroism, they went to the places dictated by their violent trajectory at more than 100 kilometers per hour over the safety barrier. I stayed on my chair like a lump. And since then, people have not stopped congratulating me for my courage as a mother, to such an extent that many friends, including you, hesitated before talking to us about the difficulties and hardships they were facing. They did not seem worthy in comparison. Laurent and I sat enthroned on a pedestal, hoisted there by the annihilation of our two little girls. But we still knew what real life was, like a weather map of constantly changing skies, and we needed people to tell us about it, because the air was thin for our two statues. The only stance that I battle against is to threaten suicide, to keep those around you on tenterhooks because you claim you're going to die. Watch out, I'm going to kill myself. My goodness, the living can make a fuss with their moods, and their other half running all over the place trying to stop them. I'm going to kill myself, watch out, watch out. Oh no, that is not how you do it. I will explain to these maniacs how Mathilde and Elise managed to die. If I can, that is, because they did the whole thing by themselves. And when the adults came to their senses and began to realize that they were no longer in the car, not even under the front seats, where they looked once they realized the rear seat was empty, when they had to resign themselves to getting out of the car to look for them-- they had to be found wherever they might be. When it was done, and they had been found dozens of meters from the car and dozens of meters apart, they had actually already gone without a word to a place that no man can see. All of this brings me back to that moment of weakness on my chair when-- even though two children, my two children, two very young children, had known how to die and were waiting to be presented to me one last time in their truthfulness-- I had not even gone those few meters along the corridor that separated them from me. They had known how to die. I no longer knew how to walk. There has been nothing glorious about the way I live my life. I love the living in all their miasma. I love the dead for their temerity. There is nothing in between. Our children now, Elvire and Gauthier, have asked us 100 times whether they would have been born if their sisters had not died. I really hope so, but I just can not say. The girls' death allowed me to be pregnant again, which I wanted anyway, to have other children, which I wanted anyway. Even so, at the square with the children, I was not like other mothers, sitting on the bench or on the side of the sand pit. I would watch my Elvire making mud pies, and I would let Gauthier suck on his biscuit. If another woman wanted to talk to me, I had only two options: a bright facade, which devastated me. "Yes, mine's already three and 1/2, but she's still frightened of the slide. I can't believe your little scrap. He's so brave up at the top of the ladder." Or a truth that was socially unacceptable. "These are my younger two children. The elder ones died four years ago." I would always be out of place. The working class, immigrants, the self-taught cranks, the handicapped, the unemployed, and grieving parents are more alike than people think. They have at least one thing in common. They have to make herculean efforts to hold a normal, banal, bouncy conversation. They can think of only one thing, the moment when they might introduce a sentence about their misfortune. 13 years have passed, and I still cannot last half a day without evoking my daughters. Elvire has received a postcard from a friend announcing the death of a classmate. I was having a siesta. In my drowsy state I could hear the voice of my 12-year-old daughter talking to her father, respecting her mother's sleep. I'm going to have to tell Gauthier, aren't I? He was playing with his cousin. Gauthier does not want to hear about anything to do with death. So when Elvire told him, he hid his feelings and hardly broke off from his game. And Elvire was left alone with this news, which she had just learned from one of those holiday cards that should never give you that sort of news. What's going on, I asked, pretending to have heard nothing and feeling sure that Elvire would want to tell me everything herself. She joined me on the bed, buried herself against me, sighed, and then cried. She had been telling me about this friend's illness since the beginning of the school year. I knew that Lauren came to school sporadically, that she had changed physically, that her mother, who was always cheerful, came to pick her up from school with her two younger children, asking her whether she had forgotten anything in her locker as you would to a child who still has 10 or 15 years of school ahead of them. Then that was it. Lauren sank into a coma. Elvire had told me about that too. But now, as she cried, she realized she had never imagined that Lauren would actually die. And this death, this end to everything, this earthly truth which meant that the child who had been told not to forget anything in her locker would not begin the next academic year in three weeks time, this was so harsh and so invincible that Elvire had only her tears to link the two realities, that of a life, yesterday, which was complete even in a state of coma and death, which was eternal right from the first moment. Now, even as she struggled with the sharp pain, she already knew that soon, very soon, this pain would soften. And despite her sobs, her shuddering little frame, her puffy red face, she was already missing the purity of this revolt before it had even begun to fade. And she refused to accept that this sorrow would become integrated into her life. When I tell my children about this one day, they won't understand how horrible it was, she told me. And then, maybe even tomorrow there will already be moments when I don't think about it. This idea redoubled her anger. Far from hoping to suffer less, she never wanted the freshness of the pain to deaden. This was the only acceptable response to a disappearance that every part of her refused to accept. As I listened to her, I loved her for having already understood everything. And I thought of these letters, in which, so many years later, I try to discover exactly what has become of all those feelings. Genevieve Jurgensen's book is called The Disappearance. It's published by Norton. Excerpts were read by actress Felicity Jones. Coming up, more people trying to make sense of the senseless, including a story by David Sedaris. In a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Look for the Union Label. In this act, two people, father and daughter-- we'll hear from them both-- start to compose a story about death before anybody has died. Well, it simply began by sitting in the kitchen of my home, reading the Boston Globe. And I looked out on a beautiful fall day, looking out at a maple tree in front of my yard, and suddenly it occurred to me that I should write my obituary, or begin working on it. No special reason. It must have been probably over the Christmas holidays, probably last year. And you were visiting your parents' house? My parents. Around that time. And I was on the telephone. And I was just looking for a pad of paper to write something down. And I just noticed on a yellow legal pad that my father had started writing his obituary. But it wasn't labeled obituary at the time? No. No. It just said born in 1917 to Albany. And it just was incredibly straightforward and standard. And I just couldn't believe it. I didn't actually have an emotional response to the obituary part at all. I was just sort of-- I guess I was amused in a way, because he is such an interesting person. And the writing was just sort of the most basic details about his family. And it didn't really say anything about him. In other words, he's a more interesting person than the writing, itself. Right. And I don't know. And I didn't really process the thought. I just went straight to him. And I said, Dad, my god, this is so boring. I said, you've lived a much more interesting life than this. And he said, well, then help me write it. You're a writer. Help me write it. And all he knew was what the headline should be. That was sort of the one very clear thing that he knew. And what should the headline be? The headline should be-- I'm named after him. And it should say Adrian LeBlanc, comma, Product of the Working Class. That was what he saw. Well, to me, that's very important, because when I say the working class, I'm talking about workers. Throughout my history, from the first factory job, first learning what a union was, and then being a committee man and president of local unions wherever I worked. And from there on, I gravitated toward becoming a full-time field representative. I tend to take positions, you know? I do this every day of my life. And I think that the obituary was like saying there are still union guys around. You follow? Yeah. I don't know if that's clear. But that was pretty much it, just like saying, look, 82 years later, from 16 to 82, there are still guys who are making a pitch. And so we sit down. I'm pretty sure that first day we sat down. I opened my portable computer, and I said OK. And he said, so how do we do this? What do we do? And I said, well, I just need you to tell me about your life. I've actually tried to do this with my dad before, not in the context of the obituary but in those moments where I felt, oh, I need to learn about my family history. But he was not very responsive. He would be very vague. But for some reason, when he was thinking of his life in terms of an obituary, a lot of details came out that I don't feel I could've-- well, I wasn't able to get when I was trying to just have straight conversations with him about his biography, daughter to father. I was wondering if it was an enjoyable process for you, talking to your daughter. Yes. Yes. Yes. She's got a-- I find her to be a searcher and a prober with good instincts, and caring. So I don't know. It was just interesting, and it came very easily. I learned so much about him. Since it was an obituary you were writing, did the two of you talk about his death? No. That's something that I think is-- I don't know. It's funny. In preparing for this, several of my friends were asking me about it. And it just sort of shocked me a little bit that they were thinking about it in that way. And then, of course, I realized it is an obituary. I wonder if he understands it more the other way, that as far as he's concerned, it really is about his death. I think he must. And I think over the years he's known how anxious my brother and I have been about him dying. So I think he often tries, in his way, to help us cope with it. He doesn't seem sort of nervous or frightened. So I don't know. When I go to visit, I find leaving my parents sometimes quite difficult, because they are older. And I'm very busy. And I don't get back as often as I'd like to. And I think he knows how hard it is for me to say goodbye. And he'll say, I'm always with you. And I'll always be with you. That kind of thing. I wonder if this whole process, you think you're doing it for him in a way, but maybe it's for you. He's doing this all for you. I believe that's very possible. I think that's very possible, which is probably why he was a good union organizer. Because I'm feeling like I'm helping him do something. He was good at what he did. Is one of the reasons that you've agreed to talk to your daughter about the obituary, and work with her on the obituary, is to help her prepare for the thought that you might die? It could be. I haven't stayed with that thought. But it could very well be, Ira. Maybe you're clueing in. I think that thought has crossed my mind, but I haven't stayed with it. I haven't stayed. But you could be partially right. Is there a way to ever-- I'm not sure I would want it to be easier. But I wonder if it's possible. Is it possible to even know what that could be like? You're saying that no matter how we try to prepare for the death of somebody so close to us, there really is nothing we can do. We can think about it all we want. Yeah, I definitely feel that with it. I mean, because obviously I've been working on an obituary, not really thinking at all about my father dying, not thinking that it's about death, just thinking that it's about talking to my father, and that I have all the time to sort of figure this out. I don't know. It's part of my relationship with him will be what happens when it's over, when he's physically gone. I mean, my brother-in-law passed away. And he was quite sick before he died. And he was in a coma right up to the moment that he actually did die. And there was such a vast difference between him. Even though he wasn't available as the person we'd known, his physical life was so immense. And when it was gone, the loss of it was just huge. It was huge, and it happened in just a minute. And I just was so shocked by that, because I was so ready for him to die. We knew that he was going to die. He wasn't really with us anymore. And I was glad that I was able to at least understand how little I actually knew about it. So how far are the two of you on the obit? Have you finished it? No. No, I haven't actually-- I can't figure out how to write it except in the past tense. And it just seems completely bizarre to speak of him in that way. So I understand she hasn't finished writing it. No, we haven't completed it. No. Do you feel like she's taking too long getting this done? Do I think she's taking too long? Yeah. No, I didn't feel there was any-- there's no great rush that I know of. Do you have a feeling there should be a timetable? No, I don't. Are you rushing the process, Ira? That's not very-- No. No, I have no intention to rush the process. I'm not going anywhere. I'm still bowling on Fridays with the senior citizens. Adrian LeBlanc and his daughter, also named Adrian LeBlanc. When somebody dies we can be haunted by the thought of them. And we can also be haunted by the way that we acted ourselves toward them. This next story is a story of both kinds of haunting. Several years ago, three weeks before his sister Lisa's wedding, David Sedaris got a phone call from his mom, back home in Raleigh, North Carolina. She had lung cancer. She was a lifelong, unrepentant smoker. My sister Amy was with me when my mother called. We passed the phone back and forth across my tiny New York kitchen, and then spent the rest of the evening lying in bed, trying to convince each other that our mother would get better, but never quite believing it. I had heard of people who had survived cancer, but most of them claimed to get through it with the aid of whole grains and spiritual publications that encouraged them to sit quietly in a lotus position. They envisioned their tumors and tried to reason with them. Our mother was not the type to greet the dawn or cook with oats and barley. She didn't reason, she threatened. And if that didn't work, she chose to ignore the problem. We couldn't picture her joining a support group or trotting through the mall in a warm-up suit. 62 years old, and none of us had ever seen her in a pair of slacks. I'm not certain why, but it seemed to me that a person needed a pair of pants in order to defeat cancer. Just as important, they needed a plan. They needed to accept the idea of a new and different future free of crowded ashtrays and five-gallon jugs of wine and Scotch. They needed to believe that such a life might be worth living. I didn't know that I'd be able to embrace such an unrewarding future, but I hoped that she could. If she'd had it her way, we would have never known about the cancer. It was our father's idea to tell us, and she had fought it, agreeing only when he threatened to tell us himself. Our mother worried that once we found out, we would treat her differently, delicately. We might feel obliged to compliment her cooking and laugh at all of her jokes, thinking always of the tumor she was trying so hard to forget. And that is exactly what we did. The knowledge of her illness forced everything into the spotlight and demanded that it be memorable. We were no longer calling our mother. Now we were picking up the telephone to call our mother with cancer. We realized that any conversation might be our last, and because of that, we wanted to say something important. But what could one say that hadn't already been printed on millions of greeting cards and helium balloons? I love you, I said at the end of one of our late night phone calls. I am going to pretend that I didn't hear that, she said. I heard a match strike in the background, the tinkling of ice cubes in a raised glass, and then she hung up. I had never said such a thing to my mother. And if I had it to do over again, I would probably take it back. It was queer to say such a thing to someone unless you were trying to talk them out of money or into bed. Our mother had taught us this when we were no taller than pony kegs. I had known people who said such things to their parents. "I love you." But it always translated to mean, I'd love getting off the phone with you. We gathered together for the wedding, which took place on a crisp, clear October afternoon. I took my mother's arm and led her to a bench beyond the range of the other guests. The thin mountain air made it difficult for her to breathe, and she moved slowly, pausing every few moments. The families had taken a walk to a nearby glen, and we sat in the shade, eating sausage biscuits and speaking to one another like well-mannered strangers. The sausage is good, she said. It's flavorful, but not too greasy. Not too greasy at all. Still though, it isn't dry. Neither are the biscuits, she said. They're light and crisp, very buttery. Very. These are some very buttery biscuits. They're flaky, but not too flaky. Not too flaky at all, she said. We watched the path, awkwardly waiting for someone to release us from the torture of our stiff and meaningless conversation. I had always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. I think it was their fortitude that frightened us. Sick people reminded us not of what we had but of what we lacked. Everything we said sounded petty and insignificant. Our complaints paled in the face of theirs. And without our complaints there was nothing to say. My mother and I had been fine over the telephone. But now, face to face, the rules had changed. If she were to complain, she risked being seen as a sick complainer, the worst kind of all. If I were to do it, I might come off sounding even more selfish than I actually was. This sudden turn of events had robbed us of our common language, leaving us to exchange the same innocuous pleasantries we'd always made fun of. I wanted to stop it, and so, I think, did she. But neither of us knew how. After the gifts had been opened, we returned to our rooms at the Econo Lodge, the reservations having been made by my father. We looked out the windows past the freeway and into the distance, squinting at the charming hotels huddled at the base of other finer mountains. This would be the last time our family was all together. It's so rare when one knowingly does something for the last time. The last time you take a bath. The last time you have sex or trim your toenails. If you knew you'd never do it again, it might be nice to really make a show of it. This would be it as far as my family was concerned. And it ticked me off that our final meeting would take place in such a sorry excuse for a hotel. What more do you want out of a hotel, he shouted, stepping out onto the patio in his underpants. It's clean. They've got a couple of snack machines in the lobby. The TVs work, and it's near the interstate. Who cares if you don't like the damn wallpaper? You know what your problem is, don't you? We're spoiled, we shouted in unison. My parents retired to their room, and the rest of us hiked to a nearby cemetery, a once ideal spot that now afforded an excellent view of the newly-built Pizza Hut. Over the years, our mother had repeatedly voiced her desire to be cremated. We would drive past a small forest fire or observe the pillars of smoke rising from a neighbor's chimney, and she would crush her cigarette, saying, that's what I want right there. Do whatever you like with the remains. Sprinkle them into the ashtrays of a fine hotel. Give them to smart-ass children for Christmas. Hand them over to the Catholics to rub into their foreheads. Just make sure I'm cremated. Oh, Sharon, my father would groan. You don't know what you want. He'd say it as though he, himself, had been cremated several times in the past, but had finally wised up and accepted burial as the only sensible option. We laid our Econo Lodge bedspreads over the dewy grass of the cemetery, smoking joints and trying to imagine a life without our mother. If there was a heaven, we probably shouldn't expect to find her there. Neither did she deserve to roam the fiery tar pits of hell, surrounded for all eternity by the same [BLEEP] heads who brought us strip malls and theme restaurants. There must exist some middle ground, a place where one was tortured on a daily basis but still allowed a few moments of pleasure, taken wherever they could find it. That place seemed to be Raleigh, North Carolina, so why the big fuss? Why couldn't she just stay where she was and not have cancer? Ever since arriving at the motor lodge, we'd gone back and forth from one room to another, holding secret meetings and exchanging private bits of information. We hoped that by preparing ourselves for the worst, we might be able to endure the inevitable with some degree of courage or grace. Anything we forecasted was puny compared to the future that awaited us. You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger. It is foolish even to try. The most you can do is eat up while you still can, stuffing yourself, shovelling it in with both hands and licking clean the plates, recalling every course in vivid detail. Our mother was back in her room and very much alive, probably watching a detective program on television. Maybe that was her light in the window, her figure stepping out into the patio to light a cigarette. We told ourselves she probably wanted to be left alone. That's how stoned we were. We'd think of this later, each in our own separate way. I, myself, tend to dwell on the stupidity of pacing a cemetery while she sat, frightened and alone, staring at the tip of her cigarette and envisioning herself, clearly now, in ashes. David Sedaris. His story "Ashes" is in his book called Naked. My god, this is so boring. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. I'm still bowling on Fridays with the senior citizens. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Sarah was at Pier 94 in New York City a couple days ago. It was the place of families of people who had worked in the World Trade Center were going to give DNA samples to police for use in identifying their loved ones. And she was standing in the parking lot. Then I saw this guy walking around basically in a circle, looking at people. And he kept touching his hand to the top of his head, like kind of rubbing the top of his head. And his movements were so strange that I actually thought that maybe he was deranged a little bit. Then the circles got a little bit smaller, and he came closer to where I was. And then I just realized that he had a flyer pinned to his T-shirt. And the flyer had a picture of this guy, black and white pictures, and some writing on it. And I realized he was somebody's relative. He'd been walking all over New York City, posting this flyer over a 40-block area. It had a picture of his father. He'd gone to the Armory. He'd filled out a missing persons report. He tried to reach other people in his father's office on the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center. He'd gone to every hospital. And he'd just given some DNA. So I said, what are you going to-- what do you do now? And he said, I don't know. And he said it like-- not just like, I don't know. But he was like, I don't know where to go. I just-- he just had no idea where to go or what to do. And he couldn't go home. It was like, I think there's a sense like, as long as there's daylight, you should be traipsing around the city, you know, looking for whoever. And it was still sort of early afternoon, and I could just tell. He just had no idea what to do, physically, with himself. He said, I was walking around over there, and I realized I was literally walking around in circles. And I don't know what to do. What's so strange is that it wasn't just people touched so directly by the tragedy who felt that. Don't you feel like we've all been in a little bit of a fog? It's hard to sleep. It's hard to know what to think of things. We want to help somehow, but beyond a few simple things, it is not clear what to do or how to do it. Walking in circles is such a primal response. A friend who was in Washington Square Park in New York when the World Trade Center buildings collapsed said that a man that he was standing there started walking in circles at that moment, screaming. And maybe it's just me. But before last week, I could have never imagined the feeling that would lead to somebody doing that. But now I can. In Chicago where I live, when I'm in the car driving around, I find myself obsessively staring at the Hancock Center and the Sears Tower, two buildings that are about as large as the World Trade Center buildings. And I look at them and try to get my mind around the scale of it. About what it means for something so crazily big to come tumbling to the ground. For two of them. Two somethings that big. Somebody told me that for the first week that this happened, she slept with the radio on because she didn't want to miss the chance that somebody would explain why this happened. And don't you feel this? That no matter how much we've all learned in the last two weeks about Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan and the huge military bases that have been in Saudi Arabia since the Persian Gulf War, bases that people hate our guts for-- and you know, who knew? Who knew? No matter how many of these facts that we learn about why people in other countries hate us-- facts and facts and facts-- somehow in your gut, don't you have this feeling that it still just doesn't add up? It still does not make sense to you? So you know, we all keep trying. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Our Glass. Today on our program, stories about the news of the last two weeks. About what to make of things now that we've gone from what the world was before to what it is today. We have stories from David Sedaris, from David Rakoff, from Haruki Murakami and from others. Stay with us. Act One. In the After of Before and After. Lynn Simpson is 50 and worked on the 89th floor of 1 World Trade Center for a small company called Strategic Communications, where the entire company was located in that building. They did marketing and communications for financial firms. And although she knows people who died in the attack on the building, the 20 or so people in her company all made it out. She escaped the building with about a minute to spare, and as the first tower collapsed, she was one of the people on the street who got showered with glass and debris and that huge cloud of dust and ash. She spoke with me from her apartment in Queens. I wanted to talk to her about what she's doing now, and especially what she makes of what happened to her. But we began by reviewing briefly how it is she made it to safety. Well, there were five of us in the office. We were the early birds. And all of a sudden, there was an enormous crash. And the building actually-- it shook. We could feel it shake. The lights went out. The sprinklers came on. The ceiling came down. The file cabinets fell. Everything started toppling. And smoke immediately filled the entire office. On the floor where you were, how many floors were you from where the airplane hit? I believe the airplane hit either just above or just about the 89th, 90th, 91st floor. The only reason that I'm here, partly, is because the airplane hit on the other side of the building. My office had a view Uptown of the Empire State Building and the Hudson River and the East River. The lights were out. It was smoky, it was dim, and it was getting very hot. I did try it the emergency stairwell and that door was locked. And we drank water, we covered our noses, and I called my boss, my boyfriend, and my mother. What did you say? I said-- I said to all of them, I'm all right. I don't know what's happened, but I'm all right. And my mother and John, we know me the best-- could hear that my voice was shaking, and I was shaking, and I was afraid. And I told John, I said, the doors are locked. I can't get out. I can't get down the stairway. A few minutes after that, people knocked on the door, and there were people, men with flashlights, knocking on the door, saying, come out and let's go downstairs. And the doors were opened at that point in time. The stairwell that you hadn't been able to get into. That I had tried before. But then we started down. And about the 83rd floor, we had to cross over. And we crossed over. That floor was devastated. It was pitch black. Full of smoke. The sprinklers were coming down. The ceiling had come down. We had to hold hands to walk across it. And the only light we basically had was one man's cell phone. And we made our way across that to another stairwell. And then we proceeded down, I believe, to 78. At 78, we had to cross to another set of stairs. And when we crossed on 78, it was as if nothing had happened. The lights were on. No smoke. Air conditioning, carpeting, it was all perfect. How strange. That must've been so strange for you all. It was very peculiar. Very peculiar to go from one extreme to the other. But at 78, we had to make a decision. There were two exit signs. And one, I've since learned that one exit went down to one floor and then stopped. It was just dead. And the other exit, which somebody said, trust me. I know we have to go down this staircase. And we did. We trusted that person and we went down that staircase. And that led us to the bottom. And then we continued down. We had to move over to the side, because the firemen, in full gear, were coming up. And they started, they met us at about 50, and they started coming up. And when we got to the plaza level-- the plaza level is the level between the two towers. And there's a fountain out there, and they often use it for concerts. They told us, do not look up. Do not look out. Do not look down. Just keep going. And we need you to hurry. Run. Could you jog? I'm sure that in the last week and a half, you must have thought a lot about the fact that you made it and a lot of other people didn't. Yes. What do you think when you think about that? How are you putting that together in your head? A lot of it has to do, I think, with timing, with luck. There's a small part of me that feels that it was fated. Perhaps there's something else in the world that I'm supposed to do. I don't know. Part of me does feel that, definitely. But part of you feels like it's just chance. Part of me feels like it's chance. I do know that my outlook on life has changed. I know that for me, I'm going to not put off things that I want to do. One of the things that is important to me is horseback riding. It's been important to me since I was seven. And John and I also live in Pennsylvania. And I told the next door neighbor, who is interested in horses, to please go out and find me two horses. And I also want to spend more time with my family, with my friends. They also sat with the minister-- my sister called the minister-- and they all sat in my mother's living room and, as they said, they watched me die as 1 World Trade Center went down. Because they hadn't heard from me since that nine o'clock phone call. And they said they grieved for about half an hour, until John called and said, I heard from Lynn and she's alive. Wow. So for half an hour, they thought you were gone. Yes. And John also thought I was gone, because he watched the towers go down. And nobody had heard from me. It was impossible to call. Where did you finally call them from? I called them, I was walking across the Williamsburg Bridge and there were two guys walking to my left. And everybody kind of looked at me, because everybody walking with me looked normal. They had obviously been evacuated from their buildings and were leaving the city. I did not look normal. I was dust-covered, filthy, and staring straight ahead. And they asked me. They heard my story. And he had a cell phone. And I said, may I please use your cell phone? He said, yes. I'm having trouble getting through, but you may use it. So I punched in the number, called John. I did it twice. It didn't go through. He kept hitting redial and redial for about five minutes, and he kept talking as we walked. And all of a sudden he got-- he said, it's ringing, and he handed me the phone. And I got on the phone, and I said, hi, John. I'm walking across a bridge. And John just screamed. And he told me that he fell on the floor. And he said, you're alive, you're alive, my God, you're alive. And I said, I'm alive. I'm walking across the Williamsburg Bridge. Please call my mother. Anybody who's been watching TV has seen the images of the Towers being hit and collapsing over and over and over. So you must have been seeing that as well. Yes, I saw it. I did decide to watch it. And I did decide to watch it on Wednesday, the day after. I did not watch it on Tuesday night. And when you first saw what it was and what it looked like from outside, what did you think? I was horrified. At the first plane that went in, I counted the floors. And I know that it went in very near my floor. On my floor. It impacted the floor. Does it seem more horrible watching the pictures of it and seeing it from the outside than it seemed when you were inside? Yes. It seems much more horrible from the outside. Because inside, I don't have those images. I have my own images of smoke and flames and dust. But I don't have the image of-- I mean-- of the plane. And also, I cannot watch the TV with all of the missing people. That truly breaks my heart. And the tears well up. Because you feel like, oh, that could have been your family. Yes. It could have been my family. The fact that John was grieving here in New York and my family was grieving in Pennsylvania with the minister, and they were mourning me because they thought I was dead-- I mean, I can picture that. I can picture them all in their individual places, just mourning me. And my brother packed a black suit, a black tie, and white shirt, and drove to my mother's from New Jersey when he heard. Because he felt that he was going to be going to a funeral or memorial. And are you sleeping OK? Not really. No, not really. I do wake up a lot. And I try and put images out of my mind and go back to sleep. But it's hard. For the first several nights, I would wake up in the middle of the night and just have those images of the Towers in my mind, and the smoke. And also, that was when I couldn't get the smell out of my hair. The very acrid dust smell. And I just had to get rid of that smell. And it's a smell that I will never forget. And it's a smell that's on my clothes. I have the clothes that I was wearing that day-- my shoes, my socks, my slacks, my top. Even the little, I wear a little thing in my hair which keeps my hair clipped back. And I don't know what to do with them. You still have them? I still have them. I don't know what to do with them. I don't want to throw them away. I don't want to have them cleaned. Why don't you want to throw them away or have them cleaned? I don't know. It's-- I don't know. I just can't quite let go of them. It is a bunch of trash. But it happened to me, and I survived. I just know that I have them in a bag and I keep the bag in a little corner. And I will eventually do something with them, because that's clutter, and clutter is not good. But right now, I just can't do that. You know, when you talk about the World Trade Center, you do it in the present tense, as if it's still there. You talk about, there is a fountain, you know-- Yes, yes. I know. Do you feel like you fully accept that it really happened, that the buildings aren't there? Well, I accept it because I have crossed the George Washington Bridge and seen that they're not there. That's the reality. But no. It's almost-- it's surreal. It's not real. It's hard to believe that it's not there. Hard to believe I'm not going to go to work tomorrow. So you haven't gone to work in a week and a half, right? No. Have not. There's no place to go at the moment. The company is going to try and start up again. They are leasing space and looking for computers. Because everything was there in that one office. All your records, all your billing, everything. Absolutely everything. People owe you money. Yes. But you have no idea who they are or how much they owe. That's right. That's true. And we owe people money. And then how does that work? Is it some sort of insurance paying for your salary? Well, it's two things. They they did receive an insurance payment Your firm? My firm, yep. And so they are paying people. The first thing they did was to pay salaries. And the second thing they did was to tell everybody to go out and buy a computer and a printer, and they're going to get everybody company cell phones. Because the company-- they're very anxious to get back to work. And if I could have bought a computer today, I would have gone out to buy one. But unfortunately, in the New York area, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to find a computer. Oh, because all the ones have been bought up by these businesses to restart. They've been bought up. Every laptop, every desktop has been bought up. When do you think you're going to want to go back to work? Well, I don't know. Probably next week or the week after. When you get up in the morning, do you think, oh wait, go to go somewhere, but you don't know where to go? Yeah, I'm a little startled sometimes when I wake up in the morning. Because I don't set the alarm clock. Are you flying a flag? Oh yes. And the flags are very heartwarming to see. It just makes me happy. It makes me smile. I was wondering. When you see a flag, do you feel like it's the rest of us saying to you, you know, you barely made it out and other people's lives are touched in various ways, that we're with you? Like, our hearts are with you? Yes. And we're together. And you're actually feeling it that way. That it's a message from us, to everyone, to you, who just got out, and all the other people whose lives have been touched. Yes. I do. And it's so many lives that have been touched. It's a good feeling. And it makes me feel as if we're putting aside petty differences and petty things that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis and get annoyed about and are uniting. And it's crossing political parties. It's crossing religious barriers. It's crossing everything. And that's everybody working together. Do you want revenge? No. I think that we, in America, need to understand why America and its way of life is hated so much by so many people. And I think that we need to protect ourselves and our shores and our people before there is retaliation. Is there a part of you which feels like, you know, don't do this for me. Like, I was in that building. Don't do it for me. Yes. I feel like-- this was not a personal attack on me. It was an attack on America. Yeah. Well said. It's not personal. I was an innocent bystander. The people who died were innocent victims. And what I'm saying is, we should not go and retaliate against other innocent victims. It cannot be indiscriminate bombing of Afghanistan or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or any of those other places. It cannot be. That is not right. That should not be what we do. Lynn Simpson in Queens, New York. Act Two. Watching From the River's Edge. Trying to make sense of what has happened, we have turned for solace and understanding and perspective to look at how people have struggled with other urban disasters. One of our regular contributors, David Rakoff, lives in Manhattan, and tells the story of one that touched a neighborhood close to where he lives. Near the north end of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, a memorial fountain still stands. Erected by the Sympathy Society of German Ladies, it commemorates the fire aboard the steamship the General Slocum in 1904. The conflagration claimed the lives of 1,031 people, mostly women and children from what was then the German immigrant enclave known as Kleindeutschland. A sign near the fountain calls the fire "the worst disaster in the history of New York." In the most painful and horrifying example of this great city's capacity to top itself and exceed all previous expectations, the sign will now have to be changed. It was on June 15, 1904, by all accounts a perfect day, that some 1,300 members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church boarded the General Slocum at the 3rd Street Pier for their annual summer picnic. At 9:40 AM, the steamer, named for the Civil War hero Henry J. Slocum began on its way, passing under the Brooklyn Bridge, a mere 21 years old at the time, and headed north, up the East River, to a picnic ground on Long Island Sound. In the days after the disaster, a minute-by-minute account of what happened on the steamboat was pieced together. At 9:57 AM, a boy noticed smoke seeping from underneath the door of the lower forward cabin. Among the preparations made for the day had been three barrels filled with drinking glasses packed in hay that were stowed there. A discarded match had started them smouldering. At 10 AM, an inexperienced deckhand opened the door and the embers burst into flames, which spread through the lower hallways and lounges, triggering the panicked escape of the terrified passengers. Another boy ran to tell the captain, William Van Schaick. "Get the hell out of here and mind your own business," he replied, thinking it a prank. He didn't realize it was true until six minutes later, when he looked out his cabin and saw the flames and the burning passengers. By this time it was too late. The spanking seaworthiness of the Slocum, newly painted and festooned with bunting and flags, was a fiction. The hold was littered with debris. The crew was new and largely untrained and had never practiced a single fire drill. The fire hose, deployed far too late, was useless anyway, the linen having rotted through and splitting along its length immediately. The lifeboats had been painted fast to the railings of the boat, and what life jackets this could be pulled free from the overhead mesh were over 13 years old. Some tore open like the hose, showering the heads of people with the crumbs of their disintegrated cork filling. Other life jackets held together, but they proved lethal. A woman dropped her daughter over the side wearing one, only to watch her sink like a stone. All was pandemonium. From the shores of the Bronx and across the river in Queens, people watched, horrified at what was happening just 200 yards away. Some swam in to try and save the scores of people who jumped from the vessel, some on fire, some caught up in the ship's paddle wheels. The General Slocum fully exploded into flames at 10:06, eventually coming to rest, a burning hulk, on North Brothers island at 10:10. It took less than a quarter of an hour. Among the 1,031 dead, not one crewman, nor the captain. There were hundreds of funerals that weekend in Kleindeutschland with miles long processions leading the hearses across the river to the Lutheran cemetery in Queens. The owners of the steamship company were prosecuted and fined. The captain, William Van Schaick, was convicted of negligence and manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in Sing Sing. He was paroled after three and a half and pardoned by William Howard Taft on Christmas day of 1911. The boat itself was, unbelievably, salvaged and converted into a cargo barge, which finally sank in the storm near Atlantic City that same year. Accounts of the horror of June 15 itself are many. There is also a well-preserved transcript of the inquest and trial. By contrast, there are almost no details of the emotional aftermath. The closest that I could find is a posting on the General Slocum website from a woman named Jacquelin Duffy who writes, "My father's family lived on East 5th Street, and according to him, there was not a tenement on that street that did not have at least one crepe at the doorway." If the need to speak of calamity is human nature, we are also predisposed to suffering our lasting sorrows in silence. There is more than one posting on the website about families that never spoke of the day again. How does one articulate the ongoing sadness of after? An anguish so great that the only recourse for people was to leave forever the buildings and streets that now only held memories of death? The articles about the General Slocum almost all end the same way. That Kleindeutschland was never the same afterwards. That's the term they use. "Never the same." The German community uprooted itself, resettling on the Upper East Side and in Queens. Some men simply moved back to Germany. What seems to have scattered the survivors was despair, not economics. The dead were, for the most part, not breadwinners. They were women, grandparents, and children. Half of the victims were under 20 years old. Today there are bedroom communities on Long Island and the New Jersey-- Manhasset, Montclair, Ridgewood, Summit-- that are missing hundreds of parents, neighbors, and friends. Entire ladder companies of fire stations are gone. Right now, we New Yorkers are being told that our spirits are not broken. That we will rebuild, and we will do it quickly. We would do well to remember, in this time of stalwart rhetoric, that for some people, rebuilding will be harder. It's not for us to say. If there is a difference in the immediacy of the experience right now between New York City and the rest of the country, there is a far more profound separation within the city itself. Between the people directly affected by the terror and those not. I can count myself lucky to be among the latter, essentially untouched and never more superfluous in my adoptive city than right now. Beyond donating blood or money, I am of about as much use as a Belgian chocolate. The memorial fountain is a nine foot tall slab of pink Tennessee marble, now quite white with age. In relief are the heads of two children, round-cheeked, angelic in profile, a blossoming branch framing them. "They were earth's purest children, young and fair," it says on the front. About three feet off the ground, a marble lion's head shoots forth a stream of drinking water. If one didn't work around to the side to read the memorial inscription, which has faded with the years, one might easily mistake this fountain for a municipal nicety, its image of the children and the words about them nothing more than a turn-of-the-century paean to the innocence of childhood, perfectly suited to a park where families might take a stroll. There are countless makeshift altars to Tuesday the 11th all over the city. Clusters of votive candles, flowers, and a heartbreaking, staggering number of fliers with photographs and names of the missing. Tompkins Square Park is no exception, but curiously, there is nothing around the fountain. No one seems to have remembered the fearful symmetry of this spot. A block away is St. Mark's Lutheran, the church of the Slocum's victims. It is now an Orthodox synagogue, and it is the first day of the Jewish New Year when I walk by. A boy, about eight, runs down the steps and gives a holler. His father comes out after him and calls, "Wait up!" He says it like a schoolyard pal. The boy stops, and his father catches up with him, and they continue down the block. If you didn't know, it would seem like a perfect day. But of course, you do know, and cannot imagine a day when you won't. Perhaps the only comfort to be taken in all of this, and it is a cold one, is that such a day will come. Such a day is inevitable. David Rakoff in New York. He's the author of the book Fraud. Act Three. Notes From the Underground. On our search for events that might somehow eliminate what we've see in New York this week, the staff of the radio show came across a book by the Japanese fiction writer Haruki Murakami. He went out and interviewed survivors of a terrorist attack that happened in a fantastically crowded city during rush hour just six years ago. On March 20, 1995, a radical doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo dropped plastic bags of poison gas on the Tokyo subway. The kind of gas they used was called sarin. It is reportedly 26 times as potent as cyanide gas. Over 5,000 people were injured. 12 died. Murakami interviewed dozens of survivors about what happened and how they got on with their lives afterwards. The English edition of the book is called Underground: the Tokyo Gas Attack in the Japanese Psyche, and he gave us permission to re portions of it here. You'll hear a number of different voices representing different interviewees. I left the house as usual, just after seven. But as luck would have it, the bus was about two minutes early. It was always late, but for once, it was ahead of schedule. I ran for the stop but didn't make it in time, so I had to catch the next bus at 7:30 instead. Looking back, it all started because the bus was two minutes early. I looked up to see this man sitting directly to my left wearing a leather coat. I was still wrapped up in my book, but it really began to get on my nerves. Leather coats often smell funny, don't they? A disinfectant or a nail polish remover kind of smell. This guy stinks, I thought. And I stared him right in the eye. Only he doesn't seem to be looking at me. He just stared back at me with this, you've got a problem, mister? kind of look. He's looking past me to something on my right. I turned around to look and saw something about the size of a notebook lying at the feet of the second person on my right. It's like a plastic pack. In the news they said it was wrapped in newspaper, but what I saw was plastic, and something spilling out of it. That's when I got a sharp smell of isopropyl alcohol. We use the stuff for wiping clean the glass in our copiers, so I know it very well. I always carry it on the job. It was somehow syrupy sweet. Not unpleasant at all. If it had smelled really bad, everyone would have been in a panic. I felt a strange tickle in my throat. You know when your dentist gives you anesthetic and it's seeping back into your throat? Just like that. So that's what's making the place smell, I thought. But I still just sat there. Soon everyone was saying, open the windows, it stinks. So they all opened the windows. I remember thinking, it's so cold. Can't you just put up with the smell? I stood at the front, next to the driver's compartment, holding the handrail by the door. Then when I took a deep breath, I got this sudden pain. Really it was like I'd been shot or something. All of a sudden my breathing completely stopped. Like if I inhaled anymore, all of my guts would be spilling right out of my mouth. Everything became a vacuum. It seems kind of odd, but I thought, just maybe my granddad's died. He lived up north and was 94 years old at the time. I'd heard he'd been taken ill, so maybe this was a kind of sign. That was my first thought. Maybe he died or something. Then suddenly I heard a woman scream. A loud, piercing squawk like a parrot. At least I think it was a woman. It came from outside the car. What now? I thought. But the platform was so crowded, I couldn't see anything from inside the train. Suddenly my eyesight went funny, as if I were seeing fireworks or something. Odd, I thought. Then ten seconds later, my eyes blacked out totally. It was a bright, clear day, then out of nowhere, this curtain descended and I couldn't see a thing. The train went above ground for awhile, and for some reason, the sky was dark, as if it were black and white, or sepia, just like an old photograph. That's odd, I thought. Today was supposed to be sunny. My legs started to feel shaky. My eyes stopped working. Suddenly, it was as if night had fallen. Damn, I thought. I should've stayed back there with the others. I moved from strapped to strap until I reached the pole near the door. Finally I stepped off the train, my hand out ready to catch myself at the far wall of the platform. I remember thinking, if I don't make it to the wall and crouch down, I'm going to fall and hit my head. Then I blanked out. Actually, I hadn't left the train. I grabbed the stainless steel pole and just slid down to the floor. What I thought was a wall was in fact the floor of the car, which felt chilly to my right hand. They ran a photo of me in the tabloids so I could see later what happened. I couldn't see. I couldn't run. It couldn't have been far, but I tripped on something and fell. I'm going to die like this, I thought. It'd be pathetic to die like this. When I was six, I nearly drowned swimming in a river, and I remember thinking, saved back then only to go blind and die like this? I just didn't want to die. Not there. Not like that. I phoned the office to tell them, I have to be hospitalized for I don't know how many days. I'm sorry to trouble you. But could you tidy up my desk? I'd been right at the epicenter. But instead of shuddering at the death toll, I felt like I was watching a program on TV. As if it were someone else's problem. It was only much later that I began to wonder how I could have been so callous. I ought to have been furious, ready to explode. It wasn't until the autumn that it really sank in, little by little. I'd just got back from a ten-day business trip to South America. Strange, you know. While I was in South America, I was invited out to karaoke by someone from the Japanese embassy in Colombia. Then I almost went back the next day to the same place. But I said, no, let's try somewhere new. And that very day, the place got bombed. I remember thinking when I got back home, at least Japan's a safe place. And the next day I go to work and the gas attack happens. What a joke. Afterwards I probably went a little funny in the head. I went around telling people, something's out there. You'll see. Something strange is going to happen. I was buying survival gear camping stores. After I came back to normal, I thought, what a fool I've been. But at the time, I was deadly serious. Now, what am I going to do with a survival knife? Right after the attack, I was insane with anger. I was pacing the hospital corners, pounding on the columns and walls. At that point, I still didn't know it was Aum. But whoever it was, I was ready to beat them up. I didn't even notice, but several days later, my fist was sore. I asked my wife, why does my hand hurt so much? And she said, you've been punching things, dear. Of course I was furious. But to tell the truth, stronger than any anger now is the feeling that I just don't want to remember anymore. Between the time I was hospitalized and the time I was sent home, I wanted to know everything that had happened. I was devouring the news on TV, but now I can't stand it. I changed the channel. I don't ever want to see another image of the gas attacks. The question I hate being asked most of all is, do you have any aftereffects? I just can't bear anyone asking me that. Although my dislike of being asked if there are aftereffects might itself be a kind of aftereffect. I'd just like to know what the criminals thought they were doing. I demand a full explanation and an apology. I'd absolutely insist on it. I might easily have died there. I do you think about that. I'm still nervous going out alone. It's not even whether to take the subway. Just to go out walking scares me now. I live alone now, but at the time I had a family. A wife and kids. Sorry drag out the sordid details. To be honest, the day after the gas attack, I asked my wife for a divorce. We weren't on the best of terms at the time and I'd done my fair share of thinking. Still, even after all I'd been through, she would barely speak to me. After being gassed, I phoned home from the office to tell my wife what had happened and my symptoms and everything, but I got almost no reaction from her. Perhaps she couldn't really grasp the situation-- exactly what had occurred. But even so, I knew then that we'd come to a turning point. Or else the state I was in had gotten me all worked up. Maybe that's what it was. Maybe that's why I came straight out with it and said, I wanted a divorce. Perhaps if the sarin thing hadn't happened, I wouldn't have been talking about divorce so soon. I probably wouldn't have said anything. It was a shock to the system, and at the same time, a kind of trigger. My family had been in such a mess for so long that by then, I didn't consider myself very important. Not that the possibility of dying wasn't real. But had I died, I probably could have accepted it, in my own way, as just a kind of accident. For a while after the gas attack I felt like throwing everything away. I'm generally good at holding onto things. I still have my plastic pencil case from elementary school. But I wanted to toss everything out. It was like nothing's worthwhile anymore. I even felt like giving away my most precious Bonsai. After the gas attack, I had terrible nightmares. The one I remember best was a dream in which someone pulled me out of my bed next to the window and dragged me around the room. Or I turned and suddenly saw someone standing there who was supposed to be dead. Yeah, I often met dead people in my dreams. Afterwards I wasn't scared to travel on the subway. No bad dreams, either. Maybe I'm just dull-witted and thick-skinned. But I do feel it was fate. Usually I don't go through the first door nearest the front. I always use to second, which would put me downwind of the sarin. But that day and that day only, I took the first door for no special reason. Pure chance. Excerpts from Haruki Murakami's interviews with survivors of the Tokyo gas attack collected in his book Underground. Our readers included Richard Henzel, [? Scott Jacques, ?] Jennifer Angstrom, Gary Brichetto, Richard Brown, Elizabeth Rich, Evelyn Friedman, Rick Peoples, Todd Bachmann, and Justin Kaufmann. Thanks to Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre and to Erica Daniels for helping us find the readers. Coming up. David Sedaris writes about the news. In a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose some topic, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that topic. Today's program, stories trying to make sense of things in the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, as our country heads towards war. We've arrived at act four our show. Act Four. Far From Home. David Sedaris lives in Paris, France with his boyfriend Hugh, which is where they've been following the news over the last two weeks. Living as a foreigner in another country, you learn that your welcome can turn on a single newspaper headline. Like the dollar, public opinion fluctuates between one extreme and another. So when the exchange is good, you try to stock up, knowing that tomorrow, anything could happen. Hugh and I recently moved, and in the days following the attacks on New York and Washington, each of our new neighbors came to introduce themselves and offer their sympathy. Are your friends all right? Your family? Do you need anything? Shopkeepers heard my accent and sometimes went so far as to touch my hand-- a gesture no less shocking than a full-frontal bear hug. Businessmen and widows from the embassy offering their beds to Americans stuck at the airport. And at noon on the official day of mourning, pedestrians stopped in their path and cars pulled off the road to observe the three minutes of silence. I stored it up. People started leaving flowers in the little park across the street from the American embassy. And it was genuine until the TV cameras arrived, at which point it became self-conscious. The planes move in, the towers collapse, and people react with heartfelt shock and horror. You cry because you're sad and frightened, and then, before you know it, the images are repeated in slow motion with the Samuel Barber soundtrack and a close-up photograph of a singed Teddy bear. Then you cry because somebody's making you, and you wind up feeling confused and manipulated, like your own feelings weren't quite good enough, and you needed professional help. Two days after the attack, my friend Kristin and I attended a service at the American Church. Unlike the service held the previous afternoon at the American Cathedral, this was a media event, attended by the mayor of Paris, the prime minister, and President Chirac. The church was small and half the pews were cordoned off for members of parliament and the American diplomatic corps, who swept in from the rain under heavy security. The line for the rest of us stretched around the corner and down the street, and for every American, there were two journalists with cameras and microphones asking how we felt The instinct was to say that oh, aside from a slight sore throat, you felt pretty good, but of course, you just couldn't. The service was broadcast on television, so although it was an American church, the sermon was delivered in French with short speeches given by a minister, a rabbi, and a Muslim cleric. It was all very tasteful, but failed to satisfy the 200 or so Americans who'd come with a sudden desire to be with their people. It's different for visiting tourists, but the Americans who actually live here go to great lengths to avoid one another. Now we wanted to hang out and share our emptiness, but it wasn't on the program. The service ended, and just as the last politician filed out of the room, a man on the balcony started singing "God Bless America." It's a song I always associated with homeroom and high school sporting events, but under the circumstances, and on foreign soil, the lyrics became significant. The man started singing, and little by little, the rest of us joined in. The couples with bilingual children, the college students, the nannies, and across the aisle, soprano Jessye Norman, who placed her hand over her heart and sang as if she were just a normal shattered woman, rather than an opera star. The thing about "God Bless America" is that after a certain point, nobody seems to know the words. "Stand beside her and guide her" is almost always followed by a prolonged mumbling that lasts until we reach the mountains and prairies. Then there's that strange bit about the oceans white with foam, which is odd in that it's not in any way a national phenomenon. Lots of countries have foam. They just don't talk about it. What killed me-- what killed us all-- was the very end. "My home sweet home." Because regardless of what we tell ourselves, Paris is not our home. It's just a place where we have our apartments and furniture. If it were our home, we'd have wanted to stay put, rather than catch the next flight back to New York or Kansas or wherever our family sat helpless in front of their televisions. I worry here that in mentioning this moment, I only served to destroy it. To package what had felt genuine and pure. The days pass and I can no longer separate what I'm feeling from what I'm watching people feel on TV. Am I supposed to cry now? Am I supposed to feel proud, to feel pity? Everyone I talk to says the same thing. Tell us what to do and we'll do it. I'm told that in the United States, these loose feelings are being corralled towards retribution. But the French news is different. It doesn't point you one way or another. Rather, it just fills you up. I'm not seeing Bin Laden on an FBI wanted poster. I'm seeing him smiling amongst this comrades. And for the first few moments, I'm always mistaking him for Cat Stevens. The BBC has offered exhaustive coverage, but in the absence of breaking news, they, too have brought out their teddy bears. I heard that the survivors will need counseling. I heard that the rescue workers will need counseling. And then I heard that even the people who reportedly watched it on TV should consider talking to a professional. Now I'm hearing that our politicians need counseling. Although they're constantly surrounded by other people, the experts said, presidents can often feel terribly alone. It would be a lot easier if the terrorists sought counseling, but it's not going to happen. I don't understand how any of this offers the slightest bit of hope or comfort. But like everything else, I store it up. David Sedaris is the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and other books. Act Five. USA, Me-SA. There's so many flags waved right now. But the trouble with the flag is that when it's waved, it can be waved for any of a number of different reasons. In the first day or two after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it seemed to me that the American flags all were being waved as a kind of act of mourning. It felt like, OK, we're all in this together. And then in the days followed, as the president and other figures started to say that there's going to be a war, but without actually laying out any particular plans or details for what that war would be-- waving a flag started to feel like, it started to be like you were giving a red, white, and blue blank check to them to do whatever they wanted. I think, like a lot of people, speaking for myself, anyway, I wanted to hear a plan first before I cheered it on. It made me uneasy, all the flags, because of that. I think there's a deeply American ideal of, you know, all of us banding together and doing what has to be done. And then there's an ideal which is exactly the opposite and just as deep as a tradition, which is to be completely skeptical of government and its intentions at all time. And like a lot of other patriotic people, I think I felt torn between the two. Now, of course, the president has declared his intentions in his speech before Congress. But the flag still means different things to different people. A case in point. Here on Chicago's Southwest Side, every night during the week after the terrorist attacks, hundreds of cars jammed one particular neighborhood, honking and waving flags. Shirley Jahad went down there as part of the news team for WBEZ, The Public Radio station where we do our radio show from. The location where they are right here is right in the midst of one of the biggest Arab-American communities in the region, and it's a block or so away from one of the bigger mosques in the region. The Bridgeview Mosque, yeah. So it takes on a whole different edge, the shouting of "USA, USA," by virtue of where they are and who they're surrounded by. Are there flags? Flags are everywhere. They're waving their flags out the window, they're draped over the back of the cars. There's people standing in the streets with these huge flags. Mostly all these people are youths. You know, young men. And so the groups of Arab-Americans are chanting back, "USA, USA. Yeah! USA USA." So each side is chanting USA? So at some point, it was as if it were the Sharks and the Jets or something. I mean, each side on one side of the street, the Arab-Americans on one side of the street, the Anglo-Americans on the other side, all waving flags and all screaming at the top of their lungs "USA! USA! USA!" Some people are sort of spitting it, and some people are, you know? And then there's people driving by in the middle of the street with the flags and the horns. And they're all chanting the same thing. And they're all shouting the same thing. But they mean something completely different when each of them shouts USA, USA, more or less. They mean completely different things. The white guys, when they're shouting USA, USA, they're basically saying, this is my country, and we want you out of here. You get out. We're sick of the Arabians being here and we want them out of our country. Simply put they're screwing everything up, and they're taking all our money. And I think you can see the degradation in the neighborhoods that were once flourishing. So basically this is a message for all the Arabs out there. You can just pack up and get your damn towels on the damn plane, right now. This was my land before it was theirs. I'm not going nowhere. What if they were born here? Well, I don't give a [BLEEP] whether they were born here or not. Their ancestors weren't born there. And so that means what? So that means they came here. America let them in. And they [BLEEP] bombed the World Trade Center. Did you know my father served in the Korean War and I'm a Palestinian? Now Shirley, who is this guy? This is an Arab-American guy, a Palestinian guy, who was leaving the mosque and he drove upon the scene. My grandfather served in World War II. Can you believe that? We're in 2001. This should not be happening. You know, what was really interesting was the young man who said, you know, this is our country and we want them out of here, moments after he says this to me, he starts-- he continues shouting "USA, USA," and he's waving a flag. And then someone hands them a really, really big flag. It's a flag it takes two people to hold. So he's holding one end, and another white guy is holding the other end. But in the crush of the crowd, somehow the other end of the flag gets transferred to another young man, and the other person is an Arab-American. Now here's the white guy and the Arab-American and they're both holding the same American flag. And-- And is there a moment where they look up and each realize, where the white guy looks up and sees, oh? Definitely. And the white guy is completely at a loss as to what to do, because he's put in this perplexing situation. He's holding Old Glory, and he can't let go, but he's holding it with an Arab-American. So he starts, like, holding it as if he's holding it with tweezers, like with just two fingers, and now he's trying to pass it off to somebody else. He can't drop it. He can't let go of it. Because it's the flag. So he's got to hold it. So he holds it, and after a while, they walked together. Down the street? Not for long. But they did walk together, and they actually started a conversation. That conversation being, let go of the flag? So I don't know how far they got. WBEZ's Shirley Jahad. Well, our program was produced today by our senior producer, Julie Snyder, and myself with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, Jonathan Goldstein, and Starlee Kine. Contributing editors Susan Burton, Rebecca Carroll, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and Alix Spiegel, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Nancy Updike and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Diane Cook. Musical help for Mr. John Connors and Mr. Steve Cushing. Hi, Steve. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who this week is mute. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Larry Keeley is one of those guys with a job that, the more he tries to you explain to you what it is that he does for a living, the more you think, people pay you for that? He consults with companies about innovation, about how to organize themselves to be more competitive, more inventive, foster new ideas, that kind of thing. So February of last year, he's giving a talk about all this to some executives who have gathered at a fancy golf course in Florida. And after the talk, two military men in the audience ask him to lunch. As they're being served, one of them asked what he knew about the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center building. So he's asking me if I knew any of the details. And I said, no. And he started to tell me the gory details about the analysis of that bombing. And of course, what they use are people who go in afterwards and do forensic analysis of a calamity. And what was fascinating about the forensic analysis is that the forensic teams didn't quite agree. Some said the bombs were placed 12 centimeters away from where they would have needed to be to destroy the major support column in the North Tower. Others said, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. The bombs were four centimeters away from where they needed to be to destroy that column. By the way, pretty alarming. And it turns out that one of the guys I'm lunching with is a major general, George Close, a brilliant guy. And he turns out to be hand-picked by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to think through something called the revolution in military affairs. When I got a little bit of explanation about this revolution in military affairs, they said, we're in the middle of one. And I said, OK. And they said, they don't happen very often, we think there's been maybe 12 of them in history. What that means is that everything that is normal and the way we engage, fight a conflict, and win it will go through a change. So one of the early historic examples was the invention of gunpowder. And you think about the world of gladiator, and you see the kind of conflict that gun powder transformed forever. People that are rushing up to the enemy with their horses, wearing 300 pounds of armor and rushing up to the enemy and whacking him with something sharp. That was the nature of battle in those days. Well gun powder comes along, cannons get cheap, they put them on wheels, they can haul them to the enemy's fortress. That's a revolution in military affairs. And I'm sitting there listening to this and they've happened so seldom in the history of the world. Every time a revolution in military affairs has occurred in history, the party in power at the beginning has not been in power at the end. And they got a lot of historians at the Pentagon. And those historians had convinced the senior generals that we were in the midst of a revolution in military affairs with these basic principles. Which brings us to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. These particular generals were convinced that it was an example of this new kind of warfare. The way the thing was organized, through a web of operatives, the low-tech way it was carried out, the fact that it was on American soil and targeted at something so symbolic as the World Trade Center towers. February of last year, these Pentagon officials were trying to think about how they should fight back. And they wanted to learn to think differently. They wanted to learn to think like their enemy. So they called on a bunch of guys in the private sector, like Keeley, for advice on how to think differently, how to change. US military strategy right now is based on the idea that we will win wars through overwhelming force. That's the idea, overwhelming force. We will throw all the bombs, and planes, and missiles at the enemy, the best technology that money can buy, and a lot of it, just simply overwhelm them in a full-out attack. And Keeley says that it was not clear if the Pentagon could change to something so low-tech and sneaky. One of the things we have is money, material in spades. To challenge elite forces to be able to overcome a vastly superior enemy, with next to nothing. That is just completely the opposite of the way we think. And it's logical that we wouldn't think that way. Because we start with the presumption that we're the mightiest, and the biggest, with the greatest technologies. Right. You're saying that in order to fight these kind of sort of guerrilla terrorist actions, they have to become guerrilla terrorists. I don't know if they have to become them, but they have to be able to think like them. Keeley says that the military brass that he talked to wanted to be able to do that, but also knew quite well how difficult that would be. It is hard to imagine the world from someone else's point of view. Today on our radio program, we try to do that. We bring you three stories, a kind of current events Rashomon. Each of the stories on our show today is something that you've heard of in the news, and we invite people with a different perspective, hopefully, than the one you already know. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three acts: Act One, 1001 Arabian nightly newscasts. A Palestinian teenager from Chicago in that story explains why everything that you think you know about the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks is absolutely wrong. Act Two, bombs over Baghdad. We hear the story of the Persian Gulf War, told by a family man from Baghdad who was drafted into Saddam's army against his will. Who had to explain to his 3-year-old son why those nice Americans were bombing their city, night after night. Act Three, Toto, I don't think we're in Vietnam anymore. US special operations forces will lead the first part of the coming war that we are all bracing for. We hear how a simple half hour mission turned into a bloody all-day battle one of the last times they went out, just a few years ago. Stay with us. Act One. 1001 Arabian nightly newscasts. You know, asking what Arab Americans or Muslims think about recent news is as ridiculous as asking what Christians think. There is no one answer to that question, it is such a diverse community. For this next story, we wanted to hear from somebody whose views do not necessarily agree with what most Americans believe. We did this specifically so that we could better understand why they believe what it is that they believe. Our senior producer Julie Snyder visited with an 18-year-old Palestinian American named Rawah starting the week of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rawah is a freshman in college. She's studying computers, living at home with her parents. She wears more traditional clothes at home, but jeans and a sweatshirt at school. She's religious enough that she always keeps her head covered in public. Here's Julie's report. Whenever I visit Rawah's family's apartment, the TV is always on. They only watch the Arabic satellite channels, there are 10 or 15 of them from Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates. There are movies, soap operas, there's even an Egyptian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire that is almost exactly the same as ours-- but in their version, instead of cash prices, you win bars of gold. There, as here, some newscasts are more reliable than others. Al Jazeera is sort of like CNN. Abu Dhabi is closer to Fox News. Three days after the attacks, it's Rawah, her mother, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and me, sitting on the couch watching Abu Dhabi. The scene on the TV is like watching the news in a parallel universe. It's a reporter doing a stand up in front of the charred and collapsed portion of the Pentagon, just like any other reporter. Except he's speaking in Arabic, talking emotionally, and gesturing emphatically, saying the US doesn't have proof linking the attacks to Arabs and there seems to be almost no proof linking the attacks to Osama bin Laden, but that everyone in the United States is jumping to conclusions. On hearing the news, Rawah's family nods in agreement. Her brother-in-law turns to remind me of the Oklahoma City bombing, where immediate reports pinned the blame on Arabs. The Arabic channels have been talking about this, and about Timothy McVeigh's recent execution, and how these attacks might be related to that. He talks about various American militia groups I've never heard of that want revenge for McVeigh's execution I tell him, I honestly don't know much about that. He tells me it's reported all the time on the satellite TV. This is the 12 o'clock news. This is Rawah. This report is saying that Israel is taking advantage of all the media turning to America and reporting what's happening. And they are bombing more homes and killing more Palestinians in Palestine. In fact, in the first few days after the attack on the World Trade Center, Israel did step up military actions in the occupied territories. In the West Bank town of Ramallah, where Rawah's sister lives, Israelis launched missiles from helicopters and leveled a building used by a Palestinian intelligence agency, killing one person and injuring 120 others. Rawah's sister called to say that she and her son had been sleeping in their laundry room because it's the only room without windows. Naturally, this was big news on Arabic TV. And while it was reported by Western news agencies like UPI and Reuters, because of the Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, it was hardly mentioned in American newscasts and newspapers. Rawah and her family say this is typical. Americans who pay close attention to the news hear about Israeli actions against Palestinians. But most of us don't really know these things are happening, and don't get a sense of how severe they are. And this just makes Rawah mad. The only channel I don't see these things on is the American channels. I have the Syrian, the Lebanese, the Dubai channels, the Kuwait, the Saudi Arabia, the Iraq. So if all of these channels are bringing it, I'm sure it's not a lie. It's been confirmed on many channels. When I first Rawah, she spent over an hour showing me around her house and explaining to me her views on the Israelis and their occupation of Palestine. We looked at articles she had written for the local Muslim newspaper. She played me a video she put together off the satellite TV, showing children brutally killed by Israeli shells, and Israeli soldiers shooting farmers at point blank range. The footage was really graphic, filled with blood and body parts. You'd never see footage like it on American TV. Rawah's presentation even went multimedia. This is a Powerpoint slideshow. I have gotten the email, first in September, where the Israelis would start attacking the Palestinians. This is a picture of a boy in a hospital. This is a boy who was shot in the head. The reason these stories don't appear in the American media, Rawah says, is because certain ethnicities in the media-- and that's the phrase she used, certain ethnicities-- don't want these stories to get out. Her family said the same thing to me. The man at the mosque around the corner from her house said it, too. After I'd spent a few hours with Rawah's family, the phrase "certain ethnicities" just shortened into "Jews." The fact that they'd say this to a member of the supposed Zionist media conspiracy just shows how hard it is for them to imagine any other explanation for the way Arabs are portrayed in the news. I think it didn't even occur to them that it might be offensive. And if all this seems bigotted and hard to swallow, consider how it looks from their side. Rawah hears about all sorts news from her sister, from Arabic TV, that is either downplayed or ignored in the Western media. What else could explain it? Ali Abunimah runs a website where he tracks anti-Arab bias in the American media. He doesn't think there's a Jewish conspiracy skewing the coverage, but he says people believe it because, in their day-to-day experience, Israel seems capable of pulling anything off. Sure, Israelis see themselves as the underdogs, a tiny state surrounded by hostile neighbors. But from a Palestinian perspective, nothing seems beyond Israel's reach. I think there's an issue of power here. When you have an overwhelmingly powerful force like Israel and people who have lived under occupation-- people whose entire life is controlled by the whim of this power, whether you can get up in the morning, go to work, is up to the mood of the Israeli soldier at the checkpoint. Whether your house will be demolished is up to the Israelis. Whether you're allowed in or out of the country is up to the Israelis. Whether you're allowed to go from this village to that village is up to the Israelis. Everything is up to the Israelis. So people experience the Israelis as a powerful, overwhelmingly powerful, force. And in fact, the Israelis have always tried to inculcate that in people, the myth of invincibility, the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, that it has this omnipotence. Which a lot of people believe, especially when they're in a much weaker position. You know, you might believe a lot of things. And look at what Israel has already convinced people of, Ali says. Most of the West believes the creation of the state of Israel was completely fair and just. An inspiring story, refugees from World War II and the Holocaust who finally got a state. From an Arab perspective, it's incredible. It's so different from the experience of Palestinians, who are often brutally and forcibly expelled. And people say, look how Israel got away with doing this to us and getting the world to believe something different. And if they can do that in that most fundamental instance, then what can't they do? Ali is Palestinian and believes that the biases of the Western press aren't necessarily the things the reporters are even conscious of. Consider the fact that no foreign journalists covering Israel, Palestine, live in the occupied territories. I think there's one, I think the Economist's correspondent lives in Gaza, or at least used to. So what happens, is that when a reporter goes there, they become, functionally speaking, an Israeli. You know, they live amongst Israelis. The children go to Israeli schools. They wake up in the morning, they go and get their cup of coffee, they're surrounded by Israelis. And so their fears become those of Israelis. I remember an NPR reporter being interviewed about how she copes with the fear of suicide bombings. And she said, well I and my friends, you know, we go out a bit less. She was speaking in the first person. So there's no reporter who can speak in the first person as to what it's like to be a Palestinian. So there's an issue of perspective. It's not that there's conscious bias. But if you're living in one place that's totally different, that's like a first world environment, as West Jerusalem is, you're going to have a very different perspective. A few days after the September 11th attacks, I gave Rawah a tape recorder to keep a kind of audio diary of her life. About a week into it, she recorded this. OK. Right now it's 8:05. And as soon as I got home, my mom told me that on the Arabic satellite they brought that about 4,000 Israeli people that are employed in the World Trade Center did not go to work on Tuesday. And Ariel Sharon was supposed to be in a meeting in New York on Tuesday, but he canceled it. Also, there were Jews, photographers, on top of the building, a few buildings. They were getting ready to take pictures. So the assumption now is that the Jews are the ones who did it. A couple days after Rawah recorded that, I was invited to her house for a lunch being held for her sister-in-law's sister who was visiting from Jordan. Lots of people, huge trays of food were laid out on the coffee tables in front of us, and toddlers and kids swarmed around. At the very end, as we were clearing the dishes, one woman asked me, how come the government and the media are always blaming the Arabs for everything, when they have hardly any evidence? Have you heard about the 4,000 Israelis who didn't show up for work at the World Trade Center on Tuesday? And then again, later, after all the women had gone, Rawah's brother-in-law came over. He runs an Islamic community group and wanted to give me some press releases that have been faxed to him. He then told me that it probably didn't matter, and that I wouldn't report it, anyway. But had I heard about the 4,000 Israelis in the World Trade Center? It's not clear how widely believed this rumor is. It appears to have originated on the Hamas website-- yes, they have a website. And then was spread on Al-Manar, the Lebanese TV channel-- not on the news broadcast, but on the call-in shows. Viewers would phone in and repeat the rumors as the truth. There's no polling of Arabs or Arab Americans on these kinds of things. But of the five representatives of Arab American organizations I spoke to, all of them had heard of this rumor, and all of them said it's not widely believed here in the States. Lots of rumors get more play. For instance, there was a rumor a few months ago that McDonald's was donating its profits to Israel. A spokesman for the Arab American anti-defamation league in Washington says he got over 4,000 emails about that rumor. By comparison, he's received only 15 or 20 emails on this latest one. One reason Rawah's family believes the rumor is true is this: who benefits from the attacks on the World Trade Center? Not the Arabs, they say, not the Muslims. Instead, Rawah says that up until this point, the war in the Middle East has been between the Arabs and Israelis. But the September 11th attacks, she says, will necessarily bring the US into that war, turning an Arab-Israeli war into an Arab and American war. As far as she's concerned, this is what Israel has wanted all along. This is why, she says, Israel would attack the US but frame the Arabs for the crime. Till now, no Israeli name has been mentioned of one of the victims. No Jews, nobody has been reported that they were hurt. But you know what? Actually, after you and I talked, I went through and looked at names of people who were missing, and there are Jews missing. There aren't? There are. There are? That were killed in that building? Yeah. Well, how about the employees that did not go to work that day? If it was true that there were 4,000 Israelis who worked at the World Trade Center and didn't show up for work that day, that would mean that one in 15 people who work at the World Trade Center are Israeli. Which is just not true. You know what I'm saying? I see what you're saying. And I don't know who did it, exactly, and no one knows yet. Because no one in the world, yet, have any real evidence of who attacked the World Trade Center. At this point, 130 Israelis are still officially unaccounted for. The confirmed Israeli deaths are these: two passengers on the hijacked planes, and the body of a third Israeli found at the World Trade Center, and buried. Ali Abunimah says no one he knows believes the rumor about the 4,000 Israelis. But, he says, part of the rumor's appeal is that it takes the heat off Arabs. You know, one of the first feelings I had, and many others, is please God don't let this be someone from the Middle East. We don't want it to be, we disown, we renounce this act. This is a horrific atrocity, a crime against humanity was committed in New York. So saying it's a Zionist conspiracy is a way to dissociate yourself from it completely. You know, if people supported it, they'd be saying, yay, you know, strike one for the Muslims. No one is saying that. They're all looking for a way out. Rawah just can't believe a Muslim could have been behind the attacks. The Koran wouldn't allow it. Besides, she says, where's the proof? And this actually seems to be the biggest difference between the way people from Arab countries see recent events and the way most Americans see them. It's not about the rumors, it's about Osama bin Laden. Most of the Arab Americans I spoke with are still waiting for proof linking him to the attacks, for some sort of hard evidence to be released to the public. And they're skeptical it'll ever come. Rawah believes bin Laden is just a convenient scapegoat. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if this Halloween you have kids and people dressed as Osama bin Laden. Strongly believe so. I went to Dominick's the other day and I was shopping and I see all these Pumpkins and costumes. And there's the first thing that came into my mind. Because Americans now are afraid of something called Osama bin Laden. Or something that is called Mohammed or Islam or Arabs. Rawah believes Israel is all-powerful, and capable of everything she sees as bad. Most Americans wouldn't agree with her about that. Meanwhile, from an Arab point of view, we're doing the same thing with Osama bin Laden. He seems all-powerful. We're ready to believe it was him, even if we haven't seen the greatest proof. Maybe everyone needs a boogeyman. Julie Snyder. Act Two. Bombs over Baghdad. Issam Shukri is an architect living in Toronto. But during the Persian Gulf War, he lived in Baghdad, where he grew up. His experience of the war was of course very different than most of ours in this country. He remembers clearly how he learned that his country had invaded Kuwait. Me and my wife used to work in two different rooms in the same sort of building. And she always listened to Kuwaiti station, the national Kuwaiti station, because it has some more fun songs and mixture of songs, and stuff like that. But anyway, so she was trying to find that station, but she couldn't. She said, Issam, it seems there's something wrong with the radio, I can't find that station. So I start to flip through the stations. And I put it on our Baghdad station, and, boy, I started to hear the marches and the military music. Did that automatically mean you knew that there was trouble? Yes. That was the government's sort of announcement, in music, to times of trouble. We sense it when we, for instance, hear emotional love songs, we think that the regime is taking a break a little bit. So at the time, we heard that and instantly we knew that there was a military or some kind of problem. I heard about the invasion by dashing out into the street, and saying, what happened? And people, in a lower voice, well Saddam invaded Kuwait. And he's calling people to go and fight over there in the front. And I said, I sort of struck my head and I said, not again. Had you served in the Iran-Iraq war? Yes, I served three years, actually. And that war, of course, an incredibly bloody war. Estimates of the dead range up to 1.5 million. Iraq used chemical weapons in the war. Can you talk about what it felt like to know that you were being called up again to fight in this conflict for somebody who you didn't support? Well, I don't know. Ira, it's the most individualist, as well as a collective, miserable experience that you will ever have. Because you are facing, actually, not one enemy. You are facing two enemies-- one in your back, and one in your face. And when you turn to run away, you see the back enemy trying to shoot you. That is the government of Iraq, right. I couldn't picture myself putting on the same uniform and fighting for a regime, a bloody regime, again. So that was my feeling. And the next day I had to go to that military center and join the forces. But as I was an architect, I was actually allocated to the back of the front, and inside the city of Baghdad. Oh so you were very lucky. I was, actually. But some of my classmates, they were sent out to the front. And some of them faced their deaths there, they were killed. Did they have the same kinds of feelings about Saddam that you did? That they didn't like the regime? Ira, 100%, 100%, I will tell you. Talk about the air strikes. Could you talk about what that was like? You were in Baghdad when the US started its 38 day air campaign against Iraq. Right. Actually, Ira, at the time we were waiting because James Baker, at the time, warned Iraq that, we are going to put you back in the Middle Ages. And everybody knew about that, but nobody believed it. Nobody believed it? Yes. Yes, we didn't believe that it's going to happen. It's over 100 countries are gathering their forces with an unprecedented show of force in the human history, against 22 million people. We couldn't believe that this could be something true. I couldn't believe that the representative of the most so-called civilized country would utter such nonsense. Forgive me for that. So where were you when the bombing campaign began? Yeah, I was in my home with my wife and my three-year-old son. And I was renovating my house. I was like two years, three years married to my wife. And I was sort of dividing my family home into two little homes. One is for my sister and one is for my family. And as a show of, you know, emotional support, we all slept-- we had mattresses on the floor in my living room, which had doors open because I was renovating at the time. You know, I've brought a lot of paint to paint my living room. So anyway, we slept, and that night, the night of the 17th of January, in my living room, and we sort of kissed each other and we fell asleep. And exactly at 2 A.M. we all woke up and the ground was shaking violently. And it was like a deep, deep, sort of echo happening, coming down from the ground. And the streetlights were on at the time, and in five minutes, all the lights were out. And we, at that minute, we were certain that this is the war and we're back again. We're facing death all over again. I, personally, Ira, I'm not ashamed of this-- I started to shake. My hands couldn't hold anything. I grabbed my-- Take a second. I grabbed my little kid. And he was crying, he didn't know what was happening. I remember my son, when he heard the B-52 over his head. I put my hand on his heart and I felt his heart bumping like crazy. And ironically, I went to the wash the next five, six times in five minutes. You know, when you have this kind of stress, I needed go to the wash room. As mundane as this is, but I need to tell the Americans about it. The fear is very, very frightening when you're expecting your death. It's much more frightening that when it happens suddenly, if you're asleep, or if you're embarking on your work, or whatever. But when you're expected minute by minute, second by second sometimes, it gets like a torture. So we were literally tortured. And we started to wander with the streets. I looked around in my neighborhood. And, by the way, our neighborhood looks pretty much like any American or Canadian neighborhood. You know, row houses or individual homes, with the front yards very nicely done. You know, people that has the same qualities of life. The difference is that they live in constant fear. And you were with your three-year-old boy. Right. Well actually, I was very worried about this guy, because he was very young. And you know when fear, when you start your life by experiencing fear and bombing, it would leave scars in your soul for the rest of your life. And I think he's fine now. But he kept asking me, why are they doing this to us? What have we done? And I couldn't find the right answer because he was very young at the time. I couldn't go into deep political analysis of what's going on. But I told him, there is a bad guy who did something wrong. And there are some judges of the world who wanted to take the law by their hand, and then they come and punish him. And then I stop for one second, and say, but they are punishing us. But we are scared, he's not scared. Did he ask, why are they bombing all of us if they're just trying to get this bad man? Well, Ira, I didn't try to justify what the American forces were doing. To tell you the truth, I'm not going to polish my words. I told him that, you know, after days and days of bombing I at first told him that, well there are some judges who are going to catch this man. And, you know, he's an outlaw, they're going to put him in jail. I try to make things like a story to his age. And then after that I start to feel frustrated, myself, because I see people slaughtered in front of my eyes. And Saddam comes out in the screens, laughing with his ugly face. So I started to tell him, well, those judges are sometimes more severe and sometimes they hit hard that the people themselves will suffer some injuries. But, again, that's OK. Probably in the end, they will catch him. But it never happened. And now he knows that it's not going to happen, neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan, nor in anywhere in the world. Was there a part of you which hoped the Americans would succeed and liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein? To tell you the truth, I hoped for that. But I felt deep, deep in heart that they're not going to catch this person. I've always doubted that. And not only me, all the people in Iraq doubted that. Because there is always history that tells you lessons. And there is the fresh memory when Saddam used the chemical weapons against Halabja-- which is a northern, very, very peaceful city-- in 1988, and killed 5,000 people in two hours. Nobody in the West raised a finger. Nobody called him a terrorist, nobody called him a tyrant. But when he touched a state that is a strong ally to the West, a state that is very rich in oil. So we didn't have really trust to the West. It's a feeling that those people do not care about other nations. They can bomb any city, any minute, any time, without warning. And what did you think about the United States at that time? Did you hate the United States for the bombing? Did you feel a mix of feelings about it, because you hoped that they would come in? I didn't like the United States. As a government, as a military force-- not the people. I saw cruise missiles falling on buildings that are exactly-- unfortunately, I would say that it looked exactly to me like the World Trade Center. I mean, when I saw the World Trade Center, those airplanes crashing into it, the first thing jumped into my head was when I saw one of the buildings-- I was driving from one part of the city to the other-- and I saw one of these building hit by a cruise missile. But some of these buildings where inhabited by civilians. So, I do not hate, I don't like to use this word, but I was mad, I was angry at the United States government. Because it uses a lot of force, inhuman force, to punish very poor people. And were you also angry in Saddam for putting you all in this position? Oh, in that respect, we hated Saddam. I would definitely use that word. Issam Shukri in Toronto. In his spare time, he does a little work with a group that's trying to lift the economic sanctions that stop food and medicines from going into Iraq. He points out that 5,000 civilians are dying every month that the sanctions continue. Five thousand a month, every month, for the past 11 years. Coming up, the war ahead, and lessons from a half hour battle that got out of hand in 1993. In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, current events Rashomon in which we look at familiar news stories from unfamiliar points of view, hoping that might shed some light on things, give some perspective on troubling events. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three. Toto, I don't think we're in Vietnam, anymore. We've been told that the first part of the coming war on terror will involve US special operation forces tracking down suspected terrorists. Perhaps it would be helpful to remember another mission like that in this moment. In the early 1990s, there was a UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia. In that country there were a number of rival factions competing for power. In June of 1993, a local militia leader named Mohamed Aidid ambushed and killed 19 Pakistani soldiers from the UN mission. The Clinton administration dispatched a squad of special operatives to capture Aidid and dismantle his military organization. The squad consisted of two elite military teams, the Rangers and the Delta Force. On October 3, 1993, their mission was to capture two of Aidid's top commanders. Mark Bowden wrote a book about the battle called Black Hawk Down. He talked to producer Alex Blumberg about that day and the mission to capture those two men. And they had been spotted speaking at a rally in Mogadishu earlier that morning, and had been observed by spies on the ground and in the air traveling to a house in the center of Mogadishu, in an area called the Bakara Market. And so General William F. Garrison, who was the leader of Task Force Ranger, authorized a raid which was to swoop in very quickly on this house and arrest these two guys and anyone who was with them, and bring them back to the base. And the mission, it didn't exactly work out the way it was supposed to. No. The mission was envisioned as taking about 30 minutes-- or basically 30 minutes on the ground and maybe another 30 minutes to convoy the prisoners out of the city. In the end, how long did it end up taking and how many lives were lost? In the end, the battle lasted about 15 hours, through a long night and into early the next day. Eighteen American soldiers were killed. It was the most significant firefight that American soldiers have been involved with since the war in Vietnam. The way the raid was set up, the Delta Force operators would hit the ground first. They ride on benches on the outside of these little helicopters-- AH-6s, they call them Little Birds-- and are literally put right down in front of the house. They land right on the street. So the Delta Force operators were inserted in that way. And then the bigger Blackhawk helicopters come in. The Blackhawks are too big to land on the street. So they hover overhead, and the Rangers rope down to each of the four corners of the block where this operation was taking place. Well, what was the first thing that didn't go as planned? Well as the Rangers roped into the four corners, one of the young rangers, a fellow named Todd Blackburn, actually missed the rope and fell 70 feet from the helicopter to the street. You know, this was the most serious injury that any of these units had sustained since they'd come a month before. And it caused certainly a great deal of alarm within his little Ranger unit there. And it set in motion a chain of events that kind of just slowed the whole process down. Not a lot, but a little. One of the very first things in the book is when you're talking about, they're hanging from these helicopters on these ropes, they're seventy feet above the ground, they have to slide down these ropes, and then sort of establish their position. And just the confusion of it all was just-- like, what do they see as they're coming down? Well, initially, as the men descended the ropes to the street, they could see almost nothing. Because the helicopters, the Blackhawks are so powerful, they kicked up huge clouds of dust. So they're roping down in a dust storm, so they can't really even see much past their nose. And they're hearing, for the first time, pretty heavy fire. Learning the sound of bullets that pass very closely make a loud, cracking noise, like a piece of hickory being snapped. So the only way you can tell how close a bullet is is by the sound it makes? That's what they tell me. I've never, fortunately, been in a situation where people have been shooting at me. But there's sort of a whooshing sound that you hear if the bullet passes somewhere in your vicinity. But if it's close enough to you, you hear what's essentially a little sonic boom as the round goes past you. And, of course, they say the one that hits you, you never hear. And most of the guys were learning this for the first time on this mission. That's right. These are very young soldiers, they're well-trained, and very cocky, and very capable. But they had never been exposed to fire like this. And they had never seen the guys next to them suddenly start to drop. Matt Eversmann, who was put in charge of this mission for the first time, one by one the men in his unit scattered around the street where they'd just landed are beginning to sustain injuries. They get shot. They get shot, right. One of them gets his thumb shot off, another gets shot in the shoulder-- he just starts seeing his men go down. So this was a very, very dangerous place to go. The rules of engagement were that the men, the American soldiers, were not allowed to shoot at someone unless they were pointing their weapons at them. And so the Somalis knew the rules of engagement. So they mingled in with the angry crowds, who were not armed, so that they could fire at the Rangers without the Rangers being able to shoot back at them. There was literally a scene where one of the Rangers was confronted with a Somali gunman who was laying on the ground. And he had children sitting on top of him. And I think he had a woman standing right in front of him. He had basically surrounded himself with non-competents so that he could lay there and shoot at the Rangers without being shot at himself. And actually what the Rangers in the situation did, was lay down a line of fire right in front of this man-- the children and the women fled very quickly, and then they shot the gunman. But eventually, they were under so much fire that the rules of engagement were just dropped. Because they realized that they had to shoot back. If they didn't, they weren't going to survive. So some of these young men were in the position of having to shoot at crowds of people in order to avoid being killed, themselves. So then, what happened after that? Well they proceeded to evacuate Todd Blackburn. The Rangers fanned out and formed the perimeter like they were supposed to. They began coming under more and more fire as the minutes went by. The Delta Operators arrested the people they were looking for. They found them and handcuffed them and were leading them out of the building, when one of the Blackhawk helicopters that was still circling overhead, was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and crashed about four blocks away. All of the men involved in this mission are communicating with themselves by radio. All of these conversations were tape recorded. One of the things that I found remarkable about listening to the audio tape is that you can hear the intensity of that moment. When that Blackhawk helicopter crashes, you hear men shouting into the radio, we've got a Blackhawk down. And you can hear the panic, almost, in their voices. To them, if you're on the ground in a city with literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of people surrounding you and shooting at you, your faith in getting out of there alive rests largely on those helicopters overhead. They are symbols for you of the fact that you're there representing the most powerful military force in the world. When the Blackhawk was shot down, that was the defining moment of this episode. The idea was to insert the men, take the prisoners, load them on vehicles, and drive them out of the city, and everyone would come back and have a barbecue. But once that Blackhawk went down, everything changed. Because now they had men down on the ground, either dead, wounded or fighting for their lives, and they had to try to rescue those men who had just crashed. And so basically the convoy, which originally had been planned to just go back to the base with the prisoners, now has a totally different sort of mission. Right. Well this became one of the major phases of the battle, and certainly the bloodiest phase. Once the Blackhawk was shot down, the orders were for the convoy to load up the prisoners and then drive to the neighborhood where the Blackhawk had crashed. And the idea was then to rescue the men who had been aboard the helicopter and then drive out of the city. But the problem was that the streets of Mogadishu are like a maze. And at this point, there are Somalis setting up burning barricades, and organizing ambushes at intersections. So as the convoy began to try to make its way to the downed Blackhawk, it got lost. It became a tragic comedy of errors with the pilots in the helicopters overhead. And there was a Navy plane, a P-3 Orion, flying high overhead, all of them trying to give directions to this convoy. But because of the, in some cases, the relay system of communicating to them, the people in the vehicles would get the instructions too late to take advantage of them. So for instance, someone high overhead would say take a left. And by the time that communicated to Danny McKnight in the lead vehicle, they'd already passed the point where they were supposed to take a left. The men in the vehicles in the rear of the convoy didn't even know what was going on. A lot of them still thought they were driving out of the city because no one had communicated to everybody down the line exactly where it was they were going and what they were trying to do. So you have these men holed up in these vehicles, one by one getting injured or killed, and not knowing where they were going, why they were making the turns they were making. And it's not something where you can stay inside. Like, a Humvee isn't actually that much protection, it turns out. Right. The convoy was made up of two five ton trucks, flatbed trucks, with the prisoners in the back, and, I believe, six Humvees. And they discovered that rounds could go right through the skin of the Humvee. For instance, one of the Humvees took a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade, which penetrated through the side and exploded in the back, blowing the men who were in the back of the Humvee out the rear of the vehicle, out onto the street. A couple of those men were killed, two or three others were severely injured. Whenever anything like that would happen, the convoy would stop, the men would all have to pile out. They would try to rescue the men who were injured, get them back on the vehicles, start up again. Every time they would stop, they would come under heavy fire. Until finally, more than half of the men on that convoy were either dead or injured. And it's especially heartbreaking when you read, because several times the convoy swings a block away from where the trapped people are. Yeah. And it just shows you how chaotic the situation was on the street. There was this feeling expressed by one of the Air Force combat controllers who was in one of the lead vehicles, his name is Dan Schilling-- he couldn't understand what was going on, and he just believed they were going to keep driving around until they were all dead. You know, at this point in the book, you're sort of midway through the book, one of the things that becomes very clear is that it's almost as if the entire city now has-- I don't want to say turned against, because I feel like maybe that's not the right word-- No, it's exactly the right word. Is it? I mean, the Rangers said that they felt like it was kill an American day in Mogadishu. There was so much anger and hostility toward these American troops, that it virtually was true. That they were trapped in a city where everyone in the city, it seemed, was trying to kill them. And this is not just a normal city, this is the most heavily-armed population, probably in the world. And so they were under intensive fire from 360 degrees. Do you think they had a sense of the enormous hostility that was pent up out there? I think that they probably were aware that there was hostility against them, but they couldn't have imagined the intensity of it. You have to remember, these are the best-trained soldiers in the world. They have the best equipment, they have these helicopters, which are absolute marvels of military technology, to support them. So they had, I think, a really cocky attitude. The idea that they would find themselves so outnumbered, and outgunned, and at a disadvantage, in a place like Mogadishu where they viewed the people they were fighting against as just a ragtag bunch of irregulars who wouldn't know how to put together an assault if their life depended on it-- now, though, they found themselves in, really, a predicament from which a lot of them had no reason to expect that they were going to get out alive. You know, clearly, from what everybody's been saying about the current situation in Afghanistan, is that the military part of the response is probably going to involve-- almost certain to involve-- special operations forces, some of which may be already on the ground in Afghanistan. Pretty much exactly what you're describing. Well, in fact involving the same units and in some cases the same men. What thoughts do you have about that? You know, what I hope the book Blackhawk Down does is sober people up to the reality of combat. And I'm not arguing, and I don't think the book argues, makes a pacifist argument, that we shouldn't be using military force. I think we're clearly in a position right now where will the moral obligation is to use military force. The problem with the Battle of Mogadishu was, that none of the civilian leadership in the United States, from the President to the Congress, had imagined that these raids could turn out with so many people killed and injured. So their response, when this happened, was one of horror, that this was a disaster. And so immediately, President Clinton called off the military mission in Mogadishu. But from a military perspective, the military objective was to capture Hasan Awale and Omar Salad. They were both captured and evacuated from the city and were in custody at the end of the day. And I think it was galling to the military, particularly to the men who took part in this, to have this mission viewed as a debacle. Because they felt that they've been successful, and they felt that after so much sacrifice, their strong desire was to stay and finish the mission, if only to honor the memory of the men who had been killed accomplishing it. Mark, did the Pentagon, did they study this battle? Did they sort of look at it a year or two later and just sort of say OK, what happened here, what went on, what are the things we can learn from this? Well, much to my amazement, I don't think that the Army seriously studied this episode at all, this battle at all. It just boggles my mind, when you consider that this is probably the only instance of serious, real world fighting that American soldiers have had to do, certainly since the Persian Gulf War. And there was nothing like this even in the Persian Gulf War. And you would think, just from a standpoint of evaluating the effectiveness of weaponry, of armor, and tactics, that they would want to examine very carefully what happened here. You know, I found myself in the position when I began working on this book, of being the first person who had attempted to really examine exactly what happened in detail. Mark Bowden. His account of the Battle of Mogadishu is called Blackhawk Down. Of 160 Americans in the fight, 73 were injured, 18 died. A conservative estimate of the number of Somalis dead-- 500 to 1,000. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Support for this program comes from PBS, presenting Life 360, a new series that explores life's surprises. Friday nights at 9:00, local times may vary. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who wishes our format included more of-- The marches, and the military music. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Rod Hudson grew up on a dairy farm in New Hampshire and worked the farm from the time he was big enough to help out, six, seven years old. When his father retired, Rod ran his own operation on his dad's property and did just fine until the mid 1980's when something strange started to happen with the cows. A series of strange things started to happen actually, beginning with their hooves. That was the first thing. Cow's feet don't normally have to be trimmed only about once a year, possibly twice. And I was having to trim them three and four times a year. Do you mean just trim their hooves. Right. If they get sore feet, they don't walk around like they should. They won't go and eat like they should. Do they give as much milk? No, no. The production was low all the time. A healthy cow would give Rod 75 90 pounds of milk a day. These cows were averaging 40 at best. It was hard to even cover expenses. The cows developed other problems. They had trouble conceiving. They started losing weight. They began to get sick. Oh, I'd have a veterinarian in about every six weeks or something like that. Was that pretty expensive? It's very expensive. You could spend $100 per cow pretty quick. And all I'd get out of them is they didn't know what was the matter with them. They tried medicines. They changed the cow's feed. They'd change it again. They replaced the cows with new cows. And this went on, month after month, year after year, for a decade and a half. And Rod was not a novice. He was an experienced dairy farmer who'd been through a lot, nearly 50 years old when the troubles began. He tried this. He tried that, all the time watching himself slowly go broke. Well, just nobody had any answers. They'd make suggestions, and we'd try to do what was suggested to us. And nothing seemed to work for us at all. It just must have made you feel so crazy. Well, I blamed it onto myself as much as anything. I tried to accept the fact that I wasn't doing something right. And as they, no matter what I did, it didn't work. The first time I talked to Rod a few months back, someone that I'm close to was having all sorts of medical problems and going through tests, and CAT scans, and spinal taps, and more CAT scans. And the doctors couldn't figure out what was causing the problems. And in the absence of information, she did what Rod did. She blamed yourself. And I think this happens a lot. I think that when you have nothing to go on, you fill the vacuum with anything that you have at hand, with any superstitions that you can think of, with everything that you think you could have done wrong. Before something has a name, it could be anything. And that period before you know the truth, that period is often worse than the truth that you find out. Today on our program, we bring you stories about that eerie, unsettling period before something has a name, and stories about how things change once things do have a name. In Rod's case, it turned out that high voltage power lines that crossed his property were leaking current into the ground. When it was wet outside, moisture would carry the electricity-- not much electricity, just 35 watts or so, enough for a vibration sort of feeling-- through the ground, and into the barn and up into the cows drinking trough. The cow was standing there with bare feet in a wet spot. Then they go to drink the water, and because this electricity was getting into the water, why they'd get a shock as they were drinking. And would that do? Well, instead of putting their head down into the water and drinking it, they were just lapping at it like a dog laps water. And they just wouldn't take in that much. They were afraid they were going to get a shock when they'd go to drink. The cows were dehydrated, getting only about a third of the water they were supposed to get. And that explained all of their other problems. After nearly 15 years of uncertainty, it was a relief to finally know the answer. But Rod Hudson was so heavily in debt, there was no way to recoup fast enough, and he lost the farm. At 65, he now has a new job. At the present time, I'm driving for Thomas Transportation out of Keene. That's an airport shuttle service. And I'm putting in somewhere around 50 to 60 hours a week. And you do the early morning? I do basically early morning runs. Starting around when? Generally, it's around 3:00 or half past. So even earlier than you would have to get up to milk cows? Well, just about the same time. Oh, really? Yeah, because that's about the time that I normally god up. And so what do you think of that job? I love it. You do? I really do. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Before It Had a Name. Our program in four acts today. Act One, Mr. Boder Vanishes. In that act, the very first recordings of Holocaust survivors made just after the war before the Holocaust was even called the Holocaust, and very different from other Holocaust survivor interviews because of that. Forgotten for decades, never before broadcast, those tapes here today on our program. And the story of the man who collected them. Act Two, Of Course I Remember Your Name. In that act, the difference between those we know and those whose names we now. Act Three, A Bad Day For Plates, the story of four kids who that their mother was just mean. And then, they found out that there was a different name for it completely, rewriting everything they ever knew about her. Act Four, You Call That Love? Stay with us. Act One, Mr. Boder vanishes. This is the story of a man named David Boder, who started to investigate the Holocaust before it was known as the Holocaust. And because of that, his research was different, and treated differently by the world, than investigations done later. Carl Marziali tells the story. In 1946, David Boder went to Europe to interview survivors of Nazi concentration camps, specifically to record their stories in their own voices. At the time, this was a new idea, so new he was the only one who went. What he got were the first oral histories of Holocaust survivors before it was even called the Holocaust. Even if you've heard other survivor accounts, there's something different about these interviews. Over and over, people refer to names that have since taken on a bigger significance, but without knowing the bigger significance. George Caldor, a survivor from Hungary, tells Boder that when he first arrived at the camp, he walked past a gate with the words, "Work Sets Man Free," and met an SS chief physician whose name Boder didn't recognize and misspelled on the transcript as Wengele. Boder typed question marks next to the name. When a French woman named Nellie Bandy mentions the camp she was sent to, it's not enough for her to say the names Birkenau and Auschwitz for Boder to know what she's talking about. Where is that? Birkenau is some kilometers from Auschwitz. And Auschwitz is where? In East Upper Silesia. In East Upper Silesia. Who has it now? Poland. Poland has it now. She tells Boder about the march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, and on the way the guards shot the stragglers, a familiar scene to anyone who's seen a movie or read a book about the Holocaust, but surprising and new to Boder. What were they, shooting them like sentenced people, putting them to the wall? Oh no [INAUDIBLE] Oh no, she's saying. She fell down somewhere and he just shot at her. That was all. All the route was bordered with corpses, you see. All the route was bordered with corpses, you see? And whose corpses were that? Well, there were men who had been led before us and had been shot like that. There were men who had been before us and had been shot like that. Maybe it's a kind of dramatic irony, the ratio of our own awareness to the speaker's lack of it. Maybe it's the way people talk when they barely know what's happened to them, before analysis and judgment show up to put everything in its place. The people in the camps had been cut off from almost all news reports for years, so all they can talk about is what happened to them. They have no bigger picture. When Nellie Bandy tires to get refuge with the US Army after the German surrender, she goes to a checkpoint and talks to an American guard. I came to see them, and I spoke English. And asked them if I could get over. "Well who are you?" When the guard asks here who she is, she can't just say, a Holocaust survivor. The idea doesn't exist for her or the guard. So instead, she makes up a term for herself. I'm a French political prisoner, she says. I'm a French political prisoner. The guard says he doesn't have any instructions for political prisoners and goes to ask his captain. The captain came back [INAUDIBLE] The captain comes back and tells her, "I'm extremely sorry, but so far I haven't got any instructions for political prisoners, just for prisoners of war. And turns her away. Often in the recordings, you get the sense of two worlds meeting for the first time and trying to figure each other. The survivors and the people they come across just to speak the same language. This is very different from later interviews with survivors after a common language had developed. So they had to go on the so-called death march. You had to keep out because if you fell down, they shot you. These are interviews of survivors made after 1988 and released in a boxed set called Voices Of The Shoa. This one describes the same experience Nellie Bandy had, but now it has a name, the death march. We had to march. So my sister is older. She gave me her shoes. It was January, 1945. I was so slippery. I was cold. No food, nothing, that if you slipped, you couldn't get up. There was no way in heaven you could get up. At the beginning, they shot you right on the spot, but after a while, why waste a bullet? Let them freeze to death. That's why they called it the death march. And whose corpses do you think they were? They were [UNINTELLIGIBLE] people. Boder recorded 109 interviews over two months. He cut an unlikely figure, an older man in goatee and glasses, wearing a blazer and tie in the middle of summer, burdened by 60 pounds of primitive recording equipment and a bad heart. Because he did this work before the Holocaust had a name, and everything that comes with a name, recognition, context, a common language, he had trouble getting funded. His work was never truly completed. His tapes were lost for decades, and he died in obscurity. Well, from Buchenwald we went to Auschwitz. Yes, and from Auschwitz? And from Auschwitz, we went to a little station [INAUDIBLE] I first came across Boder's name in 1988. I was on a freelance assignment at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago when a professor I knew showed me a copy of a campus magazine from 1947. He'd found it in somebody's attic, started flipping through it, and on page 18, found an article by David P. Boder, a psychology professor at IIT. Boder's article was about his recent expedition to Europe, and it struck me as odd for a couple of reasons. I'd never heard of Boder, even though, as it turns out, he was the first person ever to record Holocaust victims. And the tone was odd. His writing was clear, informative and totally devoid of personal content. It seemed strange that a Jewish man who had come face to face with the attempted extinction of his people would title his article, "The Displaced People of Europe, Preliminary Notes on a Psychological and Anthropological Study." I decided to find out what I could about David Boder. In the 1930's and '40's, he was a minor public figure, the kind of professor who knew how to get his name in print. He showed up in Time magazine with some invention called "the adjective verb quotient." He made the papers with his analysis of children's letters to Santa Claus, and with an experiment where he wired his students with sensors and charted their reactions to scary movies. But at some point in the mid '40's, his research shifted focus and took on an urgent tone. By 1945, he was trying to get a visa for Europe and furiously writing grant proposals to fund a project there. There were newsreel and newspaper accounts of what had happened in the camps, but Boder was proposing to interview survivors in their own languages-- he spoke at least seven himself-- and in their own words. Boder got rejection letters from a who's who of postwar philanthropy, the American Jewish Conference, the Guggenheim Foundation, the B'nai B'rith, the federal government. He kept going, and it wasn't clear to me what was driving him. It seemed to be more than scholarly interest. But among the grant applications, newspaper clippings, boxes and boxes of archival papers, there was not a single personal artifact, no reflections, no memoirs, not one personal note in his travel diary. Boder died 40 years ago, and his only daughter, Elena, died childless in 1995. To learn more, actually to learn anything about Boder's private self, I turned to Sylvia Jericho, a lifelong family friend and a colleague of Boder's daughter Elena. According to Sylvia, Boder in person was a lot like Boder in print. He'd go on at great length about psychology or the works of Chekhov. But I don't remember his ever talking about himself in the world. Why do you think that was? Well, I think it reflects tragedy in his life, and that he had abandoned his early life. And I think there was a schism between him and his early life. Here are some parts of his early life that Boder might have been trying to abandon. He had married in Russian when he was 20 years old and divorced two years later. I talked to the family historian in Israel, who says that Boder converted to Christianity to get ahead, and that this was the reason his wife left him. Boder fled Russia in 1919 after the Bolshevik Revolution, taking his daughter Elena with him. Some in his wife's family accuse him of abducting Elena, of taking her without the mother's consent. He also changed his name, so by the time he arrived in Chicago, was no longer David or Pavel Michelson, Latvian Jew, but Dr. David Pablo Boder, scholar without frontiers. Meanwhile, his wife stayed in Latvia, held onto her name and identity and was executed in a ghetto in 1941, just before Boder appeared in Time magazine for his study of adjectives and verbs. It's hard to resist the pattern that having betrayed-- that in part, his study of the people of the Holocaust and his determination to get there, and to catch the stories in there purist telling. It's hard to resist the interpretation that in part, this atoned for the freedom from that kind of torment that he achieved by simply leaving. On July 29, 1946, Boder finally made it to Europe. In the end, after more than a year of writing grant proposals, he went without official funding. He had money from his daughter, donations from a few assumptions and a loan from his life insurance. I should point out again just how uninterested the rest of the world was in Boder's idea. The project was a one man effort from start to finish. He worked without translators and operated the equipment on his own, often pausing to untangle wire that bunched up like fishing line. He would show up in a safe house, a refugee camp, ask for volunteers, find a quiet corner and begin his questions. Munich, Germany, September 20, 1946. The spool is at nine minutes. The interview is [? Mr. Jurgen Bassfruend 22 years old. [SPEAKING GERMAN] Jurgen Bassfreund now goes by Jack Bass. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama where I went to talk to him about the old professor he met while waiting to leave Europe. I remember that a lady from Nuremberg. She was old. She certainly wouldn't be alive today anymore. She told me about Dr. Boder. I went in there because he wants to he hear stories. And I think that I looked for him. I mean I knew where he was, and that I introduced myself. And that's how the interview took place. Were you facing him? I think that we sat across a table from each other. And the recorder was on the table, I believe. I remember it was a red, [? Webcoa ?] wire recorder. And of course it was some kind of a miracle in those days because that you could actually have a tape, a wire that would record your words was something that I hadn't seen before. You would think that a researcher talking to refugees after the war, a psychologist of all people, would show the appropriate sensitivity. But that's not exactly the way things went. One survivor was so upset by Boder's aloofness that she still refuses to have her interview published. And as Bass remembers, Boder might as well have been asking directions. I still see him interviewing me, and he was stern. He looked at me, and he had a very serious expression on his face. And he would say to me, "And what happened after you left Auschwitz? And where did you end up after Auschwitz? And where did you go? And what did you have to eat?" He was a thorough interviewer, but he was very stern. And then they cut our hair with a razor. With an electric razor? Yes. They sheared you essentially. [INAUDIBLE] shaved. Tell me, who did the shearing? Men or women? Women. Your hair from the head? Everything. Your whole body? Yes, the whole body. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Why did they do that? I can't tell you. It was a formal, I think, somewhat like a teacher at a final exam. You can't look left or right. You just look at him and make sure that you don't look at anything else. But I was used to ti because in Europe, all the teachers are like that. In his two months in Europe, Boder went from a passing acquaintance with Nazi atrocities to knowing probably as much as anyone alive. But it wasn't until the very end that cracks appeared in his customary reserve. So Hara Bass is the head librarian at the Illinois Institute of Technology and currently running a project to restore and archive Boder's work. She remembers the moment in the tapes when she heard the change, an interview in Yiddish with a Polish woman named Anna Kavitska. It was the less interview he interviewed. And the person in the story was talking about her daughter, which was a newborn that she had to leave in the street, in this snow, for a Christian lady in Poland to pick her up so she can take her to the orphanage. And we're talking about a newborn, and it was 25 degree below. There was snow on the ground. She left the child in the street. This woman had seen most of her family perish, and had not gotten to see her daughter after her birth. This person was sobbing throughout the interview. And it just seems after he listened to 109 people, it weighed very heavy on him at that point. I was able to hear the sadness, his impatience with the very last story in a way, I have had it. I have heard enough. Well, we have to conclude. My automobile is waiting. That's how we miss very valuable material if I have to cancel another appointment. [UNINTELLIGIBLE], September of '46 in the synagogue they first desecrated in 1937 or 1937, and which has its holiday service for the first time today and donors here to re-dededicate it. What he have heard from this woman is about the story we have heard from everybody. I'm concluding my project in Germany. And I want to thank the owner, Jack Thompson from The Chicago Tribune. Boder wobbles back and forth here. On one side, a promoter scholar making his acknowledgement, on the other, an exhausted man shaken by what he's heard. And I can't speak. I don't remember the names now because I'm just in a trance after this woman's report. I'm completely distraught. The automobile is waiting. I'm going to Frankfurt. Who is going to sit in judgement over all this? And who is going to judge my work? Illinois Institute of Technology via recording. I'm leaving tonight for Paris. The project is concluded. You can read almost anything into that final, "who will judge my work?" The shame reporters feel when they hold the camera on someone in tears, the desire for recognition, the realization that his achievement consists of making people relive their worst moments. And the hope that documenting this tragedy might alleviate any guilt he might have felt about living in America while his relatives died at the hands of the Nazis. Boder spoke these words in English so that the woman would not understand, and he never included them in the transcript. Something happened when he came back. His promoter's instinct failed him just when he needed it the most. He never got enough money to transcribe all his interviews. He had hoped to put them in a book, but in the end, he published only eight out of the 109. And the book, I Did Not Interview The Dead, sold poorly and went out of print. He followed his daughter to the west coast in 1952, and was offered a position as an unpaid research associate at UCLA. With the grant money running out, Boder kept transcribing the recordings on his own. I picture him alone in his office, playing and replaying passages to filter words from the noise, visited occasionally by his daughter Elena. Here he was in the new world, but immersed again in the old. After a life of moving on, moving out, moving up, Boder was back where he started. I remember the tapes being in one area in this little library in the late '60's or '70's even. Queries came in to the department asking about the tapes, and they had disappeared. They were gone. Irving Maltzman was a young psychologist at UCLA when Boder first arrived, and he was in charge of the reading room of the Psychology Department there. I just think we just didn't realize the historical significance of them. In part, when he published it, there were still-- I think people had enough of the terrible stories that had appeared in the newspaper finally. And in part, it was because he was not some public celebrity. There was a lack of publicity and acclamation of the work at the time. And so it was just sitting in a little reading room in a psychology department, rather than in the Smithsonian Institute or the Holocaust Museum or something. The term, the Holocaust, came up during the Second World Congress of Jewish Studies in 1957 in Jerusalem. It caught on quickly among scholars and spread to the general public by the early '60's. Before then, back in the '40's, everybody had a different name for it. There recent catastrophe, the recent Jewish catastrophe, the disaster, even the permanent pogrom. Boder died in 1961. He was 75, and if he'd have lived just a few more years, he might have found an audience. In the early '60's, people began the serious gathering of recorded oral histories. As they looked around for survivors and testimonials, a set of wire spools sat unnoticed, Raiders of the Lost Ark style, inside wooden crates in a place called the Jefferson Technical Complex in the Library of Congress. The spools were copies of the originals, made by Boder himself and sent to the library in the '50's. Library staffers who asked about the crates were told they contained recordings of, quote, "people who had psychological problems as a result of being displaced during the war." It wasn't until the mid 1990's that anyone figured out what the recordings were. A third of Boder's interviews have still never been transcribed. Carl Marziali in Chicago. If you want to hear David Boder's recordings, or read transcripts, there's a link to the official IIT website, Voices of the Holocaust, from the This American Life website, www.thisamericanlife.org. Coming up, if your mom bites you in the tuckus, what's the name for that? Is that love? What if she breaks a plate over your head? Love? Is that love? Answers in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life.. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program of course we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on the theme. Today's program, Before It Had A Name, stories of things in that delicate moment before we know exactly what they are. And how those things change once we pin a name onto to them. Things like, for example, Axis of Evil, a perfect example. Sure, North Korea, Iraq and Iran, they were bad before we pinned the name Axis of Evil onto those countries. But the name changed things, changed things for them. It turns out that part of what made North Korea so angry lately is being included on that list, is being called evil. Names matter. Well we've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two is about that moment when we suddenly learn the name of something that has, up until that point, remain unnamed for us. When the name penetrate into us, the person or the place or the thing has penetrated into us too, I think. And if that doesn't seem to true to you, Heather O'Neill provides these real-life case studies. I didn't know who Paul [? Rayon ?] was until he crashed on his motor scooter in front of the school, and he became the first person we ever saw killed. I had never heard of Sunny Teasedale until Mary Lou showed me the hickeys on her neck. I thought this guy was just a goon until I heard him singing "Panis Angelicus" with a cigarette in his mouth. Then I knew his name was Johnny Delorio for the rest of my life. I didn't know Casper James until my uncle was buried at his parents' funeral parlor. "Hi," he said in the lobby. "We go to school together." Linda Hall was just a girl with a missing finger until she taught me all the words to a Sly and the Family Stone song at the swimming pool. He was from Africa, and he was cute. I wrote Chemewe down on a piece of paper so that I could practice it and stop asking him what his name was. He said his mother with Suzanne, from the Leonard Cohen song, but I could never remember his name. "That's Quincy," they said, pointing to the boy on the high diving board who was afraid to jump. And every one yelled in unison, "Jump, jump, jump." Natasha wasn't really Natasha until she told me that her father hadn't been home for three days, and she slept on the balcony when it was warm. The teacher held up the math test that said Vladimir at the top of the page. In all the slots for answers, he had drawn pictures of guns. I looked at Vladimir sitting way in the corner. I didn't even think of him as having a name. I never knew Zero's real name. He sold heroin on Madison Avenue. Everyone started calling him Zero because just saying his real name would supposedly bring you bad luck. The neighborhood took away his name so they could feel a little more safe. My dad could never remember names, so every actor he didn't like on television he called, the child molester, or a degenerate. I would say, "The with the Italian pedophile is coming on." And he would hurry to the living room. My dad said he never paid for anything smaller than his fist. He used to tuck a gun in his boxer shorts when he took out the garbage because he said there could be rats out there. He got a license so that he could sell flowers on the corner downtown. The name on the license said Leonard O'Neill. Who the hell is that, I thought? Everybody I ever met called my dad, Buddy. My dad called me Dumbo because he said I had big ears. My mother called me Sputnik because my eyes were so big. My dad named me heather after a woman who taught him to read after he dropped out of school when he was in grade three. So that was my first name, and for a long time my middle name was Who. I had countless last names like, Heather who use to go out with Derek. Heather who kissed Marco at the dance. Heather who told Jeremy that her name was butterfly. Heather who had her shoes stolen in the park. Heather who wears that ugly blue ski jacket. Heather who has a sister in juvie. Heather who has a dad who used to rob banks. Heather who thinks she's better than every one because she says she was reincarnated. When you get your name, you are just a little baby and have no say about the matter. Your parents could get your name from anywhere. You could have a name that comes from an ugly relative or out of the Bible. It could be something they heard shouted out at the swimming pool. It could be the Spanish name for a bird, a strange name, a name your parents spelled wrong and no one could ever say right. Still, when people learn your name, they think they know all about you. When my uncle sent me a pair of running shoes from Virginia, I wrote my name on the sides of both sneakers so no one could steal them from my locker. "Hi Heather," the man across for me in the bus said. It shocked me how he said, "Hi, Heather," like he knew me all his life. I'd seen him around, chasing pigeons and trying to pour beer on little kids in the park. I wanted to reach across the bus aisle and punch him in the face for knowing my name. Heater O'Neill is the author of Two Eyes Are You Sleeping, a book of poetry. Act Three, A Bad Day For Plates. Laura Tangusso has this story about how things changed in her life, and in her whole family's life actually, when events in their past that they interpreted one way suddenly got a different name. All my life, I thought my mother was difficult and crazy. My brother and sisters did too. That's how we thought of her for decades until recently, when we learned that there was a very different explanation for why she acted the way she did. We all have memories of craziness. Here are my sisters Leslie and Liz, and my brother John. I think I might have been in kindergarten. I went in the kitchen and she had broken all the dishes, just broken things everywhere. She was just breaking them. She just really lost it. She picked up a jar of relish, and she turned around and just whipped it, pitched it at the wall. And it smashed on the wall. And I just remember the relish dripping down the wall. And she was just doing her own thing. She was in her own little world. I remember being older in high school, and being at mom's. And she lost her comb, and she just was crying and angry. And I remember really consoling and saying, "Mom, you know, it's a comb. Here, it's right here." And I felt so bad. Mom went into a tirade about something and took a plate, a full-sized dinner plate, and whacked me on the top of his head. And I quickly left the house. And I remember sitting on a stone wall, pretty upset and stunned by what had happened. And I felt this warm sensation on the back of my neck, and I reached back with my hand. And I was actually bleeding from my skull. It wasn't serious that it required stitches or anything, but Mom did draw blood as they say. What made my mother confusing though was that she had another side of her. She was smart. She was adventurous. She took us to the original production of Hair in London. When I was 13 years old, she told me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm x. It's a book I still have. She had friends who thought she was a real character and fun. And even some of our friends thought she was cool. But for us, things always felt precarious, on the brink. She was unpredictable. She could be scary, and we all tried in our own ways to protect ourselves and make things normal. Being the oldest, I would try to keep the house in order, thinking somehow that would keep my mother in order. My sisters spent as much time as they could out of the house. Leslie once asked my parents if she could live with another family. I remember how when my sister was young, when she got upset she'd hold her breath until she passed out. I always figured this was her own special way of escaping. By the time we were adults, we'd all decided to keep our distance from her. None of us lived far away, but we'd easily go three, four months, or much longer, without seeing her. When we did see her, it was usually because we initiated it, not her. It was as if it just never occurred to her to make connections with her family. I remember once I was babysitting my niece and nephew, and I took them to pick up my mother so we could all do something together. When my mother got in the car, my nephew, who was four at the time, looked at me and asked, "Who's she?" It was a family joke about my mother, that if she was this bad now, just wait until she got old. And in fact, when she reached her 70's, and her health began to decline, she became a kind of nightmare. She had become severely arthritic and frail, but lied about seeing doctors and resented our efforts to assist her. To make things worse, she also started losing her memory. By the time she'd had a second hip surgery, she had become so confusing and agitated, she slugged a nurse. We weren't that shocked, but the hospital took it seriously, and she was sent to a psych unit. The doctors there did some routine CAT scans, what we were then told was so amazing it took months to fully absorb. On New Year's Eve of 1999, six months after hearing that report, I began recording my and my siblings' reactions. When the doctors heard our descriptions of her behavior, combined with what they saw her scans, they said that it was very possible that she has had some brain damage most of her life. And I think that for me-- I don't know but I think maybe too for my sisters and brothers, that was just one of the most stunning moments in all of this for me because all my life I just thought that my mother was just difficult. That's the way she was. I just thought she was just that way. But when I heard it from someone else, and when they said they had even physical evidence of it, it just changed things in an instant. The CAT scans showed that my mother has frontal lobe syndrome, which is a shrinkage of the frontal lobe of the brain. She may have been born with it, or it may have been the result of some childhood illness or accident. In any event, for as long as we've known her, she's had it. Just with that diagnosis, there's a sense of relief because it's no longer an unknown. Prior to that, I think that I wrote mom off as being a very malicious person. And I just used to think that there was a nasty side of her personality that she was in control of. And I guess that was what I learned, is that the bad side of her personality was not necessarily something that she was in control of. It was an enormous thing to take in. She'd always been a mystery that we never imagined we'd understand. She'd done so many things that were confusing and scary. She'd blow up at such small things, like when my brother put too much soap in the sink. My mother got so enraged she put them in his room, said he was sick and threatened to send him to an institution. Suddenly, it didn't seem all her fault. My mother was put on medications, which slowly began to help her. She stopped being antagonistic. She showed appreciation for us and the staff, and she acted gracious in ways I had never seen before. After a month and a half in the psych hospital, she was moved into a nursing home. But by then, she was experiencing serious memory, and I felt like I was both gaining and losing a mother at the same time. Hello. Mom. Hi. Hi, it's Laurie. I know. Hi, how are you? Good, how are you? Fine, thank you. So it's your birthday this weekend. It's my birthday? Yep, March 5. Good lord, I forgot all about it. Sunday. Sunday. And how old am I going to be on Sunday. Let's see. Oy, something I'd rather not think about. You can hear that my mother is losing her memory, but when I listen to this conversation, what strikes me most is the ease in our voices, how normal we sound, the way my mother laughs at herself. I mean mom hugged me three times today, kissed me goodbye twice, thanked me so very much for what a great day. And I don't remember mom ever saying that stuff. We got this six to eight week window of mom being Mrs. Wonderful. I mean she just couldn't have been any more upbeat or radiant and fun to be around and laughing. And just looking so much better, and having good color in her skin. She had put on weight. I mean I hadn't seen mom wear makeup in a bazillion years, fixing her hair. And it was just really sad because I'm thinking, wow, what would life have been if mom had been this person when I was growing up? It's made us all wonder what would she have been like. Maybe she would have stayed married to my father. Maybe she would have published one of the books she wrote instead of destroying everyone. And maybe it wouldn't be so remarkable to us now when she behaves in normal ways. It's also hard not to wonder about how we would have been different. Would there be more grandchildren? Would one of us be a published novelist? Would we be happier? But of course, these are possible questions. Mom did a lot things that affected my childhood, and I'll never forgive her. Of all my siblings, my sister Leslie may have had the most difficult relationship with my mother. Leslie is the youngest, and was the only one who ever lived alone with her. There was no one else around to cushion her from my mother's craziness, and as soon as she finished high school, Leslie joined the army to get herself away. It was very stressful, very confusing for me to go through a lot of change that she put me through. And I understand that she was probably sick at the time, but I don't know. I guess I just haven't worked through it enough. She asked me once how my childhood was. "Did you have a happy childhood?" was how she phrased it. We were just out, and we were at a restaurant eating. And we just having a conversation about nothing of any great importance, just small talk I guess. And she just came out with this question. Maybe she was lucid at that moment, and she just needed to know. And I told her I did. The other night, I went to visit my mother at the nursing home. As we were leaving her floor to go out to dinner, my mother wanted to stop by the activities room to say goodbye to some friends. A man named Patrick, who's in a wheelchair and can't speak very well, called out in his slow voice, "Hello Dorothy." My mother looked directly at him, and in a loud, stern voice said, "And you, get out of that chair and take a walk for heaven's sake." For an instant, I cringed, flashing back to the countless times my mother was inappropriate in public. But then Patrick started laughing, and my mother started laughing. And as often happens now, I was reminded how much has changed. Laura Tangusso is a teacher and visual artist in Boston. This is her first story for the radio. Act Four, You Call That Love? Consider please the word, love. Love between mothers and children, love between spouses. Once the word is applied to a feeling, is it possible that we are not all referring to the same thing? Jonathan Goldstein has some thoughts about that question. If there was no such word as love, our vocabulary would be richer, and we'd have to struggle harder to find the right words. Everyone would be so long winded and Shakespearean in their range of emotional expression. The word love came along and wiped out all sorts of terms in a semantical bloodbath. Without the word love, people would speak in terms of sensations, like the sensation of standing waist-deep in a tub of warm plum sauce. Or the sensation of being tickled on the back of the knees. Some would say they felt like they had just swallowed a honey-soaked boxing glove, and others might say that they were feeling like their guts had been yanked out and spread across the kitchen floor. Without the word love, you would get wedding invitations that would say things like, "On July 15, join us at the Five Holy Martyrs Church of Worship to help celebrate Barry Lyscinzy's feeling of aimless goodwill that he's decided to direct onto Robin Krupka, who's receptive to the idea of being with a man she's fairly certain will never inflict hurt on her." Sometimes we call something love because we don't know what else to call it. When I first started dating Holly, there was one night where I was double-riding her back home from downtown on my bike. And she kissed my neck and rubbed my back through my tee shirt. We were going uphill, and she knew I could use all the encouragement I could get. We had spent the evening with some friends we didn't especially like, just because we didn't have the heart to say no to them. "We should go out more often," she said from behind me. "The way I hate everybody makes me love you more." Was that a moment of love, or merely an instance of lack of hate? With Christiane, I thought I couldn't be in love because her knees were too big. They were the size of grapefruits, and I could not see myself being in love with a woman whose knees were that big. They were ludicrous really. My thinking was that it was a good thing they were so ludicrous because they kept me firmly anchored. If I thought for even a second that I might be falling in love, all I had to do was think of those big, fat knees of hers, and then, one day, I found myself kissing them. I had to leap over a great inner hurdle to get to that, but it wasn't love that was on the other side. It was just self-congratulatory pats on my own back over how I could move beyond pettiness like that. When I was 16, there was a summer I spent in Wildwood, New Jersey, where one night while walking down the boardwalk feeling lonely and depressed, a girl a few years older than me came spinning down the boardwalk, her arms spread out. She came right towards me, and then, when we were face to face, she kissed me. Just like that. Because she was drunk or stoned, but she had kissed me. For the rest of the summer, I couldn't pass a woman on the boardwalk without thinking that we should somehow be meeting in a kiss, that that's how life should really be. In that moment, where our lips touched, the way it suddenly brought into alignment the private, unspeakable hopefulness in the heart with the uncontrollableness of the outside world, it felt like as surely as anything else I've ever experienced, a moment of love. I say this as an adult who has had serious relationship since, and I can't think of another word but love to describe what I felt that day on the boardwalk. And that was it. She just walked on. When I was a little kid, my mother's favorite things was to crane her head through a door frame or around a corner and bite me or my sister on the ass while explaining, "Boy, is this a tuckus." I spent much of my childhood walking around our house always on my guard, always feeling like she could strike at any moment. She was never really any good with words, so this was sort of her version of a love sonnet. At least that's how I've chosen to see it. You could also say it was filthy and damaging, but if you want to see something as love, or even need to see it as love, and you call it love, it feels a lot more like love. Jonathan Goldstein is one of the producers of our program and author of the great novel, Lenny Bruce Is Dead. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Wendy Dorr, Jonathan Goldstein and Starlee Kine. Senior producer Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Mr. Todd Bachmann and Diane Cook. Music help today from Mr. John Connors. If you'd lke to buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at the WBEZ in Chicago. Look it up in the book, or call 312-948-4680. Or visit our website where you can buy tapes. Or actually you can just listen to our programs for free online, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. [FUNDING CREDITS] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. Whenever I pass Torey in the hallway, he turns and whistles. And he says-- Boy, is this a tuckus. Sure he does. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio international.
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From WBEZ Chicago, this is This American Life, and I'm Ira Glass. The story that we bring you today is a kind of classic mystery story, but a classic mystery of a very particular kind. It's a real life Hardy Boys story, or maybe an episode of Scooby Doo. There's an old abandoned house. Some kids stumble upon it. They decide to break in. And then at that point, they kind of hit the jackpot kid-wise. The place is filled-- and I mean filled-- with fascinating stuff. It's also creepy and mysterious. And there are all kinds of tantalizing clues about what happened there, which they decide to uncover and which ends up taking years-- decades actually. We are devoting our entire show today to this one story, The House Near Loon Lake. We first broadcast this show in 2001. If you're in your car right now as you hear this, I hope you have a long drive ahead of you, so you can stay tuned. If you're at home and it's night, you might consider turning down the lights. Adam Beckman tells the tale. It was my brother's idea to go down to the lake. We brought an M80 firecracker, and we wanted to detonate it in the shallow water where we used to swim. We were 11, and it was late fall of 1977. We were visiting a place called Freedom, New Hampshire, a small town of a few hundred people, just across the border from Maine. My dad had volunteered to do some maintenance work at a summer camp I had once gone to. My brother Kenny, best friend Ian, and I went along. We'd been inseparable growing up. But now Kenny had started hanging out with an older crowd. And I'd been seeing less and less of Ian since I just transferred to a new school. I was in a funk about losing touch with Kenny and Ian. And so for me, the stakes for the weekend were a little higher than usual. In normal times, we like to go shoplifting or set things on fire. That Halloween, we'd taken cans of WD-40 and gone from door to door, spraying it in the mouths of jack-o'-lanterns until flames burst out their eyes, and they blew up in balls of fire. This is my brother Kenny. He's now 37, and he's a scientist. I think Ian's mom used to worry a little bit about Ian spending too much time with us or being brought under our bad influence. Because I think we taught Ian about throwing woodchips at cars, and we taught Ian about unfolding paperclips so that you could shoot them at people and so on. So we were wandering around, looking for something to do. And we saw the house. It was gray, weathered, and leaning precariously at one end. The windows were boarded up from the outside. Two old cars, probably from the 30s, sat in the yard. One of them had a tree growing up through a hole where the engine had been. At the back of the house, we found a window that was broken, and I remember peering in into near darkness. I remember it was kind of a dare kind of thing. That's my friend Ian. It was one of these things where we just would say, you know, I'd go in that house. Wouldn't you? And you would say, yeah, I have no problem going in that house. And Kenny would say, yeah, that house looks fine. And none of us really wanted to go in that house because we're all scared. But we did. Ian was the skinniest, so it was decided that he should go in first. He slid sideways through the broken panes, so he wouldn't get cut, and disappeared. After maybe 10 seconds, he scrambled back out, clutching a newspaper. It was brown, and I remember it crumbled in our hands. The headlines said something about Nazis invading. That was all we needed. One by one, we climbed into the house. It was dark inside. The only light came in through little cracks between the boards that covered the windows. The floor felt soft underfoot. And as my eyes adjusted, I could see that it was covered with a layer of filthy clothes. Junk was everywhere. Actually, we couldn't walk around on the floor because you couldn't see the floor in most places. It was just jammed with more stuff than you could live with. Because I remember there were a couple of rooms you couldn't go into for how much stuff that was jammed in there. I was careful to remember how we got in, in case we had to find our way out in a hurry. We were all very quiet. We'd seen enough horror movies to know that joking around could get us into trouble. Here's Ian. We did not spread out. We stuck probably almost hip to hip. And our backs were glued to each other. And Kenny was maybe looking the other way, and his back was kind of-- so we were sort of like this little star of people walking through the house. And Kenny is like one of the worst people to go into a situation like that with. Why do you say that? Because he's very jittery. And he always will kind of mumble about maybe what the worst thing might be that might next happen. Like, I bet somebody is going to come out of that closet. Some rooms were in total disarray, with things strewn about like they'd been rummaged through. But then there were these little areas where things were untouched. In the kitchen, dishes were stacked on open shelves. Pots and pans cluttered the sink. And the pantry was stocked with canned food. I picked up a container of Hershey's syrup, and it felt heavy. A salt and pepper shaker sat on the kitchen table. The main sense I had was of disaster. This is my brother Kenny. As if people had been kind of toodling along in their everyday lives, and something terrible had happened. Something catastrophic had happened to the people in the house, so catastrophic that no care had been put in arranging, or sorting, or editing any of the contents of their lives. And there was a feeling as we sat there that this time capsule hadn't been opened in 50 years. Hanging in the kitchen was one of those calendars they give out at gas stations. It was dated December 1938. In the bedroom was a pile of shoes, maybe 30 high, that had fused into one mass. On a nightstand, I found a pair of eyeglasses folded on top of a man's wallet. And I slipped them both into my jacket pocket. In another room was a bureau, and tucked in the mirror frame was an invitation to a dance at the town hall. Pinned to it was a rose that was completely withered. Kenny opened the closet door next to the dresser. And hanging there was a rotting white dress. We began to fabricate a little scene. A teenage daughter returns late from a dance with a rose. She pins it to the mirror and hangs her dress in the closet. And then something horrible happens. And that's when time stopped. Outside, squinting in the bright daylight, we raced back through town. Kenny and Ian were like kids coming off a roller coaster. But I had this sense of doom about the whole thing. I'd heard about the King Tut exhibit that was touring the country. I wondered if we'd be cursed, like the guys who'd found King Tut's tomb. Also, I had someone's wallet in my pocket. I took it out and showed Kenny and Ian. Inside was a bright green $1 bill, dated 1935, and a driver's license for a man named Virgil Nason. That night, while our dad drove us home, I put on the eyeglasses I'd found to make Kenny and Ian laugh. But then I felt bad about the joke. I didn't know anyone who died before, and now I was pretty sure I was carrying the wallet of a dead man. The next day, my brother would be going back to his high school buddies, and my best friend would be going back to our old school. I'd have to face the kids at my new school, where I hadn't made any friends, and it seemed like everyone was named Doug and played lacrosse. I'd always been a moody kid, but it was an unfocused sort of moodiness. Now that all this was happening in my life, my gloominess took on a new focus. I brooded about the Nason house. My homeroom teacher had been an instructor for Outward Bound. Throughout the year, he made us go solo in the woods around the school. I spent hours sitting out there, alone with my journal and a flashlight, brooding. The winter passed, and the only curse I suffered was grade seven. That spring, my parents went back to do their volunteer stint at the camp. This time, I brought a new friend named David. I knew it would impress him. We got up early and packed flashlights and our book bags. I think we even brought a canteen of water. It was raining as we climbed through the window of the house. Nothing looked like it had changed over the winter. And just like the first time, I had this acute feeling of being watched as we moved from room to room, touching things, opening up drawers, climbing up into the attic. David felt it, too. All their personal belongings were right there, so they felt so close. And I remember walking through some of these dark rooms, looking around, being afraid of perhaps uncovering something, some evil scene, or discovering that they were there, discovering that they had died there. I remember thinking that we were going to find a body in a closet at any moment. I mean, I remember there were some closets and cupboards that we just flat out didn't want to open or even open up the oven. You're just afraid that you might find something that you just didn't want to see. Do you remember the basement? I don't remember that. No, I don't remember the basement. Did we ever go down? We did go down into the basement eventually, didn't we? I still don't remember the basement. Did you go down the-- you didn't go in the basement. We never went into the basement. And here's why. The door to it had been blocked shot by a couch that was propped on its end, as if someone wanted to keep something down there from getting out. I remember uncovering-- finding a small doll whose face had been burned off. And I remember being terrified of that, thinking this must have been some scene of some horrible ritual. David has a really strong memory of a doll with its face burned off. Do you remember that? Oh yeah. Absolutely. That was scary. The minute you mentioned it, I've got the image of it. I mean there's something so creepy about a doll that's kind of been mangled. I remember discovering that there was these sort of smeared feces area of-- or smeared-- either it was animal or human. We couldn't figure that out. The poop on the bed, that was scary, too. It made you wonder, what the hell is going on in here? I think at the time, we thought, oh, gee, maybe people were crashing out here. So that fit into a whole story about, oh, some fugitive on the lam from justice who's hiding out in an abandoned house, or the town alcoholic who used to crash out there after a binge, or something like that. The strange part is, do people just pick up and walk out the front door one day and leave letters that are incredibly personal? I mean, these were important artifacts in their family. And if they did leave for some legitimate reason-- like you move, you pack up, you move-- you don't leave things like a wallet with money in it or your address book that has the birthdays written in it of your family members. Why do you leave things like that? How could you? We had a mission. The mission was to find out as much as we could about the family who had lived there. And all over the place were letters and pieces of paper. And each one was a potential clue, so we sat down in this dingy, kind of musky house. And we started to read. November 29, 1933. Dear Mr. Nason, I've checked up your case quite thoroughly and find that you have already had as much, if not more, work than most people. I find also that you were working a car and a truck and that your son has a car and a truck. Also, that your team is working hauling cut lumber. So long as a man has anything at all, he has to use it, as we have to give work to the people who have nothing at all. Under these circumstances, you do not qualify for work at this time. Signed, the Office of the County Supervisor of Relief. Dear Mama, I'm staying over tonight and go to the dance. Artie and I have had a fight. He thinks I'm going out with Eddie. I may, I don't know. I don't want him to know where I am, so don't tell him. Come over to the dance and bring my shoes, the black spike ones. Now come over, Mama, and don't be mad. Don't even tell PT. Now Mama, please don't be mad at me. Mr. Jackson is ugly today. Be sure you get Dad to come to the dance. There's a ball game tonight. Over the next two years, I returned to the Nason house four times in all. And each time, I came back with more clues about what happened. I read these letters over and over, trying to decode them, convinced that the answer about the family's downfall was hidden in some seemingly trivial comment or offhand reference. This note is written on school paper by a young girl, who was probably my age at the time. Dear Clyde, I wanted a boyfriend, so I thought I would write to you, darling. There's no other boy around here that interests me as you do, Clyde, darling. Call me up, Clyde, darling. When I saw you last night over at Pink's, I thought I would go crazy because I love you so. From your girlfriend, ED. We had to take things that could help us unravel a puzzle. I mean, I don't think we even thought of it being private property at the start because it was just abandoned, and no one cared about it. We read notes from doctors and found bills from creditors. We scanned library past due notices and studied postmarks and came up with lots of ideas about why the place had been left. We started to think, gee, maybe these people had their house foreclosed and were thrown out by bankers. Because it does seem as if somebody might have been shut out of the house, with all of the objects inside. One of my favorite theories was that the father died at maybe the same time the sons had to go to war. Because we're looking at papers that talk about war starting and thinking about how a couple of events with an old father and a couple of sons could very quickly finish a family. I remember finding information about bedding. I think we saw I think they were tickets or a schedule of a dog track or a horse racing track. And the story we made up was, oh, these people had lost all their money gambling. We needed to find someone who could give us some answers, a person who knew the family or a distant relative. Freedom is a small town. Someone must have known what had happened. But when we'd go ask down at the general store or the post office, people gave us the cold shoulder. This confirmed to us that they were part of the conspiracy to bring this family down, or at least part of the cover up. In retrospect, I realized the adults may have brushed us off because we were 12 years old. It was David who found the breakthrough clue-- a matchbook, matches intact, soiled but legible. It said Stop and Shop at Nason Grocery, Freedom side near Effingham Falls Bridge. We rode over and ditched our bikes under the bridge. There were two or three houses on either side, all big old Victorian buildings. But it was obvious to us which one was the Nason Grocery. There were a couple of ancient gas pumps outside and a resting Moxie soda sign. A rope held the door closed, but we were able to squeeze through. The first thing I saw when we went through the door were the boxes of Cornflakes that lined the walls. The Nason Grocery was a completely intact, perfectly preserved store from the 1960s, with products still on the shelves. By the cash register, there were magazine racks and rows of candy. There were glass countertops displaying fishing gear and stacks of canned vegetables, corn and green beans. Some of the cans had exploded from years of heating and freezing, which we thought was cool. Upstairs, there were a few rooms that must have been an apartment. Being in a store all of the sudden reminded us, gee, we're breaking and entering in a place that's got candy. There was a small safe under the counter. And when I turned the handle, the door swung open. Inside, I found four silver dollars and three Kennedy half dollars. I also found a $5 gold coin from 1892. I took the coins. I spent the eighth grade kind of detached from school. I'd stare out the window at the falling snow and think about the drifts that must've been blowing through cracks in the house. Or I'd lie awake at night and imagine how still and cold it would be in there. Instead of doing homework, I spent a lot of time reading through my box of Nason letters, drawing up a family tree from the clues we'd found. Every reference to New Hampshire became relevant to the mystery. I'd sit at breakfast and stare at a tin of maple syrup and think about the Nasons. I was pretty sure that if there was some way I could support a family researching abandoned houses, that it would be my vocation in life. I was 13 years old, and I had a crush on a house. I hadn't told my parents much about it. I was afraid they'd shut us down over fears we'd get hurt or arrested. But I remember feeling that I wanted a grown up to see it, to confirm that we hadn't imagined the whole thing. So I started to tell my mother about it. But I could see I wasn't getting it across how amazing it was. So that spring, I led my mother across the field of weeds and watched as she climbed through the window of the house. I was a little appalled-- more than appalled when I went inside. It was much more-- a much greater disaster than I had imagined. Also, a much greater mystery than I had imagined. And in many ways, much more interesting for that reason. My mom proved to be quite a sleuth. She drove me to the town cemetery, where we found plot after plot of Nason graves. There was Ivan Nason, died 1943; Bertha, died 1968; Virgil, whose dollar bill and driver's license I had, died in 1974; and Jesse, who died in 1969. There was another Jesse William who had a birthday, but there was no date of death. So our theories of a car carrying the whole family into a ravine, of the war, of sudden plague, of the whole town rising up against the Nasons and massacring them, these no longer made sense. Whatever had driven the family from its home hadn't been sudden. The circumstances were more complicated than anything I'd imagined. That winter, I had my first nightmare. I was in the house rummaging through things, and the Nasons were there in the walls watching me. And they weren't friendly. The next year, I didn't go to New Hampshire. I'd started high school and was finally making friends. There was less brooding in my life. And what brooding was left had to do with girls. My mother went up on the semi-annual work weekend at the summer camp, and she brought my sister along. When they returned, they told me a story that made my blood run cold. Tell me about the time that you went up with Claire. What happened? That was a big mistake. I think we were both very embarrassed. We were embarrassed. We were both very embarrassed. Yeah. Yeah. I felt I was angry. You were angry? I was. No, we blew it. We blew it, sort of in a sense. What happened was this. My mother had brought my sister into the house, and they'd seen a child's crib rotting away in the attic. And they decided to take it. So they drove my family's bright orange Volvo station wagon up in front and went in to get the crib. There was no way one could bring that crib down the stairs. And finally, I found a piece of rope somewhere, tied it up, and we lowered it down the window. Outside the window? Yeah. Outside the window of the house? Yeah. And that's when a boy walked by and saw it. We saw him see it. We saw him see it. And we realized uh oh. The boy returned with two women, who told my mother and sister they had no right being in the house. My mom argued, asking them why, if someone somewhere had an interest in the property, they were letting it rot. The woman said it was none of her business and that she'd better leave. I felt betrayed. The scene my mother had described-- the orange car, the dangling crib, the confrontation in the middle of the road, people in Freedom had a word for greedy city folk from Massachusetts and elsewhere who came to town, plundering for antiques. They called them Massholes. That's what we'd become, and I felt sick about it. I collected all the objects and letters I'd found and put them in a small wooden fish tackle box I'd found in the Nason grocery store. I tucked the box up in our attic, and I never went in the Nason house again. Three years later, I took a trip through New England with Ian, and we decided to take a detour to Freedom. I stopped the car where I thought the house stood. Ian remembered it being further along. So we parked and walked up and down the road. But the house was gone. All that remained was an outline of the foundation in the dirt. We drove to the bridge to see if the store was there, but it wasn't. We couldn't tell if the buildings had been torn down or if they'd burned. But they were gone, as was, I thought, any answer I'd ever get as to why they'd been left in the first place. I was having the nightmare regularly now. Each time, it was the same. I was in the Nason house or some version of it. But now undead Nasons were leaving their hiding places in the walls and attacking me. It was a terrifying dream. And I had it many times over the next 20 years. OK. So there's plenty in here. This summer, I went to visit my mother and looked through the box of things I'd saved from the Nason house. All the years I'd spent away from home, she'd kept the box, carefully labeled and stored through four moves. There. Uh huh. Yeah, I remember that. You see? Yes, the wooden box. You see, that's the wooden box that I remember. And I think it has things in it. It should. The box was as I'd left it, a little makeup case with powder still inside, the eyeglasses, some children's records, and the coins, photographs of the family, the letters. And there were newspapers. Right on top was the one Ian found that very first day. Oh, and this newspaper is very old. Boston Sunday Globe, look at that. "After marching--" Jesus, [INAUDIBLE]. "After marching into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, Hitler and Chamberlain exchanged speeches. Nazis stayed there, and Chamberlain said he mustn't do it again." [LAUGHING] April 16, 1939. And my-- yeah, my grandparents were already in exile because of this taking of Czechoslovakia. Hm. When my great-grandparents fled their home in Czechoslovakia, they'd left furniture, paintings, letters all very suddenly and never returned. My mother tells me that all those things probably still exist somewhere. With that in mind, she couldn't bear to see the Nason things rotting away like they had. And here's a spoon. [SIGHING] It's all very melancholy, all these little remnants. Why is it melancholy? The abandonment. The abandonment is melancholy. In a way, it's worse than throwing away, much worse. I can understand one family being obliged to flee or run, or abandon, but that nobody else cared, that it was so overwhelmingly abandoned by everybody, that nobody had cared to solve something, to resolve something. That was very offensive to me. That was-- you know, it was like leaving a corpse. You don't leave corpses. And that's a little bit the feeling that I had, that here was a carcass, a carcass of a house, of a life, of a private-- And nobody cared to pick it up and give it a proper burial. I thought that it was important that somebody should care, that somehow somebody was leaning over these words, reading them, unfolding these letters that somebody had bothered to write. And it really didn't matter that it was an 11-year-old boy who cared. Objects have lives. They are witness to things. And these objects were like that. So I was, in a way, glad that you were listening. There was one letter in particular that my mother and I couldn't get out of our heads. It was different from the others. And I'd kept it separate in a plastic Ziploc bag. It was mildewed and barely legible. "April 18, 1940, Laconia Hospital. My darling, excuse writing. It's the best I can manage. They brought me to the hospital here Tuesday night at 8:30. The baby was born prematurely at 3:00 yesterday afternoon. I am writing to you-- writing for you before I name him. What are we going to do? I'm nearly crazy. Did you get my telegram? Be sure to bring the $20.50. I am weak and can't write more. Hurry. I may die. But I love you more than ever. I registered here as your wife. I knew it would be better. With all my heart and love, come quick." Underlined, what, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I can hardly stand it. I can hardly stand it. I've thought about her so often. I've worried about her. I've worried about that kid. I've never forgotten these. Yeah. I remember finding that. I think you explained to me what it was about. I don't think I understood. Yeah. Back home in New York, I started doing research on the internet, working off the list of Nason names I'd found in the cemetery. Eventually I found this posting in a genealogy website. "Nasons of Freedom, New Hampshire, looking for relatives of Jesse Nason and his wife Bertha. Any info from their kids or grandkids and pictures would be awesome. They are my great-great-grandparents." The person who'd written it is named Samantha Thurston. I sent her an email confessing everything. And this is what she wrote back. "Hello, Adam. I'm very interested in what you found and almost wish you had taken all that you found. Jesse and Bertha are my great-great-grandparents. I don't know a lot about them, but they did have a store in Freedom, New Hampshire and were well known. We exchanged a few more emails and made plans to meet. Samantha said the immediate family either didn't have many answers or didn't want to talk. Her last email to me included this cryptic postscript about the Nasons. "They might not be what you'd expect. They are a rough crowd." The line is followed with three exclamation points. Coming up, one of the rough crowd meets one of those meddling kids, in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. We're devoting our entire show today to just one story, a real life mystery, "The House Near Loon Lake." We first broadcast today's show in 2001. Adam Beckman resumes his tale. In August, I drive north to New Hampshire to meet with Samantha Thurston, the woman from the internet, and see if I can find someone to talk to me about the Nasons. I've brought the box of Nason stuff with me. It's small, about a foot square. Inside are family letters, the coins I took from the grocery store, the can of Hershey's syrup from the Nason's kitchen. I'm hoping to give it to someone who cares about the stuff. If not, I plan to bury it on the spot where the house stood. At the turnoff from Route 25, I take a short bypass called Nason Road. On the way into town, I stopped to get directions from a woman working in her front yard. She's wearing a sweatshirt that says Nason Landscaping. Samantha had told me that the Nasons either didn't know what had happened to the house or didn't want to talk. She also said that everyone would know I was in town. It's hard not to feel a little paranoid. Here I am, an outsider from New York City, come to town with details about the past, digging around for more details. I'm apprehensive about what kind of reception I'll get. I arrive in Freedom August 2 and a parade is marching through the center of town. It's Old Home Week, the annual homecoming festival, an event created by the governor to combat problems of abandoned homes and farms in New Hampshire, all the way back in 1898. After the Civil War, young people had left the state in droves for better land and opportunities they'd noticed elsewhere. I'd last visited in the 1970s. And a few things have changed since. The town's only store has been replaced with a shop for tourists selling tea doilies, hand-dipped candles, and Beanie Babies. Farming is pretty much dead. And city people have moved in because they love how charming it is. The place is so self-consciously quaint that you feel like you're on a movie set about a small town, tidy with just enough dilapidation around the edges to be rustic. The parade moves past the old town hall, the one shop across the town's only intersection to the cemetery, then turns around for another pass. The theme for the parade this year is We Are Freedom. When I marched in the parade as a kid, the theme was Freedom of the Press. I dressed as a radio reporter and pretended to interview the spectators, an irony so bizarre I don't really know what else to say about it. That afternoon, I check into the only place to stay in town, a bed and breakfast called the Freedom House. I'd been concerned that some distant relative of the Nasons might own it, part of the rough crowd. I shouldn't have worried. The owner's a New Yorker. There's Princess Di memorabilia in the library. And my room's painted bright pink. In fact, it's been called the Ooh La La Room. I've had some people from Paris here, came in and said, ooh, la, la. But anyway. Patrick Nealy is part of the new breed in Freedom. In the five years he's lived here, he's had the B&B meticulously restored. Antique toiletries and bottles of talcum powder line the shelves of the washroom. On a hallway table, silk gloves rest on top of a purse next to a pair of opera glasses. His things are just like the stuff in my box of Nason knickknacks, only better quality. Standing there with a dirty little wooden box under my arm, I feel sort of pathetic. And when Patrick starts talking about how people can create instant ancestors out of old junk, it doesn't make me feel any better. I've pieced together histories through photos. We've come up with photographs. I have a number of instant ancestors in this house that I've kind of-- to create the ambiance. And in a few instances, I've tried to trace whatever I could about them. Patrick's learned a lot about the history of the town. So I ask him about the Nason house. He doesn't know anything about it, but he does say that a Nason cousin named Rachel Mulvy once owned this very building and that she lived here, and died here. I think that Rachel's still in the house. I've had a few guests tell me they've heard someone walking on the second floor. So I don't know that you'll hear it, but I mean, I've heard people down at the end rooms-- I usually don't tell them, but she was a little old lady. So you might hear little slippered feet. And we've had a few things with lights, light bulbs suddenly breaking. I have a couple of days to kill before my meeting with Samantha. And at breakfast, Patrick suggests I talk to a few locals who might have known the Nason family. The first one on his list lives right across the street. Well, my name is Gail Holmgren Bickford. I came here at the age of six months with my parents and have spent most of my summers here. What else would you like to know? Do you remember-- do you remember the Nason family? Of course. They were scruffy little kids. They were always kind of disheveled and half-dressed, and needing to be washed. They were real-- what do you call it, from the-- the ones who went across on the covered wagons and never got to school? Really? Well, I guess maybe they did go to school, but I think they went barefoot. They were sort of scary to go by there. If we walked to the beach, you went pretty fast to get by that house. Why? I don't know exactly. I think the firemen burned it down for a practice session. What was their status in the town? Were they ostracized? I don't know. I don't know anything about that. And I don't know the whole family setup, but one of them was into race horses and made quite a lot of money, I think, in race horsing. I asked Gail if she thinks financial hardship brought the family down, but she can't confirm anything. About 1940-something, they build a bypass so that the main Route 25 did not go through town anymore. And then the town began to die out. There was no reason to come to town. And then the stores lost business. And they began to close up one by one. I have no idea whether that's what hit that family, but there may be somebody around who knows. Nason, sure. Brought up with them. Carol Chase was the fire chief in Freedom about the time the house was burned. I find him sitting on his porch on a road outside of town. He's 92 years old and hard of hearing, but he does remember the fire. We just lit it with a match, newspaper and a match. Was the house empty, or was it full of stuff? Nobody lived there. Why did you start a fire? Why? Yeah. Well, they wanted it burned. Who wanted it burned? The people who owned it. That's about all I know about Freedom. People mind their own business. He looks away from me as he says this, and I take the hint. Later that day, I learned he's related to the Nasons by marriage. In fact, he Samantha's grandfather. I spend some time worrying over why he never mentioned this. That afternoon, I go to a junk shop on the outskirts of town, discarded appliances, clothing, and a surprising number of old family photos. The owner, John Woodard, salvages most of this stuff from traumatic moments in people's lives, a divorce or a death, or when they move from a house to a retirement home. As it turns out, back in the mid '70s he got a call about the Nason house. They were getting ready to knock down that house. And a guy called me up. And he said, gee, you ought to come over. He said, there's boxes and boxes of old whiskey bottles with paper labels and all this stuff in there. I got 10 or 12 boxes. I've sold them over the years. Do you remember if there's anything in here that you got from the house, the Nason house? If I still got some that have labels. One more spot. Let's check down here. John walks me out past aisles of discarded family possessions to a barn filled with hundreds of bottles. Yeah, see, something like this. Pickwick Ale bottle, probably from about 1920, in the '20s. I'd taken a Pickwick Ale bottle opener from the Nason house and used it all through college. It was the one relic I'd kept for myself when I packed up the Nason stuff. Do you remember where in the house you found that? These were upstairs. They were upstairs in some boxes. Of course, the roof had fallen in on part of it, if you remember. And the upstairs was-- it was one of those you said, is it really worth taking a chance getting those boxes down from upstairs? But we did. John hands it to me. It's got the same veneer of rust on it that everything in the Nason house had. This is $5. He gives it to me for free, for my project, he says. I'm supposed to meet Samantha, my internet Nason contact, at the B&B at 1 o'clock. And she shows up 15 minutes early. A red pickup truck tears into the lot in a cloud of dust, and a tough looking woman in a flower print dress gets out and slams the door. Samantha's young, in her 20s. She's made up, hair tied back in a bow, but her demeanor is all tomboy. Well, I talked to the family yesterday, to actually Allen Nason. He's the one that I'm closest to out of the whole family. We talk, and it's like we've been living in parallel worlds. Samantha's been looking for clues about the family's history for 10 years. She tells me she's been scouring graveyards and reading through public records, trying to construct a family tree. She began her search when she heard rumors that she had Native American ancestry. She decided to find out if she did to get financial aid for college. Before long, she'd figured out her grandfather was, in fact, an illegitimate child of Ernest Nason, one of Bertha and Jesse's kids, although her grandfather was not the person in that letter my mom had remembered all these years. And they have a lot of hard feelings in the family as it is. Samantha's family, hearing what she was uncovering, wasn't too keen on her research project and didn't cooperate. It was like, go to hell away. I don't want to talk to you about this. It's none of your business. Well, it is. It's my heritage. It's my history. I left my box of stuff from the Nason house upstairs in the Ooh, La, La Room. I wanted to give it to someone in the family, but I wanted to be sure it would go to someone who'd care. As we talk, it becomes clear to me how much it would mean to Samantha. So I bring it down and put it on the floor in front of her. Wow. How do I get this open? It opens on the-- like that. Oh, neat. Oh my goodness. You even got papers. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was probably one of the first things we found when we went in the house. Oh my goodness. Ain't that neat? I can't believe this. This is unbelievable. You have no idea what you've done. She opens an envelope with her great-great-grandmother's name handwritten on it. She handles it incredibly gently. I watch as she lets the contents fall into her hands. It's a bunch of tiny recipes cut out from a newspaper. Oh my god. And you know what? I never even knew them. Oh, my. That's so cool. Oh, my goodness. I hope they appreciate it as much. I really do. It's actually a blessing that you had gone into that house during that time period. Because once it fell in, everything was scooped up, thrown in a dump truck, and taken to the dump. And all the memories, everything that they left behind that should have been divvied up so that it could've been passed down, was all lost. So it actually was a good thing that you were a nosy little boy. [LAUGHING] Samantha didn't know much about why the Nason house had been abandoned, but she told me a man named David Buzzwell, who lives across the street from where it once stood, might have some answers. On the way up to his house, I noticed a sign. "Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot twice." David's sitting on his front porch with his friend Mabel Davis. How does it happen you want to know about the Nasons? When I was a little boy, when I was about 11 years old, I was in a summer camp here. Once we get talking, I realized the trespassing sign is David's idea of a joke. It's Sunday afternoon, and they're drinking Mudslides. Do you remember that house? Of course I do, honey. Been in it many times. Oh, really? When the Nasons were living there? Yeah, Mr. and Mrs. Nason were living there. And I can see Mrs. Nason now taking out a can of biscuits. Honest to god, I bet that pan was that big. Mabel's arms are spread wide as she says this. The image is pure Norman Rockwell. And frankly, it's a relief. And what were the Nasons like? Well, they were wonderful people, really. How would you say about Jess? All of his kids worked and worked hard. Both Mabel and David knew the Nasons and had been in their house. But David, like me, had only been inside after it was abandoned. Oh, it was full of treasures, old parlor sets, Morris chairs, advertising cans. The place was just packed with stuff like that. They were pack rats, anyway. They collected everything, everything. Why would they just-- why would they just leave all that? Don't ask me. Just the way they were. I would think the grandkids would want to-- Didn't worry about it. Didn't care about her? No, none of them. Why not? You know young people are. They don't care about old things today. Dave and Mabel tell me that Bertha died in 1968 and Jesse soon after in '69. And then things fell apart in the Nason family. When Jess died, one of the children was in charge. He was made the executor. He was the executor, yes, of the estate. And there were some that were very, very put out. They had to sign off and give him the authority to dispose of it. And some of them were not doing. And some would not do it. No. That is correct. It's a terrible thing to say, but as they died off one by one by one it made it easier, but it wasn't even settled when this person who was in charge settled the estate. He had died, and still it was left. And then the widow was paying the taxes all these years. And she said, well, I'm not going to continue to pay them. Let them go. I mean, I think there were one or two of the family left. And they didn't want to pay them. No. So she said, to heck with it. I'm not going to. So the town took it for taxes. I finally went to the town. And I said, that's a fire hazard. I built a new house here. People over there are poring around. I said they could step on a nail, a glass, a wire, and sue. It's not posted. So I said it ought to be burned. I was at my daughter's. And I was in her kitchen the day they were burning that. We could see the flames and everything. Oh, yeah, I remembered. I remember the fire department coming and burning it. Yeah. I had communicated with Mr. Thompson. He said to me at the time, will you arrange with the fire department to burn it at a practice session? And I will give them $1,000 donation, which he did. And I said, thank god, because it was an eyesore. And people were in and out of it all the time. Was it still full of stuff when it burned? There was a lot of junk in there, yeah. Now the Nasons also had a store in Effingham Falls. There was an old-- Oh, yes, they certainly did. Jess and Bertha had the store right-- It wasn't Effingham Falls. No, it was still Freedom. Freedom. What do you remember about the store? Well, I know it did quite a business. It sold a lot of beer. And they had candy. Oh, yes. There was a glass showcase. And they had groceries. They had groceries. And that store was just packed with everything. You could hardly get through. Well, that's how Jess was. Yeah. Jess was like that, he just had a lot of stuff? Well, he was a keeper of everything. Do you remember when it closed or why? They both died. And none of the kids wanted to run it. Why would a family leave all their things, these precious things, not of value, but of great emotional value? No, no, but a sentimental value. Yeah. I've never really thought of it, but it seems rather tragic in a way. I mean, that was a large family. I mean, how well do you know people? How many of them were interested in knowing? And so the house and the store were abandoned because the kids didn't care. In some ways, this was bleaker than anything I'd imagined back when I was 11. I'd assumed a murder, or an illness, or an accident caused the Nasons to leave all these things behind, something out of the family's control. But in fact, it was the opposite. The family made it happen. They didn't care about the stuff, or they just didn't care to remember. Too bad they weren't here to tell you. They were characters, weren't they? Yeah. Nice people, but they were a breed that's hard to find. Well, they were the old school, David. Yeah, that's right. They made everything do. Yeah. But didn't everybody then? Those were the good old days-- Yeah, no kidding. --when we had everything but money. Yes, I guess so. You better believe you did. I had a swimming pool and a Mercedes. Well, of course you would, and a place for a pony. Members of the Nason family who declined to be interviewed on tape confirmed the story Mabel and Dave told me. Jesse and Bertha Nason lived in the house until 1946. That's when they opened a store near Effingham Falls and moved to the apartment above the store. They took what they needed and left the rest in the old house, using it as storage and keeping open the possibility that they'd move back someday. When Jesse and Bertha died, the fight over the estate began. Immediately their kids-- there were nine of them-- locked up the store until it could be resolved. The house stayed pretty much as it was. After 11 years, the fight was settled. The property was auctioned, the money was split, and the buildings were razed to the ground. I asked an elder Nason why they didn't clear out the precious things in the house. And she said, what precious things? It was full of crap. And I mean crap. As for the woman in the letter that my mother was never able to forget, no one knew anything about her or her baby. David and Mabel told me this just figures in a little town like Freedom. Are you kidding, honey? It's a "Peyton Place." Explain that. What do you mean? It's just like every other town. Yeah. There's nothing different. There are all of these little-- No. --skeletons in the closet and bedroom affairs. Yeah. Things would happen like in any typical, old town. Right? Yeah. It's all by gossip. It's all-- Yeah. Yeah. In retrospect, I know it was a little much, my obsession with the Nasons as a kid. I found this stuff in their house precious, so I assumed they would too. But of course, the relics in their house weren't about my life. They carried no memories, good or bad. It's possible that for the Nasons, they were reminders of an inheritance dispute or other disputes that they'd just as soon forget. When I was talking to my friend David about the Nason house, he told me this story. His wife's father had recently and suddenly died and left behind a house that no one in the family wants. So David and his wife, Susan, now find themselves involved in figuring out what to do with it. I feel like it's on the cusp of being abandoned. No one's living there. It's ripe for being vandalized. And what do you do with a house like that? And now, it's strange. I mean, it's tied up in this weird world of legal probate where you can't really do anything with the property. You just kind of have to maintain it until some future court date. The property's become a ball and chain. And Susan said an interesting thing, was, gosh, I wish that house would just burn down. And I thinking, gosh, well, why would you wish the house to be burned down? It's partly-- there's a lot of memories tied up in the house and emotions tied up between her and her dad, symbolized by the house. But something about it seemed relevant. I wanted to show Samantha the spot where the house had once stood. So in the early evening, we walked through town and onto Loon Lake Road. We crashed through the bushes for a while, hoping that we could find the old foundation or something. But there wasn't a trace. In fact, the very land where I remember the house was gone. The soil had been hauled away weeks before by bulldozers constructing part of the new Freedom Elementary School. Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure it was right in this flat spot. This is all new. Think it's through there. Because you have the stone wall. Later, when I was packing to leave town, I found a small scrap of paper on the floor that had fallen out of the box of Nason stuff. There wasn't any writing on it, but I actually hesitated at the trash can. It's not that I missed my box of clues. I'd felt relief handing them over to Samantha. In fact, I actually felt lighter. But I was glad to have a remnant, however small, of the Nasons. So I took the scrap in my bag. Adam Beckman. In the years since we first broadcast this story, Adam worked as the cinematographer and co-director for our television show. It's streaming many places online. Three of the people that Adam interviewed for this story have died since it first aired, Gail Holmgren Bickford, one of the Freedom locals, Carol Chase, the former fire chief, and Mabel Davis, the woman that Adam talked to on a friend's front porch. Our program was produced today by Wendy Dorr and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jonathan Goldstein, and Starlee Kine. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Additional production help on the rerun from Aviva DeKornfeld, Jarrett Floyd, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Special thanks today to Carol Ford, Madeline Eldridge, Ron Beckman, and Jason Bittner. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 650 episodes for absolutely free. Or you can download as many episodes as you want for extra convenient listening with the This American Life app. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who is fascinating. He describes one of his typical weekends this way. A teenage daughter returns late from a dance with a rose. She pins it to the mirror and hangs her dress in the closet. And then something horrible happens. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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OK, three boys, aged 13, 15, and 16. All three chose to appear with fake names on this radio program. And the fake names they chose, you ready? K-Rad, Mr. Warez, and Fred. Those first two names come from the world of computer hacking and software piracy. Mr. Warez, for example, that's "warez," as in "wares," as in "softwares," as in pirated softwares, illegal softwares. And as for Fred-- Why Fred? For no reason, man. There's got to be someone else named Fred out there. You see, anonymity was important given the kinds of things that we were discussing, namely credit card fraud, computer hacking, and the nature of hell. Well, from WBEZ in Chicago, this is Your Radio Playhouse. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our playhouse stage, small-scale stories of small-scale sin. Stay with us, won't you? So K-Rad, Mr. Warez, and Fred were trying to be criminals. But they were not too successful at this. And at a McDonald's on Times Square in New York City, they told all. Doesn't that have a nice, Hard Copy sound to it? "They told all." This was kind of an unpleasant McDonald's. Because it was in Times Square, they decided to have neon lights everywhere in this place. A crush of sweaty people at the counter, tourists, most of us. It was the middle of summer. Fred took charge. What do you guys want? I want a number one meal. OK, I'm paying for this. You're paying for my cab, OK? Whatever I can pay for. OK, we'll have a number one meal. They're actually in Manhattan for a computer hackers' convention this summer, and Fred was not used to the downtown prices. Oh my god. It's $5, man. You guys are chipping in. I can't pay for this. I think it's fair to say that one sign that your criminal career is not going so well is if you have to worry about the prices at McDonald's. But K-Rad, Mr. Warez, and Fred were involved in very low-level types of crimes. All of them involve computers. They pirated software. They scammed free CD-ROM games. They cheated one of the big online computer services out of a few hundred dollars in online time. All in all, they didn't steal very much. And they didn't steal very effectively. But they did try to steal. Take this phone scam, where they would call people at random and try to get a calling card number or a credit card number out of them. Basically, the way it works is this. You call up somebody. You say, "This is the AT&T operator. I have a priority collect call for--" so-and-so's name. And the whole point is you have to sound like you're not calling somebody up with the intention of getting them. You have to sound like you've been sitting in this chair for 10 hours, and you want to go home. So you got to go, "This is the AT&T operator. I have a collect call for Paul. Will you accept charges, sir?" "Uh, yeah. I'll accept charges." "All right, hold on one second." Then you tap on the keyboard. You say, "I'm sorry. You seem to have a restriction on your phone line. You can't accept collect calls to this line." And then they yell, and they go, "What do you mean, I can't accept collect calls to my line? I've been getting collect calls to this line for 20 years." And then, you've got to go, "Sir, there's nothing I can do about it. My computer says you can't receive a collect call on this line. Would you like to try an alternate billing method?" In which case they will proceed to either give you a calling card or a major credit card. And that, of course, is the idea behind the whole thing, to end up with a calling card number or a credit card number that is not your own, that you can use yourself. Now I should say that before you go out and try this yourselves, if you are thinking about doing this yourself right now, I should tell you one important fact. It doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because a good percentage of people, after the point at which they go through the mind-boggling experience of not understanding what it means to have a restriction on your line, because nobody knows what that means, then they'll just say, "Oh, this is too much trouble. Forget it. I won't accept the collect call." The other scams these guys run don't do much better. They tried to hack their way into the mainframe system of a big computer retailer. But they were caught and stopped before they got very far. They are such unaccomplished computer hackers that Fred himself was actually the victim of computer hackers twice. Someone broke into Fred's account on one computer bulletin board and used his account and his electronic mail to visit some of the nether regions of the net. Remember, you talked to the guy on IRC. There's this weird guy. This guy was going on all these sex channels. And he was wrecking my name and stuff. It was awful. You can't get pissed at him. I wouldn't get pissed at him, because that would be entirely hypocritical. I've said that if anybody ever steals one of my credit cards or ever hacks into my account or computer system, I will not care. And I will be perfectly allowable to that. To go and say, "I can't believe it. Somebody took my credit card." Well, so what if I did it to everyone else? I'm perfectly willing to let someone do that to me. Over the summer was when they really started to get serious about using other people's credit cards, which they call "carding." They met a guy who was good at this and who taught them some tricks. K-Rad and Fred ordered $1,600 in computer merchandise on someone else's credit card. They had it delivered to a neutral address. They picked it up. They sold half of it for cash. And one thing that's peculiar about this story is that these are rich kids. K-Rad and Fred live in a wealthy upstate community. They attend what is one of the most expensive, prestigious private schools in the country. But they steal. Fred believes that he has no choice. He really suffers over money. He's this skinny, young-looking 15-year-old. And he is perpetually strapped for cash. And he said that his parents couldn't help him much with money right now because they had just gone $500,000 into debt. Because they bought a house right before the depression and stuff. The recession, excuse me. I consider it a depression. I've noticed the effects. At one point, to get some cash, he actually sold the computer that his parents had bought for him. And I don't think they knew. His idea is that he wanted to replace the computer as quickly as he could with the help of a stranger's credit card. And he also wanted to get all the other things that the other kids at his expensive private school had. He wanted to have a microwave. He wanted to have a stereo. Basically, he just wanted to be like everybody else. I'm also pretty good at shoplifting. But my whole thing on that is that I will not steal anything if I have the money for it. And a lot of times, like the store at my school, like the grill, I steal from that a lot. But I also give them $10 for no reason if I have the money because I feel bad about what I've stolen. And if I ever get the money so I don't have to do this shit anymore, then I'm not going to do it. What's striking about this is how these boys want to convince themselves-- I think they really do-- want to convince themselves that they are good, and that what they do does not harm anyone. And if it does harm someone, there's always the reassuring thought that they keep very near at hand that someday they can make it up to the injured party. As noble as this sounds, this is one thing that I absolutely guarantee that sounds like the biggest load of crap anyone could ever say. But if I am ever in a financial-- We believe in you. No, no one should believe in me. This is the biggest "I'm really good inside." If I ever find myself-- and I've made this vow to myself-- in a good enough financial situation, I will repay everything I have ever done now. If I find myself making $2 million a year, I will send a $10,000 check to the company which I stole calling cards from. That is something I definitely want to do if I am in the financial situation to do it. K-Rad told me that the $1,600 that they charged to a stranger's Visa card was, in fact, a victimless crime, that the card owner would call Visa, have the charge removed from his bill. And that Visa figures a certain amount of fraud is just the cost of doing business. One thing that I've always said in all my doings is that I will never, ever do something that will severely hurt an individual person. OK? So for example, if it involves-- I would never mug someone. I would never beat someone up for money. I'd never shoplift. Well, maybe I-- no, I wouldn't shoplift. That's one of my favorite parts of the interview. Hold on. I'm just going to play that tape back. Because you can actually hear him-- he's struggling so much, you can actually hear him working it out out loud. Hold on, I'm just going to rewind for a second. --never beat someone up for money. I'd never shoplift. Well, maybe I-- no, I wouldn't shoplift. Because that is hurting the individual person. See what I mean? So we headed out of the McDonald's and back to the hotel where the computer hackers' convention was taking place. On the way, without any prompting at all, Fred elaborated on the idea that he was only stealing because he absolutely had to. I go to boarding school. And I don't have that much-- I don't have any money or anything. And I get really hungry and stuff. I have a fast metabolism. And seriously, I starve. And I lost 10 pounds in one week. And that's not good for someone who's really skinny, like I am. And then a lot of it is just stuff I want, you know? And yeah, I just really want to stress that in other ways, we're not bad people. And we don't go around trying to screw all people in any way we can. Because we're not at all. I mean, I do social work. I tutored kids. I do a lot of stuff which isn't necessarily evil and more good. But sometimes, it's just like, I don't know, man. I like doing it. I can't explain it. Talk about that part of it. What is the thrill of doing it? That's the first-- that was the reason I started carding. The reason was the thrill of going. When we went in there, it was like Mission: Impossible. We went in. We had gloves on and stuff. And we picked it up. We had it all worked out. We were connected. We had lookouts and stuff. And it's just a lot of fun. It's like you're doing stuff that is not exactly legal, not legal at all. And it's fun. By this point, we were back in the hotel lobby. We took the elevators up to the floor where the hackers' convention was taking place. K-Rad said that real hackers do not use their skills like this. They do not use their skills for personal gain. They don't do carding. They don't steal. The whole idea of computer hacking, for these guys anyway, is that it's a kind of pure, zen pursuit. It's an ends in itself. You break into the computer for its own sake and to look around, and for the knowledge of everyone, especially you. We stood in the hallway. People streamed by. We tried to move to a corner where we would not be overheard. And K-Rad said, actually, that they had never really talked about their illegal activities this much before with anyone. The most thing I'm worried about is I'm actually starting, for the first time, to say this all out loud, everything I've done. And suddenly, it doesn't sound as hacker, much, anymore. And I've known that ever since I moved into doing maybe some credit card thing. And that's why I'm, in fact, even considering giving up on doing all the carding and stuff like that, which seriously, I am. Fred then shot him this look. Because if K-Rad were serious, and they did stop carding, Fred would not be able to get a computer to replace the old one that his parents gave him. What about my computer? What? Your computer will come first. Jesus Christ, man. I want to get a gun and shoot you. All right, after your computer. The thing about a bad conscience is that it splits you in half. And Fred said that he had two different modes. That was the word he used, "modes." He said that sometimes he would think about what they were doing. And he knew it was wrong, and it would bother him. But mostly, he tried not to think about it. My worst fear is that I can end up going to hell for doing this. And that's my worst fear. Do you believe in hell? Yeah, I do. And you think you can go to hell for getting a computer on somebody else's credit card? I don't know. I hope not. I really hope not. It's always been my biggest fear. That's why I'm afraid of dying. I'm afraid if there's something I've done which just is like the straw on the camel's back, that's going to be what's going to do it. How big is this worry? Will this keep you up at night? Yeah, maybe for a couple minutes. And then I just sort of put it out of my mind, you know? His share of the carding profits was $800. I told him that from an adult's perspective, this did not seem like a lot of money. I didn't think you could do eternity in hell for $800. And as soon as I said this, I really regretted it. Fred's body language changed completely. It was like I was calling him a little kid. It was like saying that he was ridiculous to worry over something so small. It was just one of these moments. He got quieter, and he kind of pulled into himself a little bit. Then Mr. Warez spoke up. He said that sure, maybe by adult standards, this wasn't much money. But to them, it was a lot, that it was plenty enough to count. When is hell a possibility? Whenever you think it is, it is. More on this when our program continues. Well, this is Your Radio Playhouse. Now a little radio experiment. We told a Chicago playwright named Jeff Dorchen what K-Rad, Fred, and Mr. Warez said about hell and about sin and about their own relative badness in this world. And we asked Jeff Dorchen to write an original radio play that would pick up the themes where the boys leave off. So here's what he came up with. I'll call. Me too. Three 10's. Full house, aces and eights. Ooh. What do you got, kid? Four diamonds. You got nothing. See, if you had some where the numbers matched, or if they were in order, and there were five of them. But that, what you have there, that's nothing. My grandpa used to call that a kangaroo straight. My dad used to call it a Klondike. Klondike wins the game. No, Klondike doesn't win the game. Peter wins the game. Full house wins. I hate you, Peter. I don't blame you. Grandmother, be careful. Grazie. My deal. Straight, five card draw. Anything wild? No. Shut up. Ow. Watch it with those cards, man. Sorry. What's your problem today? He has sinned. Yeah-- yes, I have. How did you know? Your eyes. They are the eyes of an accused man, furtive, alert, the eyes of a nervous beast who, once a lover of gambols and jigs and standard metals, has been driven to nocturnal skulking by the pursuit of a relentless predator. He's got you there. 10,000 lira. Call. Call. Caleb, do you believe in sin? Hell, no. I believe in damnation, though. How can you believe in damnation but not sin? Predestiny. Take me. I was born damned. I'm cowardly, petty, intolerant, lazy, and just generally destructive. I knew I was damned the first time I heard the word. Your Calvinism relieves you of the responsibility for improving yourself. Shut up, kid. Ow! What are you doing? It's all right, GI Joe. I am strong. Yeah, Pete. The kid can take it. Now give me three. How many, Dondi? Four. You can't have four. The most you can have is three. OK. I'll take two. And two for the dealer. 5,000. Call. Call. What do you have? A pair of 9's. Dondi? Three onions. Those are spades, not onions. And you're supposed to match the numbers, not the suit, you little spaghetti sucker. I have a Klondike. You have garbage. How many times do we have to go through this? It's like rolling a boulder up a hill just to have it roll back down again, over and over and over. I will not make the mistake again, sahib. Don't call me sahib. Peter, what do you have? A pair of jacks. All right. Pair of jacks takes it. All right. Seven card stud poker, one-eyed royalty, red deuces, nines, and all odd-numbered clubs are wild. What do you guys think the worst sin is? Murder? Betrayal. Why do you say that? At the center of the ninth and innermost frozen circle of hell, Lucifer devours Judas eternally. Really? That's what they say. One million lira. I'll see that and raise you one. Call. I'm there. What do you got? Seven aces. Me too. So do I. All right, so there were a few too many wild cards. Let's hold the pot over. OK. Peter? Huh? Oh, sure. Leave it over. Do you think a sin is worse if say you, for example, you betray somebody? Then suppose you don't feel any remorse. Does that make it worse? Of course. Gentlemen, the game is Chicago low. Ace, no face, sevens, follow the queen. Wait a second, Dondi. Caleb, could I talk to you alone for a second, over there, by the window? Sure, Pete. I will go fetch us some delicious ginger ale. Good idea. What is it, Pete? Think the kid's trying to hustle us? No, I just wanted to talk, that's all. What's the matter? Nothing. Just I'm afraid of going to hell. What? Why? I just don't think I'm a very good person. That's ridiculous, Pete. You're a very nice guy. You write letters. I never write letters. Yeah, but what if you do something bad? How bad does it have to be? I mean if-- do you have to-- if you feel like it's bad enough to damn you, are you damned? I mean, if you don't feel any remorse? Is that it? You betrayed somebody and then didn't feel any remorse? Is that what all those pregnant pauses during the poker banter were about? Well-- How can you say you don't have any remorse when you're practically tearing your hair out worrying about going to hell? But being afraid of punishment isn't the same as remorse. Remorse is truly feeling apologetic for what you've done, not just worrying about being punished for it. And you don't feel sorry at all? No. Even though you recognize that what you did was wrong? That's right. You know, Pete, you're a very complex guy. Thank you. They went to sea in a sieve, they did. In a sieve, they went to sea. In spite of all their friends could say, on a winter's morn, on a stormy day, in a seive they went to sea. Dondi, what's with the old lady? The cigar smoke is causing her to recite "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear. Well, shut her up, will you? I can hardly hear myself think. Shut up, grandmother. I mean, what am I doing here? Who are these strange people? I don't remember deciding to come to Italy. What am I doing in Italy? Maybe to see the Pope? Just last week, I was in France, in Rouen, the town where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. And I was visiting the tower where she was held before her execution. And I was thinking about writing a letter, you know, apologizing. A letter apologizing to the injured party. I was looking down from the highest window in the tower. And just how you do-- you know, you try to tap into the place in yourself where you have truly apologetic feelings, because you want to be sincere. You don't want the letter to sound phony. Except I realized, I discovered that there was no such place in myself, that where that place should have been, there was just an empty hole. And it was frightening. It was like staring into the abyss. Go see the Pope. Ask for absolution. But you have to be repentant. I'm not repentant. You could just act repentant. That's what ritual is all about, going through the motions. No. I'd have to be truly sorry in my heart, or it wouldn't save me. That is a very rigid attitude. What do you mean? I can't just pretend to have remorse. You haven't even tried. I mean, the Pope's a very nearsighted, distracted old man. If you buried your face in your hands and pretended to sob, I'm sure he'd buy it. It's not a question of fooling the Pope. You know, I'm starting to think that you don't really want to help yourself. How did I get here? Why are we playing poker in Italy with a demonic little boy whose grandmother is dying in the next room? What was that? A peacock. Huh. What's that a symbol of? Pride. Look, there it is, in the middle of the cemetery. It's golden, a golden peacock in the middle of a graveyard. I wonder what it means. My advice is that you come up with the most positive interpretation you can. We're out of ginger ale. I can only offer you root beer. Oh. Aww. Well, that's all right. All right, gentlemen. The game is-- We know what the game is, you little pistachio masher. Who dealt this mess? Don't give me that bluffing baloney. You got a possible straight flush in onions. Do not mention onions, sahib. My grandfather was killed by Il Duce. Don't call me sahib. Talk is cheap, gentlemen. 2 million lira. Well, "The Golden Peacock" was written for Your Radio Playhouse by Jeff Dorchen. Jeff also played Caleb. Peter Handler played Peter. Lisa Stodder played Dondi and played the dying grandmother. How bad is bad? How bad is bad enough to count to send you to hell? Well, Michael Warr is a local poet and director of the Guild Complex here in Chicago. And he joins us in this, our radio playhouse. And Michael, you were raised with certain, very particular ideas about when a sin was bad enough to actually count. Yeah. I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. It was like my whole life was enveloped by what is a sin. And as a Jehovah's Witness, it was Armageddon or paradise. And at a very young age, I decided I did not want to live in paradise because there were these pictures of paradise. The pictures would always be idyllic. And there would be the lion lying with the lamb, everyone sitting around peacefully. And the fascinating thing about the Jehovah's Witnesses, and this is something that affects me to this very day, is that it was a very multicultural type of religion. And so I would look at these pictures. And I noticed that when there were black people in the pictures, that the sisters, their heads were always covered. And that was because there was a political issue that had not really been resolved. And that is in paradise, what would their hair be like? See, this is when the natural was a political statement. So that they didn't show them wearing naturals. And believe it or not, this was like a political awakening for me because in high school, these were serious issues. The natural was just like the Black Power sign. It was a political statement. So I said to myself, well, if the sisters can't wear afros in paradise, I don't want to be there. Now, you've brought some of your poems about your experience with these rules. And they're here. Actually, you're a very modern poet, and you've brought your color Macintosh, portable Macintosh, here. Why don't we flip it on? OK. Let's see if-- I don't know if you can actually call it a flip, but it's on. It's on. Yeah, I have a poem that I have written called "Rules That Don't Work." Smokey Robinson was a mulatto devil with [? Afro-Motownian ?] rhythm locked inside a black plastic analog disk. Every time he curled his snaking tongue to sing, Satan channeled Motown messages to the epicenter of some sinner's soul, making it shake like the quake in Zechariah, hard as Babylonian tablets and wet as the Red Sea. [SINGING] Baby, baby. Slow dancing was wicked. To avoid temptation, we were to dance 18 inches apart, a safe 18 inches. On the Oakland side of the bay, black 'hovahs broke all the rules. Having to rebel against something, as other black denominations were breaking windows, tossing Molotovs, and tearing down pillars of the state, they danced, never really measuring the distance between their sacrilegious mounds. Touching more than my ear, that first skintight slow song with sister Sheila Berry was so, so, so evil that a bolt of lightning could have crashed through the roof of that dingy, oil-scented, black-lit ghetto garage and struck me down with the evidence of sin still in my ignorant arms. Dying smiling but confused, not comprehending how her pelvis could be so simultaneously rigid and relaxed, rigid then relaxed, like that thing my father told me not to do. Was it the devil that made her move like that? Sunday morning, I asked my mother and don't remember her giving me an answer. Do you think that it's only possible to be heavily engaged in these issues, or it's much easier to be heavily engaged in these issues, when you are young? That is, I was talking to this guy about this. And he told me this story about how when he was a kid, not even a teenager yet, he stole a cheap little tin toy car of a kind his parents never would have bought him that he shoplifted out of a dime store. And he said he felt such a profound guilt about the wrongness of this that he could never play with it in good conscience. He could never play with it. And eventually, he just threw it away. He just threw it in the garbage because he thought it was so wrong. And I wondered if you think that our sense of right and wrong is much bigger, our awareness of it, the internal debate about what is right and wrong, is much more acute when we're kids. I think that it's far more complicated because you have not formulated your own ideas about what is right, what is wrong. It's totally coming from outside of you. And I think that the environment I was coming up in, in which there was this metaphysical world that I was being force-fed every single day-- The Witnesses [INAUDIBLE]. --of my life. Yeah. I mean, I had home Bible study Monday night, public Bible study Tuesday night, home Bible study Wednesday night, training in a theocratic school Thursday night, study of The Watchtower and Awake! at home Friday night, Watchtower and Awake! door-to-door distribution Saturday morning, Sunday morning, and then public lecture Sunday afternoon. That is what you call indoctrination, right? But on the other hand, there was this other thing going on where I'm reading James Baldwin and reading Malcolm X and literally leading rebellions in high school. In other words, I really didn't have a lot of time beating myself and saying "This is wrong. This is wrong," in terms of buying a Black Panther newspaper or supporting the Black Panthers in those days or something. That might have been considered-- that was a sin for a Jehovah's Witness. But I was convinced by the conditions at the time that hey, if it's a sin, it's the right thing to do. I doubt if I could have explained it that way at the time. But I know I didn't feel guilty about it. Michael Warr, thank you for coming into our radio playhouse and reading for us. Thank you. It's the most I've talked about the Jehovah's Witnesses in years. Michael Warr is the author of We Are the Black Boy. More thoughts about sin, sinning, what's wrong, what's not wrong, when our radio playhouse, my radio playhouse, Your Radio Playhouse continues. This is Your Radio Playhouse. Small Scale Sin on today's program. I'm Ira Glass. So Eli was a big-time computer hacker. He and his friends were thrown into prison for this. He served six months. And here's what he says about his time in the big house. It was so fun. I have to say, I had fun. It was a good experience. And I don't regret going there, actually. I think a lot of people are going to hear this and feel a certain horror. They're going to feel like, well, people should be punished. Oh yeah. What I did was a bad thing, and I don't suggest anybody else do it, because that would be wrong. I don't do anything illegal anymore. This is a story of someone who does not fear hell or punishment. It's a story of somebody who's been put into the position of defining for himself what is right and what is wrong. Starting in the mid-1980s, Eli was a member of a crew of computer hackers called MOD. At the time, journalists from the Village Voice and Esquire magazine documented just how much they were able to do. It is entirely possible that no group of American computer hackers has before or since gotten so far in breaking into other people's computers. They infiltrated dozens of business and government networks. The reporters from Esquire, at one point, asked them to demonstrate their skills by breaking into the White House computer system. And then they watched them do it. But for MOD, their real love was the biggest, most complicated computer system in the world, the phone system. They were in at the highest level computers that run the phone system for New York and New England. And this way, they could assign any services to any phone, listen to any phone, disconnect or create accounts, get unlisted phone numbers, or bring the entire phone system down. Eli served six months in a minimum-security prison and six months on home confinement. I spoke with him this summer, while he was still on home confinement in his parents' house in Queens. The prison I had gone to was very relaxed. We played tennis, basketball. We had tournaments and got trophies. It was at Allenwood FPC. And playing Monopoly with the other inmates and Scrabble and stuff, it was just a wild concept. And then when I came back here, it actually bummed me out that I had to be home all day. It was like, where does this make sense? They're doing me a favor by letting me out, yet I had more fun in there. Something's not right. Something was very not right. It was more like a fame camp. People who were known and people who were involved in high-profile cases went there. That's what it was. I had a couple of really good friends there. My best friend there was a fellow by the name of Chris who lived out in San Diego and was involved in marijuana dealing. And he used to sell it through the mail. And he got caught. And they took away about $350,000 from him. And he's my age, probably 23, 24, something like that. And it was sad that he got five years. He was a nice guy. He was just like me. And we would hang out all the time. And across from me on the other side of my room was a man they used to call the Condo King. And he lived in Massachusetts in a castle that was probably worth $5 million and had butlers and Rolls Royces and this and that. And it was a real castle and right on the water. And he taught me about real estate, which was the funny thing. So I learned real estate from him. I learned about stocks. I learned from the best. And it was such a great experience. It was like college all over again. The attitude there was that of camaraderie. Everybody there had this one thing in common, and that was that they looked for the shortest way possible to achieve what they wanted to achieve. And they all got there at some point. And they just felt a stroke of bad luck, I suppose. There were no losers there, that's for sure. Everybody there had achieved a very high level of success, were very well known in whatever they did. And I was friends with all the mobsters there. And they took care of me and stuff because I was from New York and I knew about Little Italy and Mulberry and the Village and stuff. And when I went there, it was like, hey, another guy from New York. Kid's from the streets. And they were just impressed because I was the only hacker in this whole compound. So everybody knew me. As soon as I got there, a day later, everybody was blabbing, hey, there's this hacker in here. Even the guards were telling the inmates, hey, that guy's in here for this. Outside, in the hacking community, Eli was pretty well known. Actually, he was known by his handle, which was Acid Phreak. That's "Phreak" with a P-H at the beginning of it. Inside, in prison, he got all sorts of job offers. It turns out that lots of people in prison can use the services of a computer hacker. Everything from obtaining credit cards to changing credit to-- yeah, changing credit was a big thing. Because, I don't know if you know about this, but every time these real estate guys get busted, their credit usually goes down the tubes. One big request I had was to change a lot of credit reports and stuff. And I didn't do that and didn't take it seriously. I just told them, yeah, it was possible, but you're not going to get it from me. And there was a lot of mobsters who wanted me to set up phone lines for them that couldn't be detected by the police and things like that. And again, "Well, it's possible. But I can't do that for you." But then again, if you were to ask me that and I was to do it, I wouldn't tell you anyway. So that's kind of a question that's hard to answer. Come into my domain. This is my room. As you can see, it's a typical teenager room. Well, actually, it was only sort of typical. The bedroom that he lives in during his six-month home confinement is tiny, barely enough space for a bed, a desk, and a bookshelf. There's a TV and a VCR, two computers. He flips on the stereo. I don't know. I guess I've got kind of a lot of equipment around here. I've got a fax machine here. In my room, I've got five phone lines. I got a two-line phone, but I've got everything else connected to computers or fax. There were cheesy kung fu movies on video. On his CD player, there was old-school rap, Nine Inch Nails, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix. And then he says, "Let me show you the good stuff," and he pulls out Xeroxes of old spiral notebooks. I have here what was seized from me but they had to return back to me. Here's my evidence examination report by the United States Secret Service. Subject, Acid Phreak. These notes have basically all the systems I got into. Look, I have little sketches and diagrams of how things work, different protocols and networks, definitions. See, a lot of this stuff was really good. I had stuff outside the country, NASA. The something defense? What is that? Government defense. Government defense. Yeah, that's a Washington number. McDonald's, since I had Telenet, I had McDonald's accounts. If you're a McDonald's employee, I could raise your pay. So that way, you get $15 an hour for shuffling burgers and stuff. So did you decide just at random to help someone out? I didn't do it to anybody. I just wanted to know how. We did this from pay phones. We'd have a line of pay phones. We'd get into the computer, first liberate one phone. "Liberating" meaning make it so that you don't need quarters for that pay phone. You just pick up and dial like a regular house phone. So that way, we could make an endless amount of phone calls without putting quarters. Next step was to get into the network, find a session that was already going, and then knock them off while they were connected, and then sit there, watching them. In other words, put us in the place of the computer they were going to connect to. So the next time they'd try to log in, they would get our computer. And we'd type in, "login." And they'd put in their login account. Then we'd go, "password," you know? The password. They'd say, "OK, password," and they'd put their password in. And then we would have-- all these things were already encoded in one key, so we could just hit one key. And it wouldn't look like we were typing it. Login would just appear, whoomp. Input password, whoomp. Login. And then we'd hit the password key, and password would come out. And then we'd say "Login incorrect" and then disconnect from them. But we already got their login and password. And then when they reconnected, it would be the regular system. So they'd figure, hey, I made a mistake typing it in or something. And that's how we would get in accounts. It was funny. You get into things that are good. You start targeting systems that are interesting. And then you start developing a collection. It's like baseball cards. I have NASA. I have NSA. I've got the phone company computers. I've got MISR. I've got Cosmos. I've got this. I've got that. McDonnell-Douglas, Marriott Marietta. TRW, CBI, TransUnion. What else can I get? You try to get the big names. So you start developing your collection. Then after a while, it became fun to look up famous people. Let's look up John Gotti's credit. Let's see what he owns. Let's look up Julia Roberts. Let's get her home phone number. Let's get this guy's home phone number. We'd go into pay phones and stuff. And hooking up, I would drive up to a pay phone real quick and do what I had to do and leave really quick. That's where I really got into a movie. I felt like it was like Mission: Impossible, like that whole gang. It was like-- [HUMMING "MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE THEME"]. And we would all go out and hook up and everything. And it was like, "Yeah, all right. I'm that black guy who does all this technical stuff. I can get into it. Let's go, let's go." I felt like we should have walkie-talkies and headsets and everything, and be like, "OK, Blue. Go do your thing on five. Ready? Five, four three, you're in. You're in." It was just amazing after a while. And we were just so excited we were getting all that stuff. And it was just a rush. It was the flow. Once you start going, you can't stop. You're just steamrolling one after the other. And the flow gets you going, and then you're just like, "Yeah, we rule. We're it." It breaks down all barriers. Nothing can stop the flow. If you've got the flow, you can conquer everything. That's what people call being in the zone. Once you're in there, you can't stop. It's the juice. If anything, it's surprising how little they did with their power over computers. It was mostly pranks, making somebody's phone ring continuously, turning an enemy's home phone line into a pay phone line so when the guy picked up his phone at home, it demanded that he deposit a quarter. Of course, there was no way he could do that because it's his home phone. They did actually call Julia Roberts once. They called Queen Elizabeth, too. But there's an emptiness at the heart of a lot of these stories. Once you've got the Queen on the phone, what do you say? She's like, "Hello?" She's talking to us and stuff. And we don't know what to say. "Hi, we're calling from the United States, and this and that." And she knew what was up. She's like, "OK, hello." And then she said goodbye, and that was it. We didn't know what to say. What do you say to Queen Elizabeth? "Hi. So you see that movie, True Lies?" You know, what do you say? The fun of it is finding the number. Eli was thrown into prison for a relatively minor offense. Some of the members of his crew broke into the computers that list everybody's credit ratings. And they copied some credit reports. And they sold the information to other people. And he was named as a member of this conspiracy. They said we abused our power. But we didn't abuse it at all. We did nothing compared to the things that could have been done. What we did was such a small thing in such a larger scheme of things. It's kind of depressing, in a way. There's so many things we could have done. We could have monitored Peter Lynch. What's the next best investment for the day? And we'd make millions of dollars investing or shorting some stock. But we never did. And now we wonder why. We're like, "Damn. There are so many applications for this kind of stuff. What happened?" But then we're like, "Ah, we were just kids." Then one time, one of us got the Mad magazine owner's phone number. And we called him. And that time, he was going through some rough times or something. And we were calling him for about two weeks. And he was just so goofy. He was kind of crazy. And he was just really stressed or something. And we just kept calling him and calling him. And finally, we started harassing him and harassing him. We'd make fun of him and laugh at him and call him Alfred E. Neuman. And just ridicule him. And then he got so mad at us. And we used to keep calling and screwing around with him. And then one day, we read in a paper he died. The day after we had called him, he passes away. And we're there like, "Yo, did we kill him? I hope not." And then they said he had some nervous breakdown and this and that. We're like, "Oh my god. Oh my god. I think we contributed to his demise there. We better not tell anybody this." But then we realized that there was probably other factors that contributed to it, not just a kid calling him on the phone. But since then, we stopped doing things like that because it was like, "Oh my god." I don't destroy computers. I don't take them down. I don't delete information that shouldn't be deleted. I think there's something morally wrong if you affect a person personally in not only his computer life, but his personal life, his right to make a living. I think that's wrong. It's just a question of morality. One thing about the computer world is that it's all so new. And hacking on computers is so new that each person who does it feels like he or she can create his or her own moral code. And Eli's crew had its own particular code of behavior. For example, unlike most hackers, they didn't share what they knew with other hackers. We had complete control over certain networks. We could have any system we wanted on that network. Any host was ours. But you don't let it get out to other hacking groups and other hackers. Because if they don't know how to use it, they don't understand the power of it all, you can't trust them. It's too much power for some people. Basically, it's like having a gun. Let's say it's the Wild West. You take it upon yourself to have a gun, you're responsible for it. If you give that to someone, you're responsible for that. So you don't give it out. If you want to shoot somebody's sister, somebody's wife or something, that's upon you. It's all a question of morality in my eyes. And if I know something, and it's of importance to somebody else, who's to tell me I can't sell it if I know it? Like if I knew something about you that somebody would pay a price for, it's up to me and my own morality whether I would sell it to him or not. But nobody could tell me, "You can't do that." Like if I know about your credit history, and somebody comes up to me and says, "I'm doing background on him. I want to know. Can you get me his credit history?" If I think it's immoral, I'm not going to do it. But if for some reason I think that he's going to get it anyway, and it would benefit me, I'd probably give it to him anyway. We're not evil people. We're good people at heart. There was a time when me and my friend, Nynex Phreak, another guy in the group, we found a system that actually, what it did was you could input a certain series of digits. It would take those digits and see if it was a credit card. So you could basically hack out credit card numbers just by guessing. Is this a credit card? And it would tell you if it was or not. And we found that system. Finally, somebody wrote a program that would automatically do it, scan all night and get thousands of credit cards. And we're like, yeah, this is no good. What if they start selling credit cards and stuff? We're like, this is no good. So we actually called the FBI and told them about it. We wouldn't narc on anybody. We wouldn't say who wrote it or anything. We just said, there's a system, and it isn't right it's open like that. It was just getting ridiculous. So I was like, "We've got to put an end to this." And we did that. And we were like, "Damn. We can't tell any hacker we did this. They'll be pissed." And we felt like that was right to do. That's kind of wrong. It is because of their own moral code in their group, and also their belief that someday hacking will no longer be seen as a crime, that society will change its ideas about information and computers and breaking into computers, that Eli is able to say something like this next quote about his time in the big house. I was a criminal in the sense that Jesus Christ was a criminal, you know? Well, you know how he was thought to be a criminal. And he was sentenced and everything. And now look. Everybody's sporting crosses. And there's churches built around him and everything. Who knows? Maybe one day, it'll be Acid Phreak, the faith. You never know. In fact, when I was visiting Eli, he was facing a daily question of right and wrong when it came to his own home confinement. The prison system was keeping track of him during home confinement with this electronic device. It was about the size of a beeper. It was riveted onto an ankle strap. And it would send this signal to a computer that authorities had put into his house. And that computer would call another computer any time that he would leave the house. And as he explained, hacking these computers and the phone line that connected them was pretty easy work. But he did not do it. He said he just didn't want to get in any more trouble. He said he was going straight. And it wasn't because he thought hacking was wrong. It was that he was just tired of it. We had lists and lists of computers and no time to do it in. It just got to the point where it was such a large burden. It was like, "Aw, man. We got to do this one. Aw, there's another one we got to do." And then it got to hundreds and hundreds. And finally, it's not even fun anymore. It was such a rush to get it when you initially get it. But then, I don't know. It gets to be boring. I've just burned myself out, I think. I just got to that point where everybody gets burnt out if they have a little too much of everything. Now, though he was burned out, it was still a shock when the federal authorities seized all of his computers and he wasn't allowed to hack anymore. This was back when he was first arrested. It was like, OK, what do I do? I usually get on the computer now, late at night and stuff. And you'd just go to sleep. And then my lifestyle started changing. I'd be sleeping at night again. So I was like, "Damn. This is like-- I have to fill this void. What should I do?" And I didn't know what to do anymore. It was horrible. It was sad. We would call each other up. And usually, we'd be talking about computers and trading passwords, and then we'd get into this and that. And I remember, the first time we called, it was like, "So, what's up?" "Nothing. I cleaned my room yesterday." "Yeah, they came over and cleaned my room, too, pretty well." "Yeah, I know." "So what do you want to do?" "I don't know." Because it's such a large part of our lives at that point. You have so much power and to lose it in an instant like that is just such a shock. It's like, bam. You don't have that power anymore. You can't sit on your computer. What are you going to do? Uh-oh, I'm a regular guy now. I'm not Acid Phreak anymore. What's Acid Phreak without a computer? He's just a regular guy. So it was a bummer. At this point, I've already done it. I see it as a teenager thing. OK, I was a hacker when I was a kid and this and that. I got busted. It's a teenager thing to do. And that's that. I move on. I work with computers now, and that's my life. Well, Acid Phreak was not the first criminal who told me that he quit being bad because he got bored with it. A few Chicago gang members have told me the same thing, that you end up having the same night over and over again. You just get tired of it. Maybe you remember the book A Clockwork Orange, the book and the movie. They're about teenage boys who love ultra-violence, commit murder, do all sorts of horrible things, speak to each other in a very stylized language. At the end of that book-- the movie actually doesn't end this way, but the original British edition of the novel does. At the end of the book, the central character gives up committing acts of violence. And it's not because he thinks it's wrong. And it's not because any of the punishments and treatments that he's received have worked on him. He gives it up because he's bored with it. It's just not that interesting to him. And we will end our program today with a couple of paragraphs from the book. "I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up. Yes yes yes, there it is. Youth must go. Ah, yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of those malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin, with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside. And you wind it up, grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line. And it bangs straight into things, bang bang. And it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being one of those malenky machines." And then at this point, the narrator starts going into this fantasy about having a son someday. And he says, "When I had my son, I would like to explain all that to him, when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand, or would not want to understand at all, and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas. And I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on like that to the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy, gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself, turning and turning and turning, a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers." Well, this episode of Your Radio Playhouse was produced by WBEZ Chicago with generous funding from the MacArthur Foundation. Editorial and production help from Paul Tough and Jack Hitt on the East Coast, Margy Rochlin on the West Coast, Dolores Wilber and Emily Hanford here in Chicago. It was Paul Tough who hooked up the program with all the computer hackers. The old gospel records today were courtesy of the amazing Steve Cushing and the Blues Before Sunrise radio network. Rob Newhouse helped produce our radio play. Special thanks, as always, to Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. This is WBEZ Chicago.
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From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. Public Radio. Public Radio International. Erika Yeomans knows when her search began. It began when she saw a photo in a magazine. The picture is this one. It's this photo with his hand on his forehead and his eyes all squinted up with tears rolling down his cheeks. At the bottom of the black and white photo is written in cursive lettering "I'm too sad to tell you." It was ironic. It was charming. And the man seemed unusually expressive and vulnerable. I just think I'm intrigued because it shows a man crying. And you don't see that image very often. And you don't see a man letting himself have these true emotions. And yet he kind of pushes it away a little bit by sort of writing on there "I'm too sad to tell you." And actually, there he is again. There he is again with his hair longer. You see now, you see the first version with short hair and then the second one with his longer hair. And I prefer it short, out of the two photos. I definitely feel much more attracted to the one where his hair is a little bit shorter. It looks very now, both-- the hair styles are very retro '70s now with guys. In fact, the photo was from the 1970s, an art photo by a virtually unknown Dutch artist named Bas Jan Ader. Erika read the article about him. And the facts of his life only enhanced the air of mystery and romance in the picture. He did a kind of conceptual art, Bas Jan Ader, this conceptual art that involved a lot of physical challenges that he would set for himself. In one piece, he was photographed falling off the roof of a house. In another, he falls out of a tree. They're goofy, almost comical photos. But other works of his, like the crying pictures, have a kind of wistful, longing quality. There was just something very appealing about it and sad. And I felt like I identified with that longing. And longing for what? I don't know. A searching for something? What is it? I didn't know. And I wanted to know what he was thinking. And his last piece he did was this triptych called In Search of the Miraculous, in which he disappeared. He was trying to sail the Atlantic in a 13-foot sailboat by himself. And he disappeared, and his body was never found. And a year later, his boat was found capsized off the coast of Ireland, and it was this big mystery. Well, from the WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass, back for another week documenting life in these United States. And today on our program, admiring someone from afar, trying to get closer to them. Act One, In Search of the Miraculous. Act Two, 1,000 Miles to Miles Davis. Act Three, Stalking Snuggles. And Act Four, 1,000 Women Become Selena. Stay with us, won't you? When Erika saw the picture of Bas Jan, it had been a while since she'd had an adventure. For years, she had been slogging away as director of a theatre company, an experimental theatre company that was perpetually strapped for cash, perpetually struggling to get reviewed and get attention. It was frustrating. She needed a change. And seeing the picture of Bas Jan reminded her that life could be an adventure. I feel hesitant actually saying it just flat out in those words because so few of us carry the idea that life should be an adventure into our adult years. And a lot of people think the whole idea is really silly. But this is what Erika Yeomans believed. And Bas Jan, she thought, lived his life as an adventure. He was handsome, sensitive looking, and he died for his art. And she decided she was going to find out everything about him, make a film or a document of some kind, even though she had never done anything like this before. She was about to turn 30. It was time for a rite of passage. Birthdays, certain birthdays are supposed to be these big moments. They're supposed to be these big, pivotal moments in your life. And when I was 13, I had a birthday party called Farewell to Childhood, which I had all my girlfriends come over, and we had to dress like five year olds. And when I think about it, it's really kind of a sick thing. And it's embarrassing that I'm even talking about it, but who cares? So at 13, I had this conceptual birthday party, basically, a performance conceptual birthday party. And then I had to have the whole thing costumed and done, because I had to get over my childhood. And so I think 30 was a big year for me, because I kept thinking prior to 30 that something was supposed to happen when you're 30. I don't know what, but something. Erika tracked down Bas Jan's widow in Los Angeles and decided to make a pilgrimage. And rather than fly from Chicago, which she couldn't afford anyway, she decided she was going to drive. It would be more like Bas Jan, she thought, more a test of will and physical endurance. And events conspired to make it more of a test. Her employer wouldn't give her much time off, so she would actually have to do the drive in two days, not three or four, which it usually takes. Part of my drive out there to LA in some stupid small way was my attempt to be by myself on a journey that, not that it has risk tied to it at all, and it's not really an athletic feat. To drive a couple of days in a beat-up car by myself with a tape recorder and try to figure out if I'm going to be able to discover anything about myself, which I don't know if I did or not. But I was sort of talking to the tape player as if it was, at first, my driving partner, and then second, it became like my therapist. And so then it became a journal by the 48th hour. It became like my journal. Well, I've seen it all. My arm is peeling. My driving arm is peeling. My windshield wipers don't work. It's foggy, and it's snowing. And I'm thinking about thick lips. [SCREAMING] Aah! Come on, car. When I was 18 and 19, I was like a Junior Mint. For my life, the way I've jumped around to so many things, from so many different relationships-- Here I am 30, and I'm still not making money at what I want to do. I started to suffer from a real sadness. When I was recording myself, my thoughts, late at night, it started to get very depressing. Because the way I'm doing it is backwards, the way I've done everything. And so I'm thinking everything will come to a fruition when I'm dead, like, when I'm 70 years old. And I kept thinking that this was all wrong. And I kept comparing it to Bas Jan. Like how is this adventurous? How is this romantic? What am I trying to teach myself? How am I supposed to grow from this? I'm tired. I've had too much coffee. I've had too many cigarettes. I haven't eaten anything that's healthy. Everything has been in cellophane. It's like this whole thing of doubt, doubt, doubt, doubt, doubt and not knowing why I'm there. And I'm stuck. I can't fly from wherever I am in the middle of Missouri or New Mexico. I have to finish it. Slow down. OK. Wahoo, wahoo, wahoo. I love this car. Please make it. I love you, car. [SINGING] Driving a steep hill. Whoa. Where are the cowboys and the [UNINTELLIGIBLE]? If you ask Erika how she pictured Bas Jan's trip, his transatlantic trip, in his 13-foot boat, she answers without pausing. I envisioned him catching his fish off the side of the boat and having a little mock up barbecue pit and grilling his fish and having his fresh water supply, eating very little, fasting for a lot of it, and writing a lot in his journals. And perhaps he was going through questioning things, but I don't think he was doing it in such an alarmist way and a melodramatic way that I certainly sounded on the tapes. [SINGING] I don't care if my bright blue lights are on, because I need to see. See where I'm going to nowhere. Erika drove 15 hours a day for two days. And the third day, things melted down. She barely ate, smoked nonstop. And though she had told her friend Margy that she'd arrive at Margy's house around 9:00, she didn't hit the nether-region outskirts of Los Angeles until 9:00, which may not seem like a big deal. It's millions of lanes of roads whipping around. It's a Friday night, which of course, you know-- I pretend like there's not going to be any traffic. And of course, there was bumper to bumper traffic, cars going really fast. And I'm just driving along. And I start to feel really woozy. And I get woozier as I go on. And as I'm getting into the actual city, and I'm looking for the exit for Margy's place, I start to have a panic attack, where I know I'm passing out. I've never passed out in my entire life. I've never ever even experienced that feeling. And here I was, and I know I was passing out. And I couldn't stop my heart from pounding. I couldn't stop myself from-- just either I was going to vomit or I was going to pass out. And I started to panic. And so I was shaking, trying to get off this freeway with cars whipping around me. At this point, I was going about 30 miles per hour. And I wasn't about to go any faster, because I was really frightened. I was completely paralyzed. I couldn't get over to the exit. I finally weaved my way around with people honking at me, and they know I'm a tourist. They see my plates from Illinois. And I know they're saying all these things. I'm waiting for the gun to come out. I get off the exit. And I'm in some neighborhood that looks really desolate. It looks really scary. It's really dark. There are no streetlights. And I start weeping. And I'm on the side of the street, just thinking I'm going to sleep here tonight. I'm never going to find Margy's house. I was completely, completely, utterly frightened, didn't know what I was going to do. I pumped up myself. I started to breathe, breathe, breathe. I ate some peanuts. That was all I had in the car. And so I got back on the freeway. And meanwhile, during this time, I'm in my car and I keep hallucinating that I'm melting in my car and that my back of my car is melting into the freeway. And so I keep-- Hours late, she finally pulled over and called Margy, who came and retrieved her in her pajamas. The next morning, Erika didn't want to look at her car, though she had to. And I went outside and I noticed that my back rear tire had blown. And that was why I was hallucinating. I wasn't hallucinating. Because my tire had blown and that's what was making me feel like I was melting into the freeway. On their face, the facts of Erika's adventure do not seem like the stuff of myth. A car drive three days long on the interstate highway system. But what's remarkable about her story is that through sheer force of will, she turned it into the right of passage and test of endurance that she had wished for when she set out. And once she recovered the next day, she called Bas Jan's widow, Mary Sue, and headed out to meet her. I was wearing these very, very, very fluorescent yellow cigarette pants, my army combat boots, and my gas station jacket from the '50s, a very in jacket. I thought I'd fit in with the scene and this art community. At Bergamot Station, there are supposed to be all of these galleries. So I figured there would be a lot of groovy people. And I wanted to look as groovy as I could. Mary Sue liked Erika and answered anything she wanted to know. And some of what she said was very different from Erika's pretty picture of Bas Jan as an ideal man, a romantic art hero. I went through the rudimentary questions, at this point, of trying to figure out what did he sound like? How did he talk? Was he political? Was he not? And there were these very short answers to these things. But after about an hour or so of talking, she started to explain to me that he wasn't this perfect, beautiful creature. Because I kept saying, he's gorgeous. And that's when she sort of said, "I can't paint him that pretty, though." Dot, dot, dot. There were problems. And that's when she started to talk about open relationships. And we sort of had a girl talk about open relationships and how they don't work and about the pain that was involved in her marriage. What happens when you admire someone from afar, partly because they seemed so sensitive and tragic, and then you find out they were sometimes kind of a jerk? In this case, Erika tenaciously held on to her picture of Bas Jan as a romantic, feeling man. And if you ask Mary Sue, she says there's something lovely about that. Yes, I'm sure Erika does have a romanticized view of who Bas Jan was and what he was, of course, like. I think, however, that's just perfect. That's what Bas Jan would have liked more than the real picture. I'm sure he wouldn't want me to explain too completely all the details. Now, one of the oddest things about this whole story is that Erika sees Bas Jan as a purer artist than she is, a truer artist. When in reality, she labors, mostly in obscurity, following a vision that's completely idiosyncratic, completely her own. A typical show of hers is filled with odd, striking images, lots of strenuous movement, elliptical dialogue, no story. Some shows seem to have an unusual number of people throwing themselves on the floor. The shows can be hard to sit through. But from start to finish, they are clearly a labor of love and a labor of obsession. But to hear her talk about it, she has sold out compared with Bas Jan. He was more concerned about-- I don't want to say art for art's sake. But he was more interested in what he was doing to himself physically and mentally by putting himself in these images and doing these different tasks. And I don't think he was that worried about if he was going to be a big famous artist, or if he was going to be a successful artist, because he didn't even take care of the work that he had. After he died, they can't even find a lot of his work, because it got damaged in a garage, because they didn't really take care of it. Kristine McKenna writes about art for the Los Angeles Times. And she spoke with Erika about Bas Jan several times during Erika's visit. This image of him as pure has more to do with something Erika needs than it has to do with the reality of him. Because Erika really is every bit the artist Bas Jan was in terms of intensity and single-mindedness. I'm not an authority on him, but I do know that he was just another guy hustling in LA like everybody else. Basically, I got the impression that she was just completely romantically enchanted with him. And I don't know if she was really even looking for the facts of his life when she came out. It seemed more like some kind of mystical quest. And it was a very short history that he wrote. And that leaves her a lot of room to embellish it. But I have to add. I was very moved by this whole trip that she made. I can totally understand it. Because yeah, I thought there was something really beautiful about it. I mean, she was the pure one. She's more pure than he was, I'm sure. There's something so innocent in her vision of him and her quest to come out here and get I don't know quite what. And then in the face of all the evidence that I feel she probably came up with here, she went back home with the same vision. I mean, that's really kind of stubborn innocence. And it's pure in that there's no way she's going to make money off this. She's not going to end up getting a date with the guy because he's dead. So she gains the purity of the obsession. Erika Yeomans collected footage from old Hollywood films and from Mary Sue to make a movie about Bas Jan. Her goal was to finish the movie by the time she was 33, the same age Bas Jan was when he set out on the ocean and disappeared. The film she made, In Search of Bas Jan's Miraculous, has played in galleries in New York and Amsterdam. Act Two, Meet Your Hero. So what if you idolize someone and then finally do get close to them, actually become their friend? What happens to the romantic dream that you had of them? Well, Quincy Troupe first heard of Miles Davis back when Troupe was just a teenager. I was in this all-white high school. It was 3,500 kids, and there was only eight black kids that went to this school. And so I was trying to find some way to be hip at that time. Troupe was in East St. Louis, and Miles was far, far away. Part of what was appealing about Miles was the fact that he had begun in St. Louis himself and had gotten out. And of course, Miles was a blueprint for hipness. I was in a fish-fry place. And I saw these four black guys sitting in this booth eating jack salmon sandwiches and dinners with dark glasses on and hats and their hair was conked and everything. So I thought they looked pretty hip. So I went and got my sandwich and sat behind them. And at that time, they were talking about this homeboy from East St. Louis. And he was in New York City, and he was doing all these great things and playing all this great music and had played with Charlie Parker. Who I didn't know any of this. And they said, Miles Dewey Davis. Miles Davis. His name is Miles Davis. And they went up to the record player and put in some money and played "Donna Lee." And I remember listening to "Donna Lee." And I said, wow. I hadn't liked jazz up until that point. I was about 14, 15 years old. I was into Johnny Ace and Chuck Berry and that kind of music, rhythm and blues. And when I heard this music, for some reason-- they played it twice. And the second time, it kind of went straight to my heart. I can't explain why it went straight to my heart, but I loved the music. And I sat there, and they sat there for about an hour. And then they left. And when they left, I remember going up to the record player. And I had about $0.30 or something. It was a nickel to play those records. And I went up there, flipped through all those names, and found Miles Davis' name and played "Donna Lee." And I played "Donna Lee," then I played another one. That's when I first heard Miles Davis. And then after that, my cousin told me how hip he was and showed me pictures of him and how clean he was. I started seeing how well he dressed and what great style he had. How clean he was? Yeah. We used to say he was "clean as a broke dick dog," which was a saying that came out of St. Louis. And so I said, wow, this is a guy that I really love. So I started really listening to his music at that time. And it kind of changed my life. And then I found some other friends who had been listening to him for a while. And I kind of left my other friends and started listening to Miles and hanging out with them. And we used to sit up in this stands at Sumner High School and say we were going to run away to New York and be like Miles Davis. So I remember the first time he came to St. Louis. There was all this big buzz about him coming to play there. And I had doctored up my draft card, and changed all the dates and everything, so I could be old enough to get into the club. And I remember going to the pawn shop and getting these great suits and these Church's shoes, which were too small for my feet. They were those really hip English shoes. And I had this big Chesterfield hat, and I was really clean. But my feet hurt. And my feet hurt because the shoes were too small. The shoes were too small. So I go to Peacock Alley with some friends of mine. And we get in. The guy kind of looked at me and said, are you really-- because I was really young looking. But he let me in, finally. He just let me in. And when that band hit, they were so fantastic. They were so fantastic. And Miles was so clean. He was so clean and so hip that I was just mesmerized. And so I told my cousin, who went with us, that I wanted to go up and say hello to Miles and tell him how much I loved his music. And so my cousin said, "Quincy, don't go up and say nothing to Miles, because Miles doesn't talk to people. He doesn't like people coming up to him and talking to him. So don't go up to him and say anything. Just look at him from a distance." So we kind of stood back and looked at him from a distance, all of us. It was a whole bunch of us, young guys and older guys. We had our glasses and everything on like he had his glasses on. And we kind of looked at him standing at the bar, smoking a cigarette, drinking a cognac. And from behind us someplace, I heard this voice say, "Oh, darling, there's Miles Davis." And I turned around, and it was this white guy with his girlfriend. And I said, "Whoa, what is he going to do?" He said, "Let's go up and say hello." So he walked through us, "Excuse me, excuse me." And he walked up to Miles Davis, who was standing at the bar with Coltrane and all him. He said, "Hi, Miles. How are you?" And Miles said in that gruff voice, "Eff you. Get out of my face," like that. And I was like, "Wow." That was stunning. I had never heard anybody talk to anyone like that, let alone an African-American man say that to a white guy. And I just said to myself, "Man, this is something." Now, when was the first time you met Miles as an adult, as the person who you are now? Yes. I was living in New York. And my friend, Leo Maitland, who is now deceased, was a doctor. And he was Miles' doctor. And he used to always say to me, "I know Miles Davis." I said, "You got to introduce me to Miles. You got to introduce me to Miles." So one day, he said, "I'm going to have this party." And I said, "OK." "You want to come?" I said, "Yeah." So I go to the party. And I walk in, and I'm sitting around. And he had this great apartment. And I look over in the corner, and there's Miles Davis. I said, "My god, Miles Davis." And there was nobody sitting next to him. His was the only seat in the house with nobody sitting next to him. So I went and got some food and I looked around, no place to sit, and went into another room, there wasn't no place to sit. I came back, there was this seat. So I went and sat next to Miles. So I remember him saying something like, "How are you doing?" I said, "Hi. All right." "Yeah, you sure?" I said, "Yeah." He says, "You see anything good in here?" I say, "What?" "Anything, man. I'm talking about do you see anything good?" And I said, "There's some nice ladies in here." "That's right. That's right. You got a good eye." So I said, "Yeah, I love your music." "I don't want to talk about my music. I don't want to talk about it." I said, "OK." So then we had this general conversation. And then he went and got some food, came back, said to me, "Later." And he left. So about two weeks later, I was walking down this-- Wait, wait. Can we just hold on that part of the conversation? Was this a kind of nervous moment for you? I mean, you're sitting there next to Miles Davis. What was your feeling during this conversation? I was totally up for it. I had no fear in talking to him, I guess, maybe, because by this time, I was starting to get a little play myself, as a writer, in New York. I was starting to get some ink. And I had a kind of feeling about myself at that point. And so it was funny. We just kind of had this exchange. And then when he got ready to leave, he just left. He just left. But he came over to me and said, "Later." So I thought it was some kind of indication that he liked the conversation or whatever. And so about three weeks later, I was walking down Broadway. And here he comes walking straight towards me. And I said, "Oh, that's Miles Davis." So when he got up next to me, I said, "Hey, Miles. How you doing?" He walked right by me. Like I didn't even exist. Like I wasn't even on the planet. I mean, he didn't even nod, or nothing. He just walked right by me. And I stopped. I remember stopping, and I kind of looked back and said, "Wow, was that Miles Davis?" And it was. I said, "Yeah, that's him. But he didn't speak." I said, "Hey, Miles." And he didn't even turn around. He just kept going. So I said, "Wow, that was kind of cold." I mean, that was kind of cold. It was like, I had never experienced that before in my life. And so when I got to know him, I finally got to know him real well, when I did the Spin Magazine. I did a two-part piece for Spin Magazine. And when I walked in his place, he looked at me and he kind of said, "Yeah, sit down." So I sit down. And I remember him reaching out with his hand to grab my dreadlocks. And I hit his hand. Pow. And he said, "What are you, crazy? What are you crazy, hitting me like that?" I said, "No, man." I said, "Because I'm over here to interview you doesn't mean that you have the right to invade my space." I said, "Plus, the other times that I tried to talk to you, you just shined me on." He said, "Oh, you mean the time out on the street? The time out on the street?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Man, I don't have to talk to you, man. I didn't have to talk to you. What you got to talk about this time?" And that's the way it started. And we got to be the best of friends until he died. But Miles was always testing you. He was always testing you. He was the kind of guy-- and I loved him because he was always the kind of a guy that was always testing you. And if you passed the muster, if you could stand up to him, then if he liked you, he would bring you in. If you couldn't, he'd just run over you, you know? More with Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe. Also Snuggles the fabric softener bear and 1,000 Selenas. That's in a minute, from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Quincy Troupe spent three years collaborating with Miles Davis on Davis' autobiography, talking to Davis and interviewing him, actually, until Davis got sick of being interviewed, to create a book written in Miles' voice and syntax. It sold over 1 million copies. And if you ask Quincy, when did he stop seeing Miles Davis as the mythic, legendary figure and start seeing him as just another friend, he really can't tell you. It was gradual. One day he was on the outside of Miles' life looking in. And then at some point later, he realized that he was on the inside. You know, I got very up close with Miles. I mean, I was in his pocket and he was in my pocket for two and a half, three years. Until the time he died. I mean, I was really close to him. And so I saw flaws in his personality that-- because I think when you idolize a person like him-- like he was one of my heroes-- especially when you're young, you don't think they have flaws. You kind of see them through these rose-tinted glasses. And you kind of look at them as perfect. And so when I started to see some things that was not perfect about Miles, like his way of treating women and his way of treating other people sometimes and little small things, like cleanliness sometimes. You know, cleanliness is coming up in this interview a lot more than I ever would have guessed. Well, Miles was a clean person. In terms of his body and the way he dressed, but there were a couple of times when I went over his house one day-- I went over to his house one day, and it was a mess. I mean, stuff was everywhere. Clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste, music, trumpets. And I said, "Miles, man," I said, "Miles, you living like a pig, man." I said, "You're living like a pig, man. This is a pigsty." He said, "So what? So what? So what, it's a pigsty? What did you expect? I just play music, chump." He said, "Somebody cleans it up. That's the deal." Well, I would see some of that. And first I would say, man this guy could be a pig, you know? But then, I got to the point where I said, no, he's just a human being. He's a human being. He has flaws. He plays beautiful music. But he had these little areas where he was just a human being, where he was flawed. Like, I never thought Miles would be as country as he was. You know, what I mean by country. I mean country-country, like a Southern-- instead of a jazz musician, when you got to know Miles, like some elegant jazz musician, Miles was like a country blues singer. When was it that you first saw that side of him really clearly? When I was doing the book, and I was about three or four months in, when he started dropping the mask. And he'd just drop the mask. And I'd come by, and he'd have food. And he'd cook for me. And we'd look at boxing matches and look at the basketball games. And at first, when I would go over there, he would always be dressed elegantly in very fashionable stuff. And then after that, he started dressing just really casually. And especially on the West Coast. When I'd go up there, he'd have on blue jeans, a torn sweater. And he would just cook. And we'd just sit there and look and tell lies. And he'd listen to the fights. And we'd go for long walks on the beach. And he'd take me for rides in his car. So it was just a beautiful kind of relationship. As a matter of fact, I told him, I said, "You know, when you're in California, you're much different than you are in New York." And he said, "Yeah." After a while, he acknowledged that. He said, "Yeah, because in New York, I've got to keep my mask up." I said, "Yeah, that's right. You got to keep it up." When did you first figure out about the way he was treating women? When did you first figure out that he was kind of abusive? Well, when I started to hear some of the stories. Because Miles was brutally honest. He was brutally honest when he did that book. I remember he was telling me the stories of him beating up these women and chasing his wife around the basement of their house with a knife and a gun. And so I started to think to myself, wow, this is ouch. I mean, this is a strange kind of situation, because I'm just the opposite. I don't believe in hitting women. I don't believe in hitting anybody like that. But I figured out that Miles Davis was the kind of person-- he wasn't an intellectual, where he could respond and talk it out, talk the whole thing through. So if you got up in his face, whether you were a man or a woman, he would hit you. That was the way he was. I mean, he would hit you. I can be truthful and say I didn't like the way he did certain things. But then at the same time, we who knew him really well knew that he was a warm and generous person to us. And we'd look at those things and say, hey man, that was kind of cold what he did there. But the way I looked at it, I'd say, well, that's between him and that person. I never saw him hit a woman in front of me. Because you've got to remember, I knew him from 1985 until he died, which was a period of six years. And so when he was in his most desperately insane period of really doing these kind of things to women, this was from 1968 to 1980, 12 years. And I didn't know him then. So I never saw that. Would there be an occasional moment sometimes, once you got to be friends with him, where it would suddenly strike you, man, I'm friends with Miles Davis? When it would generally happen was when somebody would come up to me and say to me, "Man, what is it like to be with Miles Davis? You know, I always wanted to be with Miles Davis." And then I would think, whoa. But for me, after it got to a certain level, I never thought about it. Because we just had this natural relationship. He'd call me up or I'd call him up. I remember telling somebody one time, Miles called me up from Japan. He had just taped this new thing. And he said, "What do you think of this?" And he put it on. And he played for about five minutes. And he said, "What did you think?" And I would tell him whether I liked it or I didn't. If I didn't like it, I would tell him I didn't like it. And I was relating this to somebody. And they said, "You mean Miles Davis calls you up, and puts on the tape, and you listen to it?" And I said, "Yeah." He says, "Well, what's that like?" I said, "I guess it's like any one of my friends who is a poet, who will say 'listen to this poem,' you know what I mean? It just so happens it's Miles Davis' music, and he happens to be internationally famous." Many public figures up close lose the larger-than-life quality that they seem to have from afar. But there's something about Miles Davis that even today, even though Quincy Troupe was as close to Miles Davis as he's ever been to anybody in his life, that even today it's easy for Quincy to see Miles as this mythic figure. He says Miles just had this effect on people. I remember one time, I was with him-- I can't remember the Japanese, it was not [? Miashi, ?] but it was another Japanese designer. And he had his clothes in New York. And he had his clothes, and he had Andy Warhol, before Andy Warhol died, and Miles Davis modeling as the star models of the clothes, along with all these beautiful, gorgeous women. So Miles called me and said, "Do you want to go down with me?" I said, "Yeah, I'll go with you." So we go in this place called The Tunnel. It was some kind of a discotheque. So we're in there and they're modeling the clothes, and everybody's going out. Miles would walk out. Andy Warhol would walk out. So I'm backstage with Andy. And these are two legends. These are two American icons in culture. So Miles was the finale. And he had this outfit with this gold lame cape that he was supposed to walk out, with a hat. So he started to walk out. And Andy was standing there looking at him. And the cape was dragging on the floor. So he started to walk out. And he turned around and looked at Andy Warhol. And he said, "Andy, Andy. Pick up that cape." So Andy picked up the cape and they walked out together, you know what I mean? And Andy had this sheepish look on his face. And Miles strutted out, and Andy was holding the cape off the floor. And they walked up the thing. And so everybody in the room-- they left us in the room. Andy's handlers, they were like shocked. They had never heard anything like that. They were like, "Wow, did you see that? Did you see that?" But Andy was smiling. He was happy to be in it. He was happy to be in it. And so that was Miles. Miles Davis was almost like a king, you know what I mean? He was like a king. And so that particular moment, I remember his attitude was like, "I'm the king here. Pick up the cape. We both might be icons, but I'm a bigger icon than you." Quincy Troupe co-authored Miles Davis' autobiography, Miles. He is a poet and journalist and essayist and author of several books. He latest is called Avalanche from Coffee House Press. Well, now we have this artifact. This is Act Three of our program, Snuggles. From 1980 through 1995, a guy in New York ran what he called an apology line. And the idea is that people would call up. They would call this anonymous line, and they would apologize for anything they believed that they had done that was worthy of apology. Eventually, this guy started to call himself-- or maybe he called himself this from the start-- Mr. Apology. His real name was Allan Bridge. And over time, people would apologize. And some apologies would be real. And some would be fake. And some would be some combination of the two, you couldn't really tell. And then people could call in and respond to the apologies they were hearing as well. Anyway, this particular apology was transcribed in the magazine of the apology line, Apology Magazine, volume one, number four. This is called "Snuggly Bear," from August, 1993. This is a transcription of something somebody said on the phone line. "I have an apology to make. And I suppose this is as good a place to do it as any. I was watching TV and a commercial came on. It was a commercial for fabric softener, I believe. It was a small, furry bear, Snuggly Bear. And Snuggly Bear was extolling the virtues of this product, this fabric softener, I believe. And I don't know what it was about this bear, but I was fascinated. Small bear, high-pitched voice, indeterminate sex, not sure if it's male or female. I was fascinated. "A few days later, another commercial came on again. Once again, I stopped what I was doing and I watched. This time I kept watching and hoped. I kept the station on. I hoped that the commercial would come back. And sure enough, later on in the evening, another commercial came on, a different commercial with the same Snuggly Bear. Same product. "I went to the supermarket, and I saw the product. And I saw the picture of Snuggly Bear. I purchased the product. I didn't use it to soften any fabrics. I just wanted to have a picture of Snuggly Bear. I wrote Snuggly Bear a letter. And I was hoping for an answer, but I didn't receive one. Then I wrote another one. I was hoping to get some sort of response, a photograph, an autograph, something. Still no response. "I wrote a third letter, and I'm afraid I was rather upset when I wrote the letter. I've since learned that the letter was turned over to the FBI. I was warned not to try to contact Snuggly Bear again. Snuggly Bear travels around. I believe the bear has one residence in Martha's Vineyard and another residence on the West Coast. I'm not sure where the West Coast residence is, but I've been to the Martha's Vineyard residence. I let myself in. There was, of course, a certain amount of security around the house, but I let myself in. I climbed the gate and I found a window open around the back of the house, a rather large house. And I wandered around. He wasn't home, of course. He or she wasn't home. I'm sure he was out on the road doing his pitch for the fabric softener. "Well, if I can only reach Snuggly Bear. If I can only make Snuggly Bear understand that I understand. I'm sure if I get through to Snuggly Bear that I'm sure we could establish a relationship, or just an understanding. But the way it's going now, everything is in limbo. Every time I try to contact this bear, I'm thwarted. I'm calling to apologize, because I guess I've been a bad boy. I'm not stalking Snuggly Bear. They've accused me of stalking Snuggly Bear, but I'm not a stalker. I simply want Snuggly Bear to understand that I understand. That's all. I'm sorry." Well, somebody heard that apology on the apology line. And then they called in with this message. "This is out to the man who has the fixation on Snuggles Bear. I do understand, and I would really like to give you my emotional support. I do care. I sort of had a similar experience with McGruff the crime dog. And actually, we managed to get together. I can barely even say his name now. "We did manage to get it together. And I got into his life. He accepted me. He cared about me. But you can imagine. You see him all the time on TV. And life with a cop is difficult. I just didn't know when he'd be coming home at night, and I couldn't take it anymore. Plus, he was sort of spraying all over the furniture. Basically, what I want to say to you is maybe loving from afar is the best thing to do. And maybe it's best that you never actually get to meet Snuggles. Because then you'll have this pure, this untainted image of Snuggles. You take care. Bye-bye." Act Four, 1,000 Women Become Selena. It's one thing to admire someone from afar and try to get close to them. It is another thing to actually try to dress as someone you admire, try to look like them, try to become them, even for a day. Well, that's what happened recently here in Chicago at Clemente High School. Let me get some sound going here. That was a very NPR moment, huh? Picture, please, a gray, cold Chicago day, two lines of women and girls stretched around the block in both directions around this high school. One line is 18 year olds in scanty clothing. Scanty, I guess, would be the appropriate word. The other line is full of eight year olds, many in scanty clothing, though not all. Music blares, people are singing and dancing. And nearly every woman and girl trying out to be the star of the upcoming Selena movie has brought her extended family with her. The director of the film says that he wants to find two Selenas, one to play Selena as a child, one to play Selena as an adult. Selena, or Se-leh-na, was, of course, the Mexican-American pop star recently killed, widely revered. And perhaps you saw footage of these auditions on the news. We decided to send 18-year-old Claudia Perez to cover the event. Claudia loves Selena, and she wanted to audition herself. 12-year-old Jessica [? Letta ?] almost didn't make it. On Friday, she and her family drove seven hours from St. Paul, Minnesota. They arrived late at night and showed up at Clemente High School at 5:30 Saturday morning. Before coming down to Chicago, Jessica's mom told me something terrible had happened. Yesterday morning that we planned to come here, she was really sick. I ran down the stairs, she goes-- High fever. And I said, Jess, we're not going. You're very sick. I started crying. My husband goes, take her to the hospital. This is yesterday? That was yesterday. And look at her now. My grandpa was scolding my Ma. You better take her to that concert or I'm going to hit her. My grandpa is just a lovable man. He told me to go and he wished me the best of luck. And he goes, even if you're sick, you've got to go. You've got to go. I want to see you win. And I'm like, Grandpa, there is a lot of people that can win. Not just me. To hear the family tell it, it's like a miracle that Jessica got well. It was like she was chosen. In fact, Jessica was chosen once before. When Selena was still alive, Jessica and her family were at a concert in [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. She and her mom were standing outside the backstage entrance. And Selena's sister, Suzette, picked Jessica out of a huge crowd of little girls to have her picture taken with Selena. After I took the picture with Selena, the guard that was standing by the door, the guard goes, I'll give you this picture that you took with Selena for $5. And I'm like, I don't have any money on me right now, but if I go back to table, I can. And they were joking around. Suzette goes, no, no, no, $2. And then Selena turned around and goes, no, I know how much. She goes, for nothing. You can just keep it for free. And I started laughing. Jessica is a beautiful little girl. She has long black hair and a cinnamon complexion. She's wearing a Selena outfit, knee-length boots, spandex hot pants, and a black, padded bustier with gold trimming over the breast. It's Jessica's dream to be like Selena. She wants to be a singer and sing in English and Spanish. She came to the auditions, but not just so she could be a movie star. It's like she wants to feel closer to Selena. I don't want to do the movie for money or anything. Because money's not the answer. Money's not everything. Look at what it brought to Selena, nothing. I mean, I want to do it because I want Selena to see me, what I'm doing. I just want to do it for Selena. A lot of people still cry over Selena. She was so lovable, just her smile. She was like a little girl. When she went to the Grammy Awards, she went there with her camera, wanted to take pictures with everybody. Selena put a positive role. She made it seem like it's not bad to be Mexican-American. I asked Jessica in Spanish how she felt about Selena's death. She started crying. Then I started crying too. She is my best friend. And a lot of people say things that aren't true. And the people don't know how she is. And she was a very nice person. She was a very nice person. Because I met Suzette, and I met her. And they were talking to me and it was-- I mean, I was so happy. After Selena's death, Jessica and her family went to visit her grave in Corpus Christi, Texas. I was sitting down, and I was hugging the grave, and I asked myself, how come you died, and this and that? And I sang to her. I think I sang "Como la Flor" because it reminds me of her. Sing a little part of it. The words mean, "Like the flower with much love, you gave to me. I'll march on. I know how to lose a love. But oh my, how it hurts me." A lot of people say that she might be dead and stuff. But she's not dead. It's that she sleeping. She's sleeping for a very long time. And wherever she is-- in heaven, or wherever-- she's probably singing her heart up there too. I met all sorts of people at auditions. Everybody was really dressed up and looked fabulous. There was Selena music everywhere, TV cameras, girls were fixing their hair and putting their makeup on. People were dancing. At one point, we were talking to these two girls. They sang us a Selena song. And pretty soon, people we didn't even know were joining in. Everybody was singing. It was just that kind of thing. One of the girls we met came all the way from New York with her mother and her little sister. It was kind of a secret mission. So your dad's at home? Yeah, he doesn't even know we're here. No. He doesn't know that? The mother told her husband that she was at a Mary Kay conference in Philadelphia and that the daughters would be spending the weekend at their older sister's house. Then she flew them all to Chicago for the auditions. Yeah, that's good. Mama saved her daughters. My daughters first. When you finally get inside to the audition, it's kind of disappointing. It's like it's over before it starts. There were 20 girls on the stage at a time. They sit you down at these tables, give you this fake smile, hand you a card to fill out, ask you one question, then tell you to stand up and dance. You dance for 30 seconds. Sometimes they don't even play music. When I went up there, the woman running my table didn't even know who Selena was. She didn't bother to look at me. When we were dancing, they only gave you 60 seconds total to make an impression. So what are they looking for? Magic. What kind of magic? Well, I don't know. That special magic that made Selena that-- she was very outgoing, an incredible entertainer, very gifted, very beautiful. This is the director Greg Nava. He told me there were three auditions, in LA, Chicago, and in Texas. I thought, if he wants magic, I'll give him magic. I told him about Jessica. Of everyone I interviewed, she had the pizazz. She looked like Selena, she had big dreams like Selena, and she has Selena in her heart. I want to show you this little girl. I don't know if you've seen her. Oh, she's beautiful. Fantastic. She came. Is she here? She left already. She told me that she wants to be Selena. She made me cry. And she doesn't even want to get paid. I guarantee you, if she gets the role of Selena, she will be paid. I thought that maybe the auditions were just a publicity stunt, not serious auditions, something Selena definitely would not approve of. But the director said they will most likely pick the little girl from the open auditions. And there was a 50/50 chance they'd pick the big Selena. After a long day, the crowds are cleared. Two cousins who flew in from Texas were sitting outside in the cold, eating pizza, and waiting for a Chicago family friend to pick them up. They had arrived early in the morning and didn't get much sleep. They weren't sure when their ride was coming or where they were going to spend the night. I asked them what they thought of the auditions. I don't know. I don't think it went as great as I thought it would be. Yeah, but why? What did you expect? Well, because, it's like, I don't think the producers were there when I got to do my stuff. So I don't know. I don't know. They're looking for something different. I don't know. What makes you think that they're looking for something different? Just because the people that they choose, they talk to, they don't even-- I don't know. Their appearance. They're not looking for more deeply. They're not looking for a true Selena. They're just looking for appearances. And it's really bad. They might know who Selena was, but not truly what she meant to us. They had spent $135 each, saved from babysitting, to get to Chicago. But they didn't feel bad. It's fine because we got to meet a lot of people and stuff. I mean, we just came. And we knew we're going to not get picked. But we still came and take the chance, because that's the thing that Selena would always say. If you have a thing, you go for it. Don't let nobody put you down because they say, well, we already chose the person. Give whatever you have. And that's what we did. So that's a reason why we came here. They just sat there on the bench waiting. They weren't really dressed for Chicago weather. They wore fishnet pantyhose, real short shorts, bustiers, and thin leather jackets. You could tell they were really cold. They were anxious for their ride to show up. A couple weeks later, it was announced that none of the girls from the open auditions were chosen for the Selena part. Not them, not me, not Jessica. Nobody. Are you doing something tonight? We don't know. We have to get a ride first here. And then we'll know where to go. Well, give me a pen. I could give you some places. You can call me. Go to some party. Claudia Perez is an 18-year-old former high school dropout who recently got her high school equivalency, hopes to go to the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall, is looking for a full-time job right now. This is her second report for our program. She says she wants to be famous, but up until now we are the best that she can do. So Claudia, explain why this is the song you wanted us to play on our program after your story about Selena. I like it because she sings it with a mariachi. And it's an old song from Mexico. When I think of Selena, I don't think of her as a mariachi singer. Well, you don't. That's why she didn't sing with mariachi. She was more of a beat-y person, with a lot of beat. And that's why this song, this one and this other song that she sang, everybody sang it when she left. Everybody sang when she left? You mean everybody sang it when she died? Yeah. Listen to you. You sound like that girl in your story who's like, she's not dead, she's just sleeping, the way you just said that. "When she left." She didn't just leave, honey. I don't like saying death. That's why. Well, today's program was produced by Dolores Wilber and myself with Nancy Updike, Alix Spiegel, and Peter Clowney. Today's show was first broadcast back in 1996. Contributing editors for this show, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. Margy helped do the reporting and the interviews for our story on Erika Yeomans. To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you can visit our website where you can also listen to most of our programs for free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who welcomes his beloved radio staff every single morning to the radio station with this greeting-- Eff you. Get out of my face. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. Later. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. So you've heard, right? The US State Department has hired a former ad executive to run an information campaign to make the United States more beloved in the Muslim world. We know that in many of the countries where our messages are sent that often they're distorted, they're one-dimensional, or they're simply not heard. This is Charlotte Beers, formerly of Madison Avenue, whose taken what is certainly a colossal pay cut to become undersecretary of state in charge of this effort. And while many of the things that she's announced so far are eminently sensible-- better communication with foreign journalists, exchange programs so more people from the Muslim world get to meet and know real Americans-- she talks weird. I know I'm one to talk here. But she speaks in a particular kind of language. Here she is in a press conference talking about Muslims in America. Their conversion rate is astonishing. 30% conversion in each year is about the fastest growing religion in this country and a good number for any sales team. Here's a sales curve any corporation would envy. These are the percent of mosques founded in the US over the last few years. It's obviously a growing, vital religion with some very wonderful people who have a pretty remarkable life here in the United States. To consider all the difficulties the United States faces in this effort, to win the hearts and minds around the Muslim world, consider for a moment what it takes to do a regular advertising campaign, to do something as simple as sell laundry detergent in Muslim Afghanistan and Pakistan. Up until very recently, Zdenka Milanovich was based in Karachi for the global ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi, charged with selling Tide or the version of Tide that they use over there. It's called Ariel. And it is for handwashing since only 1% of the population has access to a washing machine. She said working in that part of the world was unlike any advertising she had ever done before. For me, everything that I knew as the principals in advertising is something that I knew that I had to completely forget about. Zdenka did this interview with our show and with the fine National Public Radio program On the Media. Because we're facing with a completely different type of consumers. The average salary in Pakistan, the real one is $5 per month. The literacy rate, the real one, for women is 4%, 5%. For men, it's higher, of course, 37%. Then there was the fact that although it was women who washed clothes, it was men who made the purchasing decisions. Women didn't read magazines. They didn't see much TV. Zdenka had a product for them that she couldn't advertise to them. So the ad agency did a focus group and was sort of taken aback when six women, completely covered, in black, came in to talk about detergent and about the ads that the agency was thinking of running. We exposed them to certain commercials. We just wanted to get some kind of insights. And after showing them the concepts, asking them to tell us what do they really think and which one would they chose, what they said is that they wouldn't use any. And they have to be asked, why. They said, because we just can't use it, we don't believe in this product because it's too expensive. They know, and they have perception that your brand is expensive because it has a foreign image. This is why it's not good. And I remember me, I just got home. And I was back in the office, and I didn't know what to do. Then I called certain people working in strategic planning in Dubai to understand what to do because they are not listening, and what is they way to approach them. So here's how they turned Ariel from a newcomer into the number one best-selling detergent in these Muslim countries. First, they decided that if the brand's foreignness was a problem, if foreignness made Ariel untrustworthy, then they needed to use, as their local spokesman, people that everyone would trust, which meant local people, real people. The ad agency gave them Ariel to use for a while and then filmed them talking about how great it is. We wanted to create the story about unfortunate people and how our product really contributed to better life. So we created real stories, for example, using a guy having four children and really with the hope to put his children in the good school, to offer them good education. Because the two main hopes for the people are to get the daughters married and to get sons educated. And this is what we did. We just asked the guy to talk in front of a camera that he wants to educate his children, he is a poor man. He can't afford it to do it with one job. This is why he actually has to do two jobs. And because not having enough clothes, his wife helps him by washing with Ariel to look impeccable, working two jobs. And here is the hope for the future. And so what does the US need to do to win the hearts and minds of these same people? Well, Zdenka says that the US needs to let people know that it is on their side, same as Ariel did. And this is where it gets tricky. Because after all, in these countries, plenty of people are mad at the United States because they believe that we are emphatically not on their side. We do things that they disagree with. We support local governments they don't like. We drop bombs that sometimes hit civilians. We give money and arms to the state of Israel. And so there are people that we are not going to persuade. Well, obviously, in marketing in general, a good advertisement cannot compensate for a faulty product. John Quelch is a professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School and author of a book of case studies on how to market products in the Muslim world. So there will undoubtedly be a certain core, a certain set of individuals in each of these Muslim countries whom advertising will not be able to achieve anything with because the policies will still not be perceived as being satisfactory. The problem here is more than a communications problem. It's a problem that relates to policy. It's a problem that relates to the degree to which, first of all, that they don't know the United States. Here's what beginners we are at selling ourselves in most Muslim countries. John Quelch says, we don't even have the most basic polling data to tell us what people think of us. How many people hate us so much that they will never be persuaded? How many might be open to hearing our side of things? This is, in my opinion, a generation-long effort. And as our nation embarks on this campaign for hearts and minds, we thought here at This American Life that it might be helpful to broadcast on the radio a cautionary tale or two, stories of people in wartime trying to win hearts and minds who, at some point, started to believe their own propaganda which, I guess, is kind of an occupational hazard. And they lost important battles because of that. Our program today in two acts. Act One, Don't Believe Anything You Hear On The Radio. In that act, we bring you what we believe are tapes that have never been broadcast in the United States, tapes of a clandestine radio station that the CIA set up back in the good old, bad old days of the 1950s to overthrow a central American government, which they succeeded in doing, using the immense power of radio. Or that's what the CIA believed anyway. Act Two, Live On Stage By The Sword, Die On Stage By The Sword. In that act, a story of wartime, of altruism and self-interest, of believing one's own publicity, and of a 50-year campaign for hearts and minds that was better known as The Bob Hope USO Tour. Stay with us. Act One, Don't Believe Anything You Hear On The Radio. Well, let's begin our show today with what was considered, sort of famously, actually, to be one of our nation's most successful campaigns to win hearts and minds. In retrospect, it serves as a kind of best case and worst case scenario for what we'd like to accomplish around the world these days. It involved a clandestine radio station that the CIA set up to help overthrow the government of Guatemala back in 1954. In the late 1990s, during a brief period when the CIA was declassifying old Cold War materials, tapes of this clandestine station were declassified thanks to the efforts of a nonprofit group called The National Security Archive. As best as we can tell, these tapes have never been broadcast in the United States. Nancy Updike tells this story. The democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, did a few things to get on the wrong side of the United States government. For one, he tangled with a very powerful American company called United Fruit. They grew and exported bananas. They were also Guatemala's largest private employer and its biggest landowner. Most of the 566,000 acres United Fruit owned in Guatemala were uncultivated. And when Arbenz came to power, he started nationalizing the country's land, buying up tens of thousands of those uncultivated acres for a nominal fee and giving them out to peasants. United Fruit complained to the US government. It was the height of the Cold War, Arbenz had communists among his advisers, and the US didn't want Guatemala to become a Soviet beachhead. Guatemala, after all, was only a four-hour flight from New Orleans, a representative from Ohio darkly reminded Congress. Because Eisenhower didn't want to seem like he was intervening in another country's affairs, he sent the CIA. They were given a couple of old airplanes that would fly over the capital to scare people, drop leaflets and, very rarely, a bomb. The CIA had a different president in mind for Guatemala, a disgruntled lieutenant colonel in exile named Castillo Armas. The CIA dubbed him, "The Liberator." The military that Castillo Armas had, which the CIA put together for him, was a ragtag force. This is Nick Grace. I'm going to tell you who he is in a minute. This was essentially an army that was toothless. And in order to promote the army, if you will, essentially, they depended upon propaganda. This is the propaganda outfit the CIA set up, Radio Liberacion, Liberation Radio. And it was basically three Guatemalan guys that the CIA recruited, funded, and trained in psychological warfare-- disinformation, propaganda, scare tactics. From May through July of 1954, these guys went on the air to tell Guatemala about the bold, homegrown liberation movement they were part of, a movement to free the country from the iron grip of international Communism. This, of course, was a lie. There was no homegrown liberation movement, only a CIA plot. It essentially was an elaborate puppet show that was played out over the airwaves. Which brings us back to Nick Grace. He collects clandestine broadcasts from around the world and is probably the only person alive who's listened to all 54 of the tapes of Radio Liberacion. This was an air check. The announcer states, "Every Guatemalan should have, as symbols in his struggle against Communism, God, fatherland, and liberty against Communism, against the vices of the past. For a true democracy, this is Radio Liberacion." "Operating on its clandestine shortwave transmitter from some secret place in the Republic of Guatemala." Explain do you know how much was pre-recorded and how much they did live on the spot? That's tough to say. I think, on the whole, perhaps roughly 80% to 90% of it was pre-recorded in Florida, Opa-Locka, and brought down to the transmitter site-- which we believe was in Nicaragua-- by diplomatic pouch. So these very passionate, patriotic exhortations to free Guatemala from some outside influence were all recorded in Florida? Yeah, pretty much. Up until mid-June. This broadcast was, in fact, one of the ones that was made in the bush, so to speak. So it was not recorded in Florida, you're saying? No, this was recorded in Nicaragua. Do you hear the hum on the audio? Yeah, what is it? They set up so quickly in Nicaragua that they weren't even able to ground their equipment properly. In all of the broadcasts that were done in the jungle, you can hear this hum. They announce, "Radio Liberacion calling Agent Bernardo. Wait at the agreed place. Two hours later, launch the attack in sector R-25. The map shows the exact location of the target. Good luck. Signed, The High Command." They were essentially sending the message to the government that we have maps, we've got agents, we have already chopped up Guatemala into various sectors, we've got a High Command, we're well armed, and we're right at your doorstep. What was actually happening? Absolutely nothing is happening. An interesting thing about this is that he says, "Tomorrow at 9,300 hours, you will receive the requested equipment." Well, 9,300 hours, there's no such term. So you can see-- I heard that, and I thought, what is that? Is it some sort of different military clock? Or they didn't know what they were talking about? They, essentially, didn't know what they were talking about. I wonder if there was any CIA guy listening who heard them say, "9,300 hours" and just went, oh, no, don't say that. I think the CIA, at this point, was very happy with the results. All right. What are they doing here? Here, they're sending a quote unquote "coded message" to the guerrilla army, saying, "There's an important message. And here we go." "Our house--" "--has seven doors--" "--all are green--" "--except one--" "--which is yellow." The perception is that it's a coded message, that something is going to result out of this announcement. Because people had been hearing these kinds of announcements for a month and a half, as well as hearing announcements saying, look out your window, step outside on your patio, and step out into the streets in five minutes, a present will come to you. They step outside, and these anti-government leaflets are dropped out of these aircraft. Now this one is completely different from the other ones. He's almost being a real DJ in a way, where he's coming on and he's being very intimate and saying, "Hi. What's up? How are you? I'm glad." "Don't worry about us." The rest of them are so bombastic, and this one is so-- Personable? Yeah. Well, and so intimate. It's just like he's one guy, and he's talking directly to you. That's what, essentially, they were trying to do, personalize the people behind the microphone. They also wanted to put across the fact that they were supposedly broadcasting from the jungle, from the mountains and that it's very tranquil, the air is clean, there are lots of wild animals. For the populace, hearing that, they think, gosh, there's an area of my country which the government has no reach. "There may have been hardships," as he says. "But yet, the warm support that we get from people everywhere is strong," he says. "It's very satisfying." Well, I was a young boy, I was 11 years old, when we started to listen to Radio Liberacion. That was the name that it took. The slogan was there from the very beginning, I believe. Dios, Patria, Libertad. God, Fatherland, Liberty. Raul Molina is 58 years old and now lives in New York City. His father worked for United Fruit. They lived in Guatemala City. And every day, the whole family would listen to both the government station and Radio Liberacion. They wanted to stay well informed. Molina and I listened to some of the broadcasts. He hadn't heard them since he was a kid. OK. So let's play one of these. That's the national anthem of Guatemala playing. Molina is a serious man with a round face. He fled Guatemala in 1980, fearing for his life. He was a university president, and the army was routinely shooting people like him. Now he works as a translator for the UN. I watched his face for reactions to the tapes, but mostly he just listened, intently. You just laughed a little bit. What were you laughing about? Well, I was laughing about "from a secret place," like it was very much in the outskirts of Guatemala and so on. They made us believe that they were somewhere else. And you did believe that they were in the jungles? Certainly, we did believe. We thought that they might be probably in one of the mountains close to the border to Honduras. Everyone was thinking that that was the case. When did your family realize that these broadcasts weren't real? Well, most Guatemalans realized many years afterwards. We lived through a period from 1954 easily to the early '60s believing most of what had been played on this station. Do you remember these guys' voices? Are they familiar? Yes. And one of them is Lionel Sisniega Otero who is still a politician in Guatemala. He's still in Guatemala? He's still-- He's in Guatemala. And he's in politics. He's with the present government as a matter of fact. Wow. How do you feel about that? Well, I feel very bad about the present government in Guatemala, to tell you the truth. We have a neo-fascist regime in Guatemala. Radio Liberacion was such elaborate deception, the CIA guy running the radio operation was a former actor and a writer. And he put the thing together like a play. There's one broadcast where they even staged a fake takeover of the station, as though government soldiers had suddenly discovered their plucky clandestine outfit in the mountains and had tried to run them off the air. The drama comes in the middle of a regular broadcast. The announcer is talking. And then all of a sudden, you start to hear a little commotion in the background. He seems distracted. Other people are talking behind him. Someone is saying, "Shh, shh." Then you notice the announcer sounds out of breath. Abruptly, there's an increase in the scuffling in the background, and it escalates to the denouement. And then silence. The station goes off the air at this point, leaving listeners to wonder what had happened. Two days later, Radio Liberacion came back on the air and smugly explained that although government thugs had tried to shut down their transmitter, the brave rebels had thwarted them. After two months of broadcasts, the government of Guatemala fell. And it was a success that cemented the reputation of the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. It's hard to remember this today, but in 1954, the CIA was still a relatively young organization, only seven years old, still in the midst of trying to define and justify itself. When Arbenz fell, the CIA was ecstatic. Its critics turned into fans. Eisenhower, in his memoirs, called the overthrow of Arbenz one of his proudest moments. The operation went down in CIA history as quote, "an unblemished triumph." Nick Cullather is a historian the CIA hired a few years ago to write an official internal history of what happened. Cullather was given full access to all documents related to the Guatemalan coup. He says that in spite of everything else that went into the operation-- the CIA had tried to infiltrate the army and foment student uprisings, the planes had increased their flights over the capital-- there was no doubt in the CIA's mind what had made the critical difference. It seemed, to the CIA, that the radio had caused the government and President Arbenz to inexplicably crack psychologically. President Arbenz left the presidential palace, walked across the street to the embassy of Mexico, and abdicated. And that was the conclusion of the operation. And at that point, everything else was failing. The secret army that they had assembled was in full retreat. The air operations appeared not to be having any result. The student groups that they'd organized to foment rebellion in the capital city had all been rounded up, jailed, and executed. Nothing else was going except the radio operation. So it seemed to them that the radio operation must have worked. But the CIA never did a serious analysis of what had happened in Guatemala and why it happened. They didn't talk to any Guatemalans. They didn't even go back over their own operation to determine what had worked. They relied on after-action reports provided by the agents involved. The propaganda guys were the best storytellers, and their version of events stuck. In other words, the agency hired a bunch of liars, taught them to lie better, and then believed them. It created a legend about the types of operations that could be successful, the belief that, at very low cost and with very little loss of life, one could overthrow a government if one used the right combination of military and psychological action. But it really also set up the whole repertoire that the CIA continues to use today. If you take a look at the operations in Central America in the 1980s, the operations following the Gulf War in Iraq, some of the operations that are underway in Afghanistan today, it's the same set of ideas. Small actions that create a climate of opinion within the country that leads to a feeling of inevitable doom. But this whole legend is built on a story that's not true. Arbenz didn't resign because the radio broadcasts psyched him out. He resigned because he could see that the United States would not stop until he was gone. Four months before the coup, the US pushed a resolution through the Organization of American States essentially giving it the right to intervene in Guatemala at will. When Arbenz managed to get actual documentation of the CIA plot against him and made the information public, the State Department denounced it as a desperate and transparent communist propaganda effort, probably masterminded in Moscow. And the US press, from liberal to conservative, bought this. In his final days, Arbenz appealed to the United Nations Security Council. The US strong-armed the Council, and it voted not to hear the case. But even after all this, he still might have hung on. In the end, Arbenz only resigned when his frightened army sent word from the field that if he didn't step down, they would march to the capital and depose him themselves. They, too, believed it was only a matter of time before the US would invade. It seemed the only people who didn't see it that way were in the CIA. Here's historian Nick Cullather. It's very hard for me to separate the notion of force from the notion of propaganda because propaganda is always backed by force. When the Germans were attacking the French along the Maginot Line, they first put sirens on the Stuka dive bombers because the bombs themselves weren't having a great deal of effect on the French troops. But the sirens really made them run. So was that force or was that propaganda? I think the people in the CIA saw that as propaganda. But I think a lot of people would take a look at that and say, no, that's just another variety of military force. Cullather says, there are plenty of situations where it's right for us to use both force and propaganda, for us to intervene in the affairs of another country. Rwanda, for example, or the current war in Afghanistan. The problem, he says, is that we're not so good at facing the magnitude of that task. It's easier to destroy a government than to create one that's stable over the long term. In the CIA documents he examined, he found that the Agency's ideas about a future Guatemalan government were sketchy at best, sketchier, even, than our ideas about what kind of government should come to run Afghanistan. In Guatemala, things didn't work out so well. The man the CIA deposed turned out to be the last truly democratic leader Guatemala had. Armas, the man the CIA picked to replace Arbenz, was assassinated three years into his repressive regime. And since then, it's been one long series of brutal military dictatorships interspersed with short-lived attempts at civilian rule. Again, here's Raul Molina who heard Radio Liberacion as a child. I remember watching a movie. I think it is Eisenhower coming out of a plane and saying now that Guatemala had been liberated, Guatemala was going to be an example for the world. And it became an example to the world, but of the things that you should never do in a country. After that invasion, not a single day passed in Guatemala without violations of human rights with 200,000 Guatemalans killed and more than 45,000 Guatemalans disappeared. So that's certainly the cost of this adventure that we have just heard started [? that way. In this broadcast, Radio Liberacion is announcing the resignation of Arbenz. It's a triumphant speech about how his overthrow is a victory for those fighting against foreign control. But of course, the announcer is working for a foreign government. He says joyfully, "Radio Liberacion is now transmitting live from the liberated territory of Guatemala." Every single part of that sentence is untrue. The transmission is not live. He's not in Guatemala. And the country has not been liberated. Nancy Updike. Coming up, Bob Hope's dog bites our reporter in a minute from Public Radio International and Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Hearts and Minds, a story of wartime and propaganda efforts and what happens when you start to believe your own propaganda. We've come to the second act of our show. Act Two, Live On Stage By The Sword, Die On Stage By The Sword. So the cast of the movie Ocean's Eleven, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and the rest are going to entertain the troops at a US base in Turkey. This is not entirely altruistic. They will be there to coincide with the multimillion dollar publicity campaign for the film's opening December 7, a day that will, of course, live in infamy. By going to Turkey, they will get some free publicity back home, a nice video of the stars palling around with cheering troops. DVDs of the film will be sent to 11 grateful warships in the region. All of which brings to mind this story which our contributing editor Margy Rochlin tells. At the beginning of the Persian Gulf war, during the period when US forces were moving in, but no fighting had started, lots of soldiers found themselves stationed for months in the middle of nowhere, actually living and sleeping in battle formation, isolated from the outside world. So General Norman Schwarzkopf contacted Steve Martin, the actor and comedian, and asked him if he would go to the Middle East. That's how Martin and his then wife, the British actress Victoria Tennant, ended up on their very own mini USO tour. They flew to a Saudi air base near the Kuwaiti front line. And for about a week, they'd awaken at dawn, get into a troop carrier helicopter along with two pilots, two machine gunners, and a special Marine escort, and they'd visit soldiers stationed along the Iraqi-Kuwait border. Every 20 minutes or so, they'd land. And Steve Martin would climb on top of a tank, and about 75 soldiers would gather around. And for about a quarter of an hour, the comedian would just wing it. He'd clown around, answer questions, sign autographs, pose for pictures, whatever. Not wanting to be just the tag-along wife, Victoria Tennant came up with a plan. She'd move through the crowd, collecting names and telephone numbers from the soldiers along with messages that she could relay to their loved ones when she got home. It was such a simple idea, but coming from this rich, prim-looking British woman, it must have seemed unexpected and, therefore, doubly moving. They opened up to her. Single fathers asked her to call their children and say, "Your daddy loves you." Newly married men wanted her to let their brides know how much they were missed. It took Victoria Tennant days to make all the calls. And the best thing about this story is you probably never heard it. And the reason why is because Steve Martin and Victoria Tennant didn't want it publicized. It was a pure, unselfish act, which brings us to Bob Hope. Bob Hope, of course, performed USO shows for a half century all over the world. It was a hearts and minds campaign with two fronts. The servicemen got a taste of home, and the people back home were reminded what great guys Bob Hope and all the other performers were. Now we at This American Life have no doubt at all that Bob Hope, and for that matter George Clooney and Brad Pitt, are all great, great guys. But we were curious about the intersection of public service and self-interest that occurs at a USO show. Years ago, when Hope was still visiting the troops, Margy Rochlin talked with him about what he got out of it for a newspaper profile she was writing. And we asked her to pull out her old tapes of Bob Hope and explain it to us. As best as I can figure, it started innocently enough for Bob Hope. By 1941, Bob Hope's three-year-old radio show had made him the top radio star in the country. Just before the war broke out, a representative from Pepsodent, the toothpaste company who sponsored the show, suggested to a reluctant Hope that he entertain the GIs at the March Field Air Base in Riverside, California. Hope said, no, he didn't think it was a good idea. Nobody listened to him. Next Tuesday, I was crawling on a bus going to March Field with Francis Langford, Jerry Colonna, Skinny Ennis, and the band. And the audience was sensational. So much so that I said, wait a minute, this is tremendous. And we started doing it every week. Went to Camp Pendleton, San Diego, Camp Cook, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] so and so. Everywhere around there, and finally, December, they declared war. Now it's dramatic. We went for five years, we played bases. And it was the most sensational thing, most emotional part of my life. That's what he was in it for at first. Hope had never had an audience respond to him the way that the GIs did. In his 1990 memoir, Don't Shoot, It's Only Me, Hope explains that before he began the USO tours, his producer's equation for a radio show allowed for 23 minutes of jokes and music, 3 minutes for commercials, and roughly 3 minutes for laughter. But Hope's bits went over so huge at the army camps that they had to refigure the laugh time to 6 minutes. Over the next 50 years, Hope took his show all over the world, performing on the flight decks of aircraft carriers and out in the jungle on hastily constructed stages. He was there during every war and major military action from World War II-- We have a nice show here with Francis Langford, Jerry Colonna, Tony Romano, Patty Thomas, and Barney Dean. I know you'll enjoy the girls. You remember, girls? --to the Berlin airlift and the Korean War-- Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Second Infantry Division occupying Korea except on Saturday night. It's on Saturday night when they occupy Seoul. --to Vietnam-- No, but I'm very happy to be here at Tan Son Nhut, southeast Asia's biggest rocket base. Yes, mostly incoming. --to Beirut and the Middle East in the '80s-- And may I tell you it's been a while since I've entertained servicemen. But Washington told me, if we can bring ships out of mothballs, why not you? --and the Persian Gulf in the '90s. That program cost $70 billion, and I got a great idea. If those planes are invisible, let's not build any, but tell the Iraqis they're up there. Hope was the wisecracking master of ceremonies. From show to show, the only thing that changed was the guest stars involved. Big stars, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, Mickey Mantle, Ann-Margret. There would definitely be a band, always beautiful women. Sometimes the women would sing, maybe Hope would bounce a few one-liners off of them. Mostly, their job was to run on stage wearing not very much. When they came out, the lonely GIs would howl their approval. I just want you boys to see what you're fighting for, that's all. Several times his life was in danger. In Saigon, his hotel was bombed. During the Korean War, he was inadvertently landed on Wangsan Beach before the First Marine Division had taken it. One thing he was proud of. At each base, he'd tailor his material with inside jokes for the local servicemen. The Defense Department got a letter from up here signed by 300 GIs, 2 Seals and a misplaced gooney bird. And Colonel Jolly. Thank you very much. Here we are in U-Tapao, the gateway to beautiful downtown Sattahip. Look at those guys hanging out the window. Room service must be late with the poo-ying. I don't even want to know what that joke means. To understand what the USO shows did for Bob Hope's career, you have to remember that he was already the most popular star on radio and in the movies when he began doing the tours. One of his biographers, Bill Faith, said the USO gave Bob Hope a popularity the likes of which we cannot even imagine today. It gave him the sheen of a national hero. And for a long time for Bob Hope, doing the USO tour was a balance of cheerful patriotism and good business. Until 1954, when the balance shifted and the business side of things took on a little more importance. 1954 was when Bob Hope began the tradition of taping the USO shows, then selling them as television specials to NBC. Arguably, they were the cornerstone on which he built the last 40 years of his career. A common misconception about the USO shows is that they raised money for the organization, which isn't true. In fact, there's always been controversy about who paid for what. Bob Hope says he paid all production costs and even lost money in the long run. But it's not clear how. The actors basically donated their time, although the USO says it occasionally paid them a small per diem. And everyone agrees that the Pentagon paid for transportation, most lodging, for the bulk of the bills. Now remember, Hope sold these shows to NBC. But let's say he did lose money. You could not put a price tag on what he got in return. He'd do the USO show every Christmas which would build an audience for other comedy specials throughout the year. Bob Hope presents the hilarious, unrehearsed antics of the stars, starring Lucille Ball, Milton Berle-- Just like the USO shows, each special was almost identical. First came the eight minute opening monologue. He'd tell 35 to 40 jokes. Then came the guest stars, a song, and a corny skit segment at the end of the show. In 1986, I went to observe the legendary comedian tape one of these specials for NBC. At one point, they did a spoof of Mutiny on the Bounty on a big wooden ship. Hope was Captain Bligh, John Denver was Fletcher Christian, Broadway musical star Howard Keel was the Bounty's alcoholic doctor. Morgan Brittany, who played Pam Ewing's evil half-sister on Dallas, was a prissy British missionary. I can't remember what Jonathan Winters played, but he was in drag. He was dressed as a Polynesian dancer girl, I think, in a grass skirt and coconut bra. It looked like the easiest job in the world. No one even pretended to have memorized their lines. They just woodenly read their dialogue from cue cards. If they flubbed a joke, the cameras just kept rolling. That was how they achieved the famous style of Bob Hope specials, or non-style really. It was supposed to be like watching famous people getting together for an hour to have a good time in front of the camera. In the TV business, these specials were famous because they always got top ratings, and they didn't cost Hope much to produce. Back in the '60s, Bob Hope had this amazing clause inserted into his contract. Charges by NBC technicians were frozen at 1961 rates. Back when NBC struck that deal with him, it might have seemed like a good way to keep Hope at the network. But 25 years had passed. If he wanted to have a set built, the fee was circa 1961. He paid next to nothing to use the editing and post-production facilities, their manpower, everything. That was the whole beauty of his setup. He knew that people tuned in to a Bob Hope special to see Bob Hope. The costumes and talent were just window dressing. Why pay people to rehearse? Why waste money? Call it the most economical star-delivery system television has ever seen. This guy was a genius. Not long after I watched them film that sketch, I went to interview Bob Hope at his 50 room house on a quiet tree-lined street in the San Fernando Valley. Hope had two dogs, a black lab and a white Alsatian, and they followed us up the driveway, growling. Are you watching the dog? Hello, baby. Hello, baby. Don't look at her. Don't look at her. That's OK. When one of them nipped at me, Hope kept insisting they were completely harmless. He's a good boy. Ow. He just sort of grabbed my arm here. He's never bitten anybody but one of my writers. All right. All right. Ouch. She just bit me again. OK. Come on, hey. All right now. Don't start. Things went downhill from there. Bob Hope and I had no chemistry, none. He'd tell jokes that I didn't get. And not only that, after he'd delivered the punch line, he'd lean towards me, fix me with his brown eyes, and gauge my response. So I'd laugh. The things I said only made him fall into long exasperated silences. It was awkward. So we ate lunch, creamed chicken and peas with rice. I think I wanted him to show me how he'd changed with the times, how he'd subtly tweaked his material to better reflect his age or adapted it so that it resonated with the popular culture. So I asked him a question. Are you pretty sympathetic to the women's movement? There I was sitting with a man in his early 80s who was still telling hubba-hubba jokes, and I'm quizzing him about the women's movement. What was I expecting? I am sympathetic to any woman's movement. I do a joke on it. Because it's such a big laugh that I close my act on it. "It's nice to be here in Honolulu. And I tell you, women are really coming to the fore in this world." I said, "It's wonderful. I'm so happy because we pushed them around long enough, kept them down. In fact, I remember a friend of mine saying to his wife, 'How could you be so incredibly beautiful and so incredibly stupid?' And she said, 'It's God's will.' He says, 'What do you mean?' She says, 'Well, he made me incredibly beautiful, so you would be attracted to me, and made me incredibly stupid, so I'd be attracted to you.'" Well, they die. And I'd say, "That's for the ladies. Thank you. God bless you. Good-bye." I close my act with that. He was friends with so many presidents, it was like being friends with Bob Hope came with the job. He played golf with Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, George Bush senior. President Kennedy had him over to the White House to discuss jokes. LBJ presented him with a Medal of Freedom. Friends since the '40s, he and Ronald Reagan had an annual tradition of celebrating New Year's at Walter Annenberg's in Palm Springs. Right around the time we met, the Iran-Contra scandal was just beginning to break, and Hope was struggling with how he was going to address the topic of the day without hurting his old pal's feelings. At one point, he did his Iran-Contra bit for me. I said, "I don't know whether I want to go back to the States because I hate it when our foreign policy is funnier than I am." "And Congress is really upset because, you know, they get mad when people screw things up, and they don't have anything to do with it." I said, "I don't know who the White House aides were. It was either Curly, Larry or Moe." "And I can't understand selling arms to Iran," I said. "That's like Johnny Carson giving jokes to Joan Rivers." Well, that doesn't hurt anybody. And it's all front page. So you have to go that way. That's the way I go. Hope has always been identified more with the right than the left. It was Republicans, never Democrats, who invited him to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. But on that day, when I brought up politics, he classified himself as nonpartisan. A leaner, I think he called himself, someone who leans in the direction of whomever is currently in power. Whether he was a leaner or not, his image as a fence straddler ended in 1963 with the Vietnam War. He was forced to make a political choice, and whichever choice he made, it wasn't going to sit well with the other side. If he decided to go to Vietnam to entertain the troops, he was supporting an unpopular war. But if he decided to stay home, he risked breaking a tradition and disrupting a so-far harmonious relationship with a government who'd help make him an American icon. Well, you may remember what he decided. From Shemya Island in the Aleutians, from Yokota, Japan, and from Camp Casey, and Osan in Korea-- In the end, Hope did nine Christmas tours in Vietnam. And each of those shows, he taped, produced, and sold to NBC as television specials. From Udorn, U-Tapao, and Nam Phong in Thailand, and from Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Vietnam, it's the Bob Hope Christmas special starring Redd Foxx, Lola Falana-- For the first time, he began generating criticism. Though there were still cheering crowds, there were plenty of times where the men booed Bob Hope and gave him the finger. In an era of Jimi Hendrix and pot smoking, picture long-haired troops without shirts, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beer, being treated to golf jokes, big band music, and a juggler. In 1980, in Rolling Stone magazine, writer Timothy White quoted servicemen who claimed that attendance was mandatory, that they were a captive audience, that the scantily clad showgirls that had so delighted GIs in the past now just seemed like PG-rated strippers to the men, women who they could look at, but couldn't touch. Hello. I'm Miss Kansas, Cindy Lee Sikes. Merry Christmas. Oh, I'm 18, and I won the swimsuit contest in the Miss America Pageant. In this footage, things don't seem so wholesome anymore. Each girl is dressed in a spangley leotard, and the men surge forward like they're going to devour them. Hi y'all. I'm Melanie. I'm Miss Georgia World. Anybody from Georgia? Any of y'all like to try a little of our southern comfort? Next, two young blondes are on stage with Bob Hope. Hi, I'm Tricia Barnstable from Louisville, Kentucky. And I'm Cyb Barnstable, her twin sister. And we just want to know if there's anybody out there who thinks they can handle two. Back home, it almost seemed like Bob Hope was blind to the politics of what he was doing and out of touch. There's an incredible quote from Marlon Brando from an interview in Playboy magazine. Brando called Hope "an applause junky." He said, "Bob Hope will go to the opening of a phone booth in a gas station in Anaheim provided they have a camera and three people there. He'll go the opening of a market and receive an award." Brando said, "It didn't bother him at all to work the Vietnam War. Oh, he took that in his stride. He did his World War Two and Korean War act-- our boys, and all that. He's a pathetic guy." The criticism after Vietnam truly stunned Bob Hope. For years, he was seen as a good ambassador, agendaless, flying around the world representing our country. He hadn't changed anything, but somehow, he'd become a bane to the anti-war movement, a militarist, controversial. It didn't make any sense to him. We weren't carrying bullets. We were carrying laughs. And I wasn't the only one going. Everybody went to Vietnam, Jimmy Stewart and his wife, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Johnny Grant. But on account of me getting all the television coverage and doing that show, they all got the feeling, they said, "Hey, he's doing this show, that's a commercial show," and so on and so on and so on. And anybody that would deny those kids the right to have a show like we brought them, well, you felt kind of sorry for those people. Because they couldn't have been very patriotic. I had a couple of people that called me a warmonger. And I gave it to the FBI and the sheriff here. And they found these guys over in Santa Monica Boulevard, and they chased them out of the town. Who were the people? They were some bums that were probably guys that were defectors or something. A kid walked up to me out here in Van Nuys-- I was in an ice cream store-- went out to my car. And a kid walked up to the car and said, "Hey, is it true that you took guns to Vietnam?" I said, "Where'd you hear that?" He said, "Oh, I read that somewhere." And I said, "Let me tell you something, son." I said, "I took laughs to Vietnam." I said, "Did you ever see my show?" He might have known that the politics of war would lead him down this road eventually. No one could deny that in his career with the USO, Bob Hope faced hardships and acted out of a sense of altruism and patriotism. But it's also clear that there was another side to it all. He'd figured out a way to use international conflict as a marketing tool for his reputation and career. And there's nothing wrong with that. It just seems wrong to cry foul when people stop laughing. Margy Rochlin in Los Angeles. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who has this message for his rebel troops. Our house has seven doors. All are green except one. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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It's an us versus them situation. To Felicia Blum, a freshman at Glenbrook South High School, it could not be more clear. There are fundamental differences between her school and its rival, Glenbrook North. The differences are basically the fact that the people at GBN are a little more snobby. Like, people have to fit a certain mold that people here don't have to do. And describe the mold. What is the mold that they're fitting into? Like, skinny, pretty. You don't necessarily have to be the nicest person. Good clothes, expensive clothes, expensive everything. Buffalo Jeans, Michael Stars, Kate Spade purses, backpacks, pencil bags. Go there, the kids at South tell me. You'll see. Over half the girls at Glenbrook North will have Kate Spade or Prada handbags. So I go. It's not far, just a few minutes across the Chicago suburbs. Now, traditionally, at this point in any story on public radio, or any after-school special for teenagers for that matter, what should happen next is that I should arrive at Glenbrook North and find out that, no, of course, kids in both schools are the same. Kids are kids. They're always the same. But it turns out that there are a lot of kids at Glenbrook North, GBN, who agree that they are snobbier. GBN is more, like-- you have to have this, and do your hair, and do your makeup. Everything. Yeah. I think GBS is more comfortable with themselves as people than we are. I know. Exactly. We follow the crowd. Exactly. And if you're not in the in-crowd, then you're nothing. And everyone will think of you as just a big loser. And it's hard. I was told that most of the girls at this school would be carrying either Kate Spade or Prada bags. I have a Prada on right now, actually. Yeah. It's true. Is that true? Kate Spade is true. That's true. But laying it all out like this, here on the radio, exaggerates just how competitive the two schools are. Most kids didn't seem to care one way or the other about the subject. It was the kids who were the most invested in the idea of school spirit who feel the strongest that there's a difference between the schools. Like that first girl, Felicia Blum, for instance. Yeah. I have a lot of spirit. I'm on poms, which is like dancing at the halftime shows, so I guess I'm a little high spirit. What can I say? It's hard for there to be such a thing as "us" if you don't have a "them." And some people by disposition need a good "them." Other people tend to see "thems" of all sorts as more like "us," which is the subject of today's radio show. In this time of war, when we are all feeling a heightened sense of "us" and "them," we wanted to take up the problem of "them" with three stories of people misperceiving the "them-iness" of "them." From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three vivid acts. Act One, My Friend The Extremist. What happens if you're not sleeping with the enemy, but instead find that you are watching The Lion King with him. Act Two, Don't They Know It's Christmas After All? In that act, David Sedaris tries to contemplate the barrenness of a world that has Santa, but no elves. Act Three, Newfies. The story of an American sailor in World War II whose life was saved by foreigners and then threatened repeatedly by Americans. Us and them, reversed. Stay tuned. Act One, My Friend The Extremist. Several years ago, before many of us paid much attention to the name Osama bin Laden, reporter Jon Ronson started following around the religious leader who calls himself bin Laden's "man in London." At first, Ronson definitely thought that this leader was on the "them" side of "us" and "them." But once Ronson got to know him, he changed that opinion. In the year since September 11, he has been forced to change that opinion again, to the point where it is not exactly clear what to think. Here's Jon. I first met Omar Bakri Mohammed shortly after he declared holy war on Britain in 1995. There were maybe 5,000 of Omar Bakri's followers in Trafalgar Square when he announced that he wouldn't rest until he saw the black flag of Islam flying over Downing Street and the White House. There was much cheering. The stage had been rented out to him by the local city council, from which he outlined his post-jihad vision for the UK. He who practiced homosexuality, adultery, fornication, or bestiality would be stoned to death or thrown from the highest mountain. Christmas decorations and shop window dummies would be outlawed. Pubs would be closed down. Pictures of ladies' legs on packets of pantyhose would be banned. We'd still be able to buy pantyhose, but they'd be advertised simply with the word "Pantyhose." I very much wanted to meet Omar Bakri and spend time with him while he attempted to overthrow democracy and transform Britain into an Islamic nation. It turned out that he lived a couple of miles away from me in Edmonton, North London, in a small semi-detached house at the end of a cul-de-sac. I got his telephone number from the phone book. He called back straightaway. There were so many anti-Muslim lies, he said, generated by the Jewish-controlled media, so much misinformation in the newspapers and the movies. Perhaps this would be an opportunity for the record to be set straight. So yes, I was welcome to join him in his struggle against the infidels. And then he added, "I'm actually very nice, you know." "Are you?" I asked. "Oh, yes," said Omar Bakri. "I am delightful." At 9:00 the next morning, I sat in Omar's living room while Omar played with his baby daughter. "What's your daughter's name?" I asked him. "It is a difficult name for you to understand," said Omar. "Does it have an English translation?" I asked. "Oh, yes," said Omar. "It translates into English as The Black Flag of Islam." "Really?" I said. "Your daughter's name is The Black Flag of Islam?" "Yes," said Omar. "Really?" I said. There was a small pause. "You see," said Omar, "why our cultures could never integrate?" The Lion King was playing on the video. We watched the scene where the warthog sung "Hakuna Matata," the song about how wonderful it is to have no worries and problem-free philosophies. Omar sang along, bouncing the baby on his knee. "We always watch The Lion King," he said. "It's the only way I can relax. You know, they call me The Lion. That's right. They call me The Lion. They call me the great warrior, the great fighter." Omar showed me his photo album. His teenage photographs made him look like a matinee idol. He came from a family of 28 brothers and sisters. His father had made a fortune selling sheep and pigs and cows. They had chauffeurs and servants and palaces in Syria and Turkey and Beirut. Omar escaped Saudi Arabia in 1985. He'd heard he was going to be arrested for preaching the jihad. He escaped to Britain. Now he's a big man with a big beard. "I was thin because I always worried," he said. "I was always on the run. Now I live in Britain. I never worry. What's going to happen to me here? Ha-ha. So I got fat. A leader must be big in stature. The bigger the body, the bigger the leader. Who wants a little, scrawny leader?" Omar's plan for the morning was to hand out leaflets entitled, "Homosexuality, Lesbianism, Adultery, Fornication, and Bestiality: The Deadly Diseases." He said he couldn't help notice my car in the driveway, so perhaps I would give him a lift. "OK," I said. I dropped him off near the tube station. I went to park the car. 10 minutes later, I found him standing in the middle of the pavement with a stack of leaflets in his hand. "How's it going, Omar?" I asked. "Oh, very good," he smiled. "The message is getting across that there are some deadly diseases here and there." He turned to the passers-by. "Homosexuality," he yelled. "Beware the deadly disease. Beware the hour." Some time passed. "Homosexuality," yelled Omar. "Beware. There are homosexuals everywhere." I expected to see some hostility to Omar's leaflets from the passers-by. But the shoppers and tourists and office workers seemed to regard him with a kindly bemusement. Nonetheless, after 10 minutes, nobody had actually taken a leaflet. "Beware the hour. There are homosexuals everywhere. Beware the hour," continued Omar cheerfully. "Be careful from homosexuality. It is not good for your tummy." Omar Bakri was unlike my image of a Muslim extremist. Then he told me he had a good idea. "Just watch this," he said. He turned the leaflets upside down. "Help the orphans," he yelled. "Help the orphans." "Omar," I exclaimed, scandalized. The passers-by started to accept the leaflets. "This is good," chuckled Omar. "This is good. You see? If I wasn't a Muslim, I'd be working for, how you say, Saatchi and Saatchi." At lunchtime, Omar said he needed to buy some collection boxes for his regular fundraising endeavors for Hamas and Hezbollah. Hamas had orchestrated a bus bombing in Jerusalem three weeks earlier, which had killed 11 people. "There was a cash-and-carry just off the ring road near Tottenham," said Omar, "that sells very good collection boxes. Could you give me a lift?" "OK," I said. So we drove to the cash-and-carry. Omar sat in the backseat, which made me feel a little like a taxi driver. "Left," said Omar. "Left at the junction. No, left." At some traffic lights, I asked Omar where his wife was when I was at his house. "She was upstairs," he said. "She wouldn't come down until after you left." "What would happen if I had tried to interview her?" I asked. "I would declare fatwa on you," said Omar. "Please don't say that," I said. "Ha-ha," said Omar. "Even as a joke," I said. We arrived at the cash-and-carry to discover that the only collection boxes they had in stock were large, plastic, novelty Coca-Cola bottles. Omar paused for a moment. He scrutinized the collection boxes. He furrowed his brow. Then he placed half a dozen of them in his shopping cart. "These are good collection boxes," he said. "Very big and lightweight." "It seems strange to me," I said, "that you plan to collect for Hamas in novelty Coca-Cola bottles." "Ah," said Omar Bakri. "I am not against the imperialist baggage. Just the corruption of Western civilization." We packed our stuff into the trunk of my car, and I drove Omar to the Finsbury Park mosque, where he was to deliver a speech at a conference entitled, "Democracy or Dictatorship." Omar was speaking on behalf of dictatorship. This was my first opportunity to meet some of Omar's followers. There were maybe 500 of them in the audience. Things did not start well. "Are you a Jew?" asked a young man. "Uh, no," I lied. He apologized. "Don't worry about it," I said. Omar Bakri was fast-talking on the podium, as if he couldn't contain the words that needed to be said. He filled the room. He quoted from a letter he'd just received from an old friend, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, The Blind Sheikh. The Blind Sheikh was in jail for life in Missouri for inspiring the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. This law of "inspiration" had not been utilized since the American Civil War. Omar used to eat with The Blind Sheikh back in Saudi Arabia. After the speech, Omar said he needed to do some errands in town, and could I give him a lift? I agreed, although I feared I was beginning to cross the line between journalist and chauffeur. "I'm meeting someone in Soho," I said. "So can I drop you off there?" "No, no, no," he said anxiously. "It is forbidden for me to go into Soho. Please don't take me there." Soho would be razed to the ground, said Omar, once the holy war had been won. "It is important for people to understand these things," he said, "so they will be ready to adapt to the new ways." "Have you ever been to Soho?" I asked. "Oh, no," said Omar. "It is forbidden." "What do you imagine Soho to be like?" I asked. "There are naked women everywhere," he said. "Naked women standing on street corners." We got talking about the word "fundamentalist." Omar said it had been redefined by the infidels of the west as a pejorative term. "You use it as an insult," Omar said. "Turn left, please." "But surely you are a fundamentalist," I said, "in the sense that you live your life by the rules set down in the Quran." "This is true," said Omar. "The Quran rules every aspect of my life. It tells me how I eat, how I sleep, how I fight, and even how I will die." Omar paused. "You know," he said, "the Quran even tells me which direction I must break wind in." There was a short silence. "And which direction do you break wind in?" I asked. "In the direction of the non-believer," Omar said. "The direction of the non-believer." Omar laughed heartily for some time, and he slapped me on the back. "OK," said Omar as I pulled up near Piccadilly Circus. "Thank you very much. Goodbye, Jon." As I drove away, I gave my horn a little beep, and I mouthed the words, "I'll call." As the months progressed, I found my life becoming increasingly determined by Omar's whims. "If you turn up late," he often said, "I will give you 60 lashes. Ha-ha." On many occasions, Omar would telephone and call me over urgently. I'd cancel nights out with my wife and drive over to discover that he'd forgotten all about me and had taken the train to Plymouth, or Nuneaton, or to his secret jihad training camp near Crawley. I sometimes felt I was getting a unique insight into what it would be like living under Islamic rule with Omar as ayatollah. Time passed, and then it was January, the first day of Ramadan. For months now, I'd been asking Omar to take me to his secret jihad training camp in Crawley, an anonymous commuter town near Gatwick Airport, which seemed a rather incongruous location for a jihad training camp. Finally, he agreed. We were picked up at Crawley station by some young local followers. These were people I'd never seen before. Omar said that in every town and city in the country, and many towns abroad, there were clustered his supporters. "When you put those people together," said Omar, "you have an army." "Oh, yes," he continued. "There's a day when military struggle will take place in the UK. Jihad. It's called 'conquering.' One day, without question, the UK is going to be governed by Islam. The Muslims in Britain must not be naive. They must be ready to defend themselves militarily. The struggle, as I always say, is a struggle between two civilizations. The civilization of man against the civilization of God." We were driven to the jihad training camp, a well-stocked gym in a scout hut in a forestry center. Snow lay on the ground. Inside, a young man wearing boxing gloves was beating a punch bag, and Omar immediately instructed him to focus his assault. "On the head," he said. "That's it. The head. Easy, easy. OK, stop now. Rest. Rest. You kill him. You kill him." The group laughed, and I laughed too. I was standing in one corner with my back against the wall. I found the situation slightly uncomfortable. And then, apropos of nothing, Omar made an announcement to the group. "Look at me," he said. "Here I am with an infidel. Jon--" Omar paused for effect "--is a Jew." There was an audible gasp followed by a long silence. Of all the locations in which Omar could have chosen to disclose this sensational revelation, a packed jihad training camp in the middle of a forest was not the place I'd have hoped for. I found myself searching for the fastest path to the door. "Are you really a Jew?" said someone eventually. "Well," I said lightly. "Surely it's better to be a Jew than an atheist." There was a silence. "No, it isn't," said a voice from the crowd. "When did you know I was Jewish?" I asked Omar. "From the beginning," he said. "I could see it in your eyes. Why didn't you tell me?" "Well," I said. "You know." "Are you ashamed to be a Jew?" said Omar. "You deny it?" "No," I said. "I am not offended that you are a Jew," said Omar. "We are all Semites. If you were Israeli, if you were Zionist, that is a different matter, but what offends me is that you hide it. You assimilate. That you have no pride." "I am proud," I said, unconvincingly. But of course, Omar was right. I should have told him. "Assimilation," tutted Omar. "Integration. These are the worst things of all. Be a Jew." In the years that followed my time with Omar, he sporadically made the papers, calling for this fatwa or that fatwa, reaffirming the fatwa on Salman Rushdie after Iran had lifted it. But he also began to seem increasingly anachronistic, a spent force. All that would change during the week of September the 11th, 2001. The first sign that Omar had decided to initiate his own endgame came in the form of a press release he posted on his website on September the 12th. It read, "The final hour will not come until the Muslims conquer the White House. As America declares war on 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, what is your duty?" Omar then gave a series of newspaper interviews in which he spoke of his delight at the attacks. "Oh, wow," he told the Daily Mail. "The United States has come under attack. It's exciting." A number of his British followers joined the Taliban. At least three were, in Omar's words, "martyred" because of it. The conservative leader, during an emergency session of Parliament, called for a change in the law, so Omar could be deported. Scotland Yard arrested Omar, and then they released him. He'd committed no crime. I telephoned Omar on the evening of his arrest. I expected to find him in defiant mood, but he seemed a little scared. "This is so terrible," he said. "The police say they may deport me. Why are people linking me with bin Laden? I do not know the man. I've never met him. Why do people say I'm bin Laden's man in Great Britain?" "Because you've been calling yourself bin Laden's man in Great Britain for years," I said. "Oh, Jon," said Omar. "I need you more than ever now. You know I'm harmless, don't you? You always said I was laughable, didn't you? Oh, Jon, why don't people believe you when you tell them I'm just a harmless clown?" Of course, someone who's a clown isn't always harmless. I thought about Omar when I watched the World Trade Center fall to the ground. Had he been a monster all this time masquerading as a friendly buffoon to fool guileless liberals like me? I wondered if he'd duped me, or worse, if I'd duped myself. Someone once told me that I suffer from the great liberal misconception that everyone is basically good underneath. I'd argue instead that most people are a mix of good and bad, and that to see ourselves in them is better than seeing them as inhuman, as something that is impossible to recognize. But I have to admit, there are moments when I think I went too far in befriending Omar. The last time I saw him in person was 1996. It had been a year since he bought his novelty Coca-Cola Hamas collection boxes from the cash-and-carry. They were full now, of loose change and GBP 50 notes. There was a check for GBP 5,000 in one. Omar and his deputy, Anjem, were taking the collection boxes to the bank. The money would be converted into foreign currency and shipped off to the Middle East, where it would be used in the fight against Israel. Omar had some business to finish. Anjem packed the bottles in the back of his car. Then he remembered that he'd left his coat inside. He said, "Could you guard the money for a moment? I won't be long." "OK," I said. Anjem disappeared, and I was left standing guard over thousands of pounds, money that would go to Hamas to kill the Jews in Israel. For a while I stood there. And what was I doing, guarding money that would be used to kill the Jews? And then I understood that I had to take the money. I had to reach into the car, grab the Coca-Cola bottles, and make a run for it. This was my responsibility, my duty. I had an obligation to do this. I had the strength to carry two bottles. How many lives might that save? Omar and Anjem were inside. The car was unlocked. But I didn't do it, of course. I just stood there. And then Anjem and Omar returned, thanked me for my help, and took the money to the bank. Jon Ronson. In the year since he followed Omar Bakri, Bakri left London and then was banned from returning into England. He now lives in Lebanon. Coming up, David Sedaris puts the "damn" back in Amsterdam. You can say that on the radio, right? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Them, stories of how we sometimes expect "them" to be more like "us," or less like us, other times, and wrongly. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Don't They Know It's Christmas After All? When we travel overseas, most of us want to embrace the "them-iness" of other countries and cultures. But that can be hard when we confine ourselves to museums, shopping, restaurants. David Sedaris has devised a few things to talk about while overseas to get a glimpse of the ways in which people are different from us. I've never been much for guidebooks, so when traveling abroad, my first question usually relates to barnyard animals. "What do your roosters say?" is a good icebreaker, as every country has its own unique interpretation. Grecian roosters crow "kiri-a-kee," and in France, they scream "coco-rico," which sounds like an order for one of those horrible pre-mixed cocktails with the pirate on the label. When told that an American rooster says "cock-a-doodle-doo," my hosts look at me with disbelief and pity. "When do you open your Christmas presents?" is another good question, because I think it explains a lot about national character. In France and Germany, gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve, while in Holland, the children open their presents on December 6, which is nationally celebrated as Saint Nicholas Day. It sounded sort of quaint until I spoke to a man named Oscar, who filled me in on a few of the details as we walked from my hotel to the Amsterdam train station. Unlike the jolly, obese American Santa, Saint Nicholas is painfully thin and dresses not unlike the Pope, topping his robes with a tall hat resembling an embroidered tea cozy. The outfit, I was told, is a carryover from his former career, when he served as the bishop of Turkey. "I'm sorry," I said, "but could you repeat that?" One doesn't want to be too much of a cultural chauvinist, but this seemed completely wrong to me. For starters, Santa didn't "used to do" anything. He's not retired, and, more importantly, he has nothing to do with Turkey. It's too dangerous there, and the people wouldn't appreciate him. When asked how he got from Turkey to the North Pole, Oscar told me with complete conviction that Saint Nicholas currently resides in Spain, which again is simply not true. While our Santa flies in on a sled, the Dutch version arrives by boat and then transfers to a white horse. The event is televised, and great crowds gather at the waterfront to greet him. I'm not sure if there's a set date, but he generally docks in late November and spends a few weeks hanging out and asking people what they want. "Is it just him alone?" I asked. "Or does he come with some backup?" Oscar's English was close to perfect, but he seemed thrown by a term normally reserved for police reinforcement. "Helpers," I said. "Does he have any elves?" Maybe I'm just overly sensitive, but I couldn't help but feel personally insulted when Oscar denounced the very idea as, quote, "grotesque and unrealistic." "Elves," he said. "They're just so silly." The words "silly" and "unrealistic" were redefined when I learned that Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as six to eight black men. I asked several Dutch people to narrow it down, but none of them could give me an exact number. It was always six to eight, which seemed strange considering they've had hundreds of years to get a decent headcount. The six to eight black men were characterized as personal slaves until the mid-1950s, when the political climate changed, and it was decided that instead of being slaves, they were just good friends. I think history has proven that something usually comes between slavery and friendship, a period of time marked not by cookies and quiet hours beside the fire, but by bloodshed and mutual hostility. They have such violence in Holland, but rather than duking it out amongst one another, Santa and the former slaves decided to take it out on the public. In the early years, if a child was naughty, Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men would beat him with what Oscar described as "the small branch of a tree." Then, if the youngster was really bad, they'd put him in a sack and take him back to Spain. "Wait a minute. Saint Nicholas would kick you?" "Well, not any more," Oscar said. "Now he just pretends to kick you." He considered this to be progressive, but in a way I think it's almost more perverse than the original punishment. "I'm going to hurt you, but not really." While eight flying reindeer are a hard pill to swallow, our Christmas story remains relatively dull. Santa lives with his wife in a remote polar village and spends one night a year traveling around the world. If you're bad, he leaves you coal. If you're good and live in America, he'll give you just about anything you want. We tell our children to be good and send them off to bed, where they lie awake anticipating their great bounty. A Dutch parent has a decidedly tastier story to relate, telling his children, "Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes. They might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain. Or they might just pretend to kick you. We don't know for sure, but we want you to be prepared." This is the reward for living in Holland. As a child, you get to hear this story. And as an adult, you get to turn around and repeat it. As an added bonus, the government has thrown in legalized drugs and prostitution. So what's not to love about being Dutch? David Sedaris strives for international understanding in several books. This one appears in Dress Your Children in Corduroy and Denim. Which brings us to Act Three, Newfies. We end our program with this story in which "us" and "them" are reversed. All the people who should be on the side of the man in this story are actually against him, and all the foreigners, who might be bad to him, actually treat him like one of their own. Chris Brookes put the story together. Go right in where he came out of. That's the bridge [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I'm driving through the small town of Saint Lawrence, Newfoundland, Canada. It's about 300 miles from where I live myself, and the population is 1,697, according to that road sign. It's on the edge of a boot of rock that sticks right out into the North Atlantic shipping lanes. When you see this place on the map, it looks like a big foot waiting to trip unwary sailors. The person giving me directions here is Ena Edwards. She's kind of the unofficial Saint Lawrence historian. And you turn left up here by the stop sign. Do you see the high school's down there? Newfoundland is a place that some mainland Canadians like to make jokes about. They imagine that we're an island of some kind of naive fisherfolk. And actually, naive isn't the right word. Stupid is what they think we are. And the jokes they tell about us are called Newfie jokes. How many of us does it take to screw in a light bulb, that kind of thing. And when I first heard this story, it was in that kind of a context, a funny story about isolated Newfoundlanders just too naive to know what would have been obvious to most other people in North America. But lately, I've found out the rest of the story, and it wasn't a joke at all. We're getting close to it though. Where Ena's taking me here is to the new school playground. But the playground is really the end of this story. The beginning of it is 3,000 miles south of here, all the way down in DeKalb County, Georgia. If you'll step in here, I'll show you, that's Saint Lawrence. That photograph. Yeah, that's Saint Lawrence. And here's my great-grandmother and grandfather, who were born slaves. Well, I'm Lanier Phillips. I was born March 14, 1923, and I live in DeKalb County. And DeKalb County didn't furnish schools for black people until 1939. They didn't want the blacks to have any kind of education. Then they had the Klan, the Ku Klux Klan. And they instilled fear in the black people. At least they tried. And I know they had fear into me from five or six years old. And I would go up the railroad track and see them come down Main Street, marching every Saturday night. They would march. And then at other times, they would be on this truck, and they would fire a shot in the air or something like that. And I knew which way they were going. When they crossed the railroad track, if they kept going straight, I knew they was going to a place called Smokey Row, predominantly black. Well, it was all black. But if they made a right turn, I knew they was coming down to what we call Bruce's Alley, where I live. And I'd take off like a jackrabbit and tell people, they're coming. And everybody would put the lamps out. They didn't have electricity. But they did some terrible things. Black people had a chance to build the school themselves. They called it Yellow Ribbon. Three counties, Rockdale, Gwinnett County, and DeKalb County, got together and built this school, but the Ku Klux Klan burned the school down. Yes, sir. They burned it. I remember that clear. I can close my eyes and see the flames going, standing, and watching the school burn, and listening to the grown-ups say, they'll never let us learn or let our children learn to read. I saw no future. I had no dreams because the only thing I could say, well, maybe I'll be a sharecropper or something once I grew up. So I said, I think I'll join the navy. So in '41, I joined the navy. Well, they had blacks in one place and whites in another. And blacks better not interfere, go down to the whites' showers or bathroom or anything like that. And the blacks on board ship, they could only be mess attendants, serving and what they called taking care of your officer. You were assigned a certain amount of officers. You kept his shoes shined, his clothing ready, and his room cleaned. And you'd be out for 30 days or more. You had to wash those officers' underwear. Well, in the convoys, we had a lot of merchant ships. And we would escort them up to Iceland. And then the British would take over the convoy and take them on into England. And the home port was Boston, and as soon as we left Boston, it was storming. And we'd join up off of Halifax. I thought we were heading for Iceland. I said, well, I won't get off the ship until we get back to the States. Because the previous trip had been to Iceland. And no blacks could go ashore there because they had some agreement with America that they would never let a black man put foot in Iceland. And they had the same agreement in Morocco. At Port Lyautey, they had a base there. And they said no Jew could ever stand there. And that was the agreement. And that's the way it was. That's the way it was. My maiden name was Farrell, which I kept after I married. So I'm Ena Farrell Edwards. And at the time of the disaster in 1942, February the 18th, in Saint Lawrence, it was Ash Wednesday. And it was a ferocious storm, a real blizzard. I heard the XO, the executive officer, tell the captain, this is going to be a rough one. I'm Gus Etchegary. I was about 16 and a half in 1942, just finished high school in Saint Lawrence. Oh, it was a huge-- it was a hell of a storm. There was no doubt about it at all. I don't know what the estimate of the winds would be, but it had the full strife of the Atlantic. And I guess many people said, maybe it was even said in our house, what a dreadful night. We pity the poor sailors on the sea tonight. Truxtun had no radar, so what they did was rely on dead reckoning. Before they knew it, they were right into the cliff. Bang. I thought we had been torpedoed. I didn't know what-- I was in my bed when it hit. Down I came. I had all my clothes on. I had my life jacket. And I grabbed a pair of shoes-- I didn't know if it was mine or what-- and went topside. Well, it was dark. And it was storming. I mean it was picking the Truxtun up and, it looked like, just slam it against the rock. And you could hear the steel grinding. Then when day began to break, all you could see was the cliffs and the rocks. And it just picked the ship up and down it would go. And began to wash the fellows overboard. I almost got washed over two or three times, but I'd grab that lifeline and hold on. At about 7:30 in the morning, my father called, and in a somewhat frantic voice said, get down here as quickly as you can. Get ahold of the driver of that pickup truck. Load up all the ropes and lines that you could find in the area and get down to Chambers Cove. The ship had begun to take on so much water, we knew it was going to sink. They had said that no man could live in the water more than five minutes because of the cold. As we came up over the hill and looked down, 300 feet or so below, right in the middle of a horseshoe cove, this destroyer, this Truxtun, partly submerged, but the full length of the rail was still above water. All these people hanging on, if you like, to dear life on the rail. Some were just swept up on those jagged cliffs and then tumble down. It was a pretty dreadful sight. About this time, she began to break, and all the oil had come out. Oil was coming out, and everybody looked like little rats in the water covered with that crude oil. I, along with others, went down hand over hand on a rope. I told the other blacks that were standing there with me-- I said, at least we're going to die if we're still on board ship. Let's go for it. He said, well, this is Iceland. You don't know what they're going to do. Said, remember, we just left Iceland, and no blacks are allowed. Says, just like being in Georgia or Mississippi. You mean that you're-- I'm sorry, I'm just trying to absorb this. You're in a life and death situation, getting practically washed off the deck of a destroyer which is breaking up. And there's four or five black guys having a discussion about whether they should actually swim for it or not because they might not be allowed in the land. Right. They wanted to stay on board ship rather than take a chance of landing in Iceland. I said, well, we're going to die if we stay on board this ship. I said, at least we can die fighting. I said, let's go. When I jumped in there, it was like I felt just one quick pain that went over my entire body, and it was all over. I didn't feel any pain after that. I just felt sleepy. And when we got ashore, I said, well, I made it here. I may as well die. So I just laid down there on the beach, and I closed my eyes to die. This is the end. And this fellow came, and he said, get him up. Don't let him lie there. He said, pick him up. He will surely die if he lays there. Walk him around. So he pulled me up. And he had on a cap and a coat. I knew he wasn't Navy. And he began to walk me around. And from there, it brought life to me. I said, man, here's a white person who wants me to live. If I had been in Georgia, they would have said, kick him out of the way. Let's help these white people. Then I think I passed out. They took them to where there was a temporary first aid station erected. And of course, the call came to the women of the place to go out to clean them. And that's where the story came in of Lanier now. That little funny story. See, he was there among all the other survivors. The ladies were cleaning them up and scrubbing them up because they were covered with tar, with this oil stuff, this crude oil. They were so filthy, every part of them had to be washed. So when he opened his eyes-- I could see these white ladies all around. There I was, stark naked, on this table. And I heard one of the ladies say, this is the curliest hair I've ever seen. I said, oh boy, this is the end of me. I said, hell, they're going to say, get him out of here, he's black. And then she said-- "This poor fellow. The tar went right into his pores. I'm scrubbing and scrubbing, and I can't get him clean." And I spoke up. She said, I can't get it out. I said, well, you can't get it off. It's the color of the skin. And she said, oh, I'll get it off all right. And so she continued to scrub. Violet [? Pike, ?] she's dead now. She had never seen a black man before. So she didn't differentiate. She's out there, thought he was a white man with the black into his pores so bad as she couldn't get it out. And I was thinking, oh, boy. They're going to lynch me. Here I am. If I had been in Georgia, they would have ran those white women out of town and maybe lynched me for letting them bathe me. And of course, when the men were taking them out to the different homes, she said, bring him to my home. So that evening, then, she prepared supper. And he was amazed that he ate with the family. And he drank out of china cups, the same as the family. And they put me in the bed. And this lady, she would come in and say, are you warm? Are you all right? And she did this the remainder of the night. I didn't go to sleep anymore because I was still afraid. I didn't know where I was or what was going to happen to me. But then I kept asking myself, did I die, and I went to heaven? What's going on? Now look at these pictures, huh? After all these years. Now I'll show you Lanier at that time. There he is. 18 years old, see? The next morning, they gave me a coat and a cap. And I put these things on, and I wanted to get outside to see what was going on. And I went outside, and Ena was out there taking pictures. And I seen him, and I said, come on over and get in the picture. Well, I stood aside. You know, a black is-- the only way he'll take a picture with a white is because how many logs he could lift for the the sawmill, or how many pounds of cotton he could pick in a day, or something like that. He was the white man's prize negro or something like that. And she said, get in, get in, get your picture taken. That's him, right there. These are the ones I took with the Brownie. Four white faces and one black one. This story I'd heard as a joke about the Newfoundlanders who'd tried to scrub the black off a black man. This is like a picture of the joke. But it turns out, the real story doesn't stop here. Well, it hasn't been a day passed since that happened, it hasn't been a day passed I didn't think about Saint Lawrence. They changed my entire philosophy of life. So they gave me leave. I think I got 15 days leave. And I went to see my aunt who lived in Chattanooga. And we would catch the bus from there to go into town. And the blacks had to sit behind the whites. And what the whites would do-- if it was only three whites on the bus, maybe two of them would go to the seat just before the last seat, which means that on the way in, if the bus filled up, the whites would have plenty of seats, and the blacks would only have that one seat. So when we got on, my aunt and I, the back seat was filled, and here was this white guy. So we sat in the seat in front of him. He reached and grabbed me by the neck and pushed me up. And he said, nigger, don't you sit in front of me. And I was going to fight him. I felt like fighting him then because of the treatment that I'd got in Saint Lawrence and what the people have treated me like a human being. I said, well, hell, I'm a human. I'm no longer a slave and the lowest and the least, the last. I said, I'm going to do it. I said, If I can give my life and fight this war the same as everybody else and can't even ride a bus when I pay the same fare as everybody else, but I can't be seated as everyone else-- My aunt said, just be quiet, just be quiet, we'll be in in a few minutes. So I thought about that. Two years after the shipwreck. They sent me to Jacksonville, Florida. And when I got to Jacksonville, I was hungry. And when I got off and walked into the station, I saw all these prisoners, Italian and German prisoners. And they had Army MPs, Americans, guiding them. They had them inside the dining room, eating. And I knew that the blacks could go to a window or something, somewhere, but I knew they wouldn't be allowed to go into that dining room. And I thought about the people of Saint Lawrence, how they had fed me, gave me clothing, and put me in their bed. And I looked at the prisoners. And here I am in American uniform. So I went in to ask, where does a colored-- is what they called us then-- where can call the colored negroes get something to eat? I'm trying to make it to the naval air station. So I went to go in, and this one cop grabbed me by the collar and slung me on the ground. And when he slung me on the ground, he put his foot right on my neck and actually pulled his gun out and pulled the hammer back. I could hear it click. I thought he was going to shoot me. He say, you black son of a bitch, I'll blow your black brains out. He said, you know better than to come in here where these white people are. So the white people were the German prisoners and the Italian prisoners, and here I am in an American uniform. And I thought about the people of Saint Lawrence. 16 years after the shipwreck. I was tired of shining shoes. I was tired of washing dishes and pots and pans. I was tired of it. I had 17 years in the navy as a mess attendant. And I was looking, when I get out, I wanted to learn a trade. And I wrote the first black congressman, and I wrote the Bureau of Naval Personnel a letter, and told them I thought I was qualified to be something other than a mess attendant. And when I got that letter back saying, report to Fleet Sonar School, I really gave the credit to Saint Lawrence. Because had it not been for Saint Lawrence, I wouldn't have been writing the powers that be because I had been brainwashed that I was so inferior to the white man, to don't look forward to ever being anything. And I got orders, report to Fleet Sonar School. They called me down. Counselor wants to see you. And I went in to see a counselor. Phillips, he said, we've got good news. Oh, I said, I'm going to start class. He said, no. We've contacted Washington, and they'll go along with it and make you chief steward mess attendant. He said, because we don't think you can make it through sonar school. I said, well, sir, you can take the first class if you want, I said, but just don't throw me out. He said, well, you know you're going to flunk out, don't you? I said, no, I don't know that. I said, give me a chance. If I flunk out, so be it. He said, all right, you start the next class. So I started the next class, and I went through sonar school. There's the board, right there. Look. By now, you've probably forgotten how we started this story, driving around Saint Lawrence, 59 years after the shipwreck, with the town historian, Ena Edwards, looking for the brand-new school playground. See, there's the playground. Established by the students of Marion Elementary School in 1999. You can go out and walk into it. You can go in. I'm not a rich man. But every contribution I can make, I make it to the people of Saint Lawrence. I realize since the mine closed, the economy is way down. He has shown gratitude. No doubt about it. And they were trying to get a new playground for the elementary school. And I said, well, I have a nice check to present from Lanier. I've said, do whatever the society wants to do with this. I said, But I would like for you to do something for your museum, and let the world know what you did for the entire crew of the Truxtun. And here's this black man, let them know what you did for him too, and how you changed him. There, look. "Lanier Phillips, USS Truxtun survivor. And then on the other side is the USS Truxtun, lost February 18, 1942." And the Marion Elementary School logo is in the center. And the name of the playground is Lanier Phillips playground. I seek no recognition. I just want the people of Saint Lawrence to know how much I appreciate them. And I want them to know what they did for me. But do you think they're a different kind of people from the people in Georgia? Well, they're the same kind of people. But the reason they are different is because their parents and grandparents or what didn't teach them the hatred and the bigotry that the southern United States taught their kids. We are creatures of what we've been taught, and the people of Saint Lawrence taught me that I was a human being. They put into my mind-- it's etched in there. It's solid, like liquid steel, hot steel became cold and solid. It's into me and will never leave me. That story by Chris Brookes, who makes radio stories in Newfoundland, Canada. Lanier Phillips is now 83 and living at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington DC. You know you can download today's program in our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia, who has this message for the radio audience: Look at me. Here I am with an infidel. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Here is a recording you weren't meant to hear. A guy from New York, a percussionist, went to perform in this opera in Italy. While he was there he met this woman, who was a graduate student, who was writing about the opera for her thesis. She took him on a tour of Rome on the back of her scooter. He met her friends. They hung out. One thing led to another. They had this week together. And when he got home to New York, he didn't want it to be over. So he made her these tapes. It's scary. It's scary how much I'm thinking of you. But it's good. It makes me happy. Even if you're not here, I feel happy to think about you and to know that you're existing somewhere. When you're really love and other people overhear you, I think it's hard not to sound a little over the top. That's what I like about these recordings. The feeling in them is so direct. And so today we're going to try something completely different on our radio show. Every story on the show is made out of tapes like this one. Every story is made from tapes that were intended for an audience of one. Someone somewhere made somebody else a tape. We listen in, all of us. I have to say, it's kind of an amazing show because of that. Act One, we hear the greatest phone message in the world, the absolute greatest. Act Two, we have a special effects story. In that act, we use the power of audio technology to turn someone who stutters into someone who no longer stutters, so he can deliver a message to one man in Idaho. Act Three, a war story. In fact, the story of a soldier in the first Persian Gulf War who made tapes for his wife during battles, until he accidentally recorded this incident, this violent incident that haunted him for years. And Act Four, a love story. In that act we return to the guy who you just heard from a minute ago, a man trying to sustain a relationship that spans oceans, all with a little cassette tape. And so without further ado, let us turn now to Act One. This Act One is the story of the greatest phone message of all time. Some people see it that way anyway. You may judge for yourself. A quick warning that there is one famously nasty word in this story that occurs exactly seven times. Count them yourself. But do not worry. We beep the word every single time. Producer Jonathan Goldstein tells the tale. The first thing you should know about my friend Josh is that he calls me a bitch squealer. Now bitch isn't the bad word you're going to be hearing in this story. And that's because it's referring to an actual dog, a fenced in security dog that barked at me and Josh while we were out walking one night. And while my scream may have been louder that evening, Josh's scream was definitely higher pitched, which to my mind means Josh should rightfully be called the bitch squealer, while perhaps I should be called something like bitch bellower or bitch loud crier. Just the same, quit your bitch squealing is what Josh says to me when I ask him to please change the station on the car radio or to stop crowding the armrest in the movie theater. The other thing to know about Josh is that he thinks of himself as an idea man. And he always refers to his ideas as pure gold. So a few years ago, when I first started doing stories on the radio, I would call him up and ask him if he had any story ideas. And he always did. The thing was, most of them involved hot dog eating contests and all-nude car washes. One time Josh talked to a French-Canadian waitress who used the words diggy do as a conjunctive phrase, as in, my mother, she gave birth to me in Lac Saint-Louis, and diggy do, I'm in Montreal. Josh tried to convince me that this semantically innovative young woman was most definitely worthy of a 40 minute interview on national radio. Just the other day, Josh was telling me about this really funny phone message that he heard back in his college days, and how I should definitely do a radio show about that. He swore to me that it was the defining moment in his class' campus life that year. Now how is a person supposed to believe something like that? I can imagine you really liking this message. Oh, I see. I see. But you see, I can't imagine it being the kind of thing that was like-- That your sedate NPR audience would appreciate? No, no, no. I mean it sounds like you got a kick out of it at the time. But I can't imagine it being like an atomic bomb that hit the campus or something. Yeah. See, this is clearly another example of the failure of your imagination. How many times have I given you ideas that you have nay said? How many times have I given you gold standard ideas-- Josh yells at me a lot, especially when he thinks I'm not taking his ideas seriously. When we go out to eat, he yells at me loud enough to make the other patrons turn around and look at us. Sometimes though, he'll get all unexpectedly silent, and just stare out the restaurant window, and then turn to me and say something like, wouldn't life be better if there was a big old pig sitting out there by the fire hydrant? Why can't life be more like that? But anyway, to get back to the phone message, the one Josh heard in college, I'm telling you about it not to demonstrate what a slightly misguided colorful character Josh is, but to chart with honesty the unfairness of my pre-emptive bitch squeals of doubt. I went to Columbia University in the early '90s, OK? Late '80s, early '90s. When I was there, they had this phone system-- I'll just give you a little bit of background, all right? And then I'll cut to the chase. They has this system there called the Rolm system, Rolm phone system, R-O-L-M. And you could forward messages to people. You could forward messages to everyone on campus if you wanted. Sort of like a precursor to the internet. Yes, like a precursor to the internet. Thank you, Mr. Current Affairs Guy. So it was an amazing utility. People could forward all kinds of crazy messages. So one day, there was this guy named Fred. And his mother left him a message on his answering machine. And he forwarded it to maybe one or more of his friends. And his friends turned around and did a Brutus, and they stabbed him in the back. And they forwarded this message across campus to everyone. So do you want to hear the message? All right. So he prefaced it by saying-- You have it? You have the message? I do not have the message. I have the message in my head. I am telling you a story. All right? All right. So he prefaced it by some kind of a sad little lead in. In a little voice, he was like, I think you'd would appreciate hearing this message from my mother. And then the message played. This was the entirety of the message. And I'm going to do the voice for you as best I can. You ready? Yeah. Oh, sorry. More background. Apparently he was not a hit with the ladies, Fred. This is what I was led to understand. I'm not sure if this is true or not. But he had managed to score a date to go see The Little Mermaid, of all movies. The Little Mermaid. OK? So this is the message his own mother, his blood relation, leaves for him. And I quote, "You and The Little Mermaid can both go [BLEEP] yourselves. The books you wanted, they're not here. They must be in La Jolla. I'm not going to wait up all night for you. Goodbye." That's the entirety of it. All right? Yeah. That's the message that his mother left him? That's correct. You catch that part? "You and The Little Mermaid can both go [BLEEP] yourselves." I love you, son. That's gold. And then-- no, hold on. Are you going to listen? Yes. Then somebody took it-- some evil mix-meister genius took it and remixed it into a 12 inch dance version. "You and The Little Mermaid, La Jolla, La Jolla, [BLEEP] yourselves, [BLEEP] yourselves. They're not here, the books. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. And there are other people who remember it? Are you even listening to a word I just told you? This was the The Producers of its day, OK? Everyone heard about it. Everyone knew it. Everyone had an opinion about it. Every single person who attended Columbia that year, I guarantee you they would know what I'm talking about. I still didn't believe him. But just for the hell of it, I phoned the Columbia alumni magazine to see if there was anyone there who might remember anything about the Little Mermaid message. I ended up speaking to someone who not only attended Columbia in the early '90s and remembered the message, but just like Josh had, he actually quoted it to me, the whole message. "You and The Little Mermaid can both go [BLEEP] yourselves. I can't find the books. They must be in La Jolla. I'm not going to wait up all night for you. Goodbye." The guy then became so excited at the thought of someone doing serious research about the message that he offered to use the Columbia database to look up every Fred that might have graduated around that time. No matter how long it took, he said, it would be worth it if I could track down some recording of the message and allow him to hear it again. I called other Columbia students from that period. And every one of them reacted the same way to the message, like this guy Ben Feldman, now an entertainment lawyer. Hello. Is this Ben? Yes. I have two words for you, little mermaid. This is the funniest call I've ever received. Well, you and The Little Mermaid can go to hell. A few days later, Josh called me back. He had found out Fred's last name from his older brother, who it turns out graduated the same year as Fred. Josh said that Fred's last name was Schultz. And I told Josh that this was great news. And Josh told me to shut my squeal hole, which I did. So I called Fred Schultz. And it turns out that he had recorded the original message and still had a copy of it, a copy which I am now going to play for you. Remember, this is a phone message that was forwarded from one person to the next, each person re-prefacing the previous prefaces as it made its way from one voice mail message box to the next. Recieved at 4:20 PM Friday. Guys, I have never heard a phone mail message like this one. Listen to the first person. You are going to die. No seriously, this is the funniest one of all of them. All right, here it is-- These giddy introductory messages continue for two and 1/2 minutes, each one revving up the impending drama, acting as a kind of stage curtain that opens onto another curtain, and yet another one still, each one teasing you with the tantalizing proximity of the main stage about to be bathed in the spotlight. OK, I've gotten like 95 phone mail messages in the last two days, but this is the funniest. This is going to blow you away. This makes the other ones look like chopped liver. And then finally the chain of deferral ends with the very first forwarded student's solemn pronouncement. There comes a time in life when we hear the greatest phone mail message of all time. And well, here it is. You have to hear it to believe it. I thought you'd get a kick out of this message from my mother. Hi, Fred. You and The Little Mermaid can go [BLEEP] yourselves. I told you to stay near the phone. I can't find those books. You have other books here. It must be in La Jolla. Call me back. I'm not going to stay up all night for you. Goodbye. These days, Fred Schultz lives in Venice Beach, California. He plays in a band, he skateboards, and he pretty much seems happy. When he sent me the recording of the Little Mermaid message, he also included burnt incense and a CD of his band's soundtrack for a film about cannibalism called Eat Me. Here's a clip. [MUSIC - "EAT ME"] Fred is the kind of guy who, when the subject gets on to future plans, will tell you he's thinking pretty seriously about moving onto a boat. When I ask him about the phone message from his mom, he says that from the moment he got it, he knew he was sitting on something big. The question then became, what was he going to do with it? I did sit down and stress and think about it for like an hour or two. I debated whether to send the message out to anyone. And then I sat down and listened to music, and just thought about it, re-listening to the message and just thinking, should I send this along or just let it die, kill it, hit erase. But Fred decided not to hit erase. And he explains his mother's cryptic message this way. He had called looking for an old school notebook. She said she'd search for it, but only if he'd wait by the phone while she did this special favor for him. But did he stay by the phone? No, he did not. As for The Little Mermaid, this was the one thing Josh was completely wrong about. My whole life, I have had a thing about mermaids-- and dolphins, but mermaids. When you love mermaids that much-- and dolphins-- you don't keep that to yourself. My outgoing message, first it had Ariel from The Little Mermaid singing "Part of Your World," singing like, "part of your world. What would I give if I could live out of these waters?" And then I jump on and say, hi, please leave a message for me and The Little Mermaid. And then you hear beep. Now put yourself in his mother's shoes. To hear Joan Schultz, Fred's mom, tell the story, that outgoing message was like a call to arms. I hear The Little Mermaid music. And he said, sorry I can't answer you now. Please leave a message for me and The Little Mermaid. Well, that's all I had to hear. I was so infuriated and so incensed, that without even thinking-- and I never ever say this word-- I said, Fred, you and The Little Mermaid can both go [BLEEP] yourselves. And I slammed the phone down. So late that night, studying in his dorm room for finals, Fred finally decides to forward the message to his friend Jeff. Then Fred goes to bed. And by the next morning, he wakes up to discover, that just like one of those guys in one of those movies, his life has suddenly become forever changed. My message machine was blinking that all 10 messages that it accepts are filled. They were all filled with people-- like chains of 20-- it had already gone around to say each chain had hit 20 or 30 people. How many people heard it over the course of the night? Hundreds had already heard it in the middle of the night. Over the course of how many hours? Like four hours. What was then to follow for the Schultzes was nothing short of campus-wide celebrityhood. Women ran up to Fred and hugged him. Men envied him for his ability to inspire that much raw transparent hostility in his mother. The phone message was so popular that, like a hit TV show, it spawned spin-offs. Other messages circulated with people commenting on the original. As a history major, I think we've got to put this into a class struggle perspective. His mother represents-- From a political science standpoint, I would say that both Fred and his mother are products of the political system. I feel that Mrs. Schultz's sexual desire for her son, Fred, is manifest. And Josh was even right about the dance remix version of the message. You and The Little Mermaid can go [BLEEP] yourselves. The Little Mermaid can go [BLEEP] yourselves, yourselves, mother, mother. Although no official at Columbia could confirm this next claim, virtually everyone I spoke to who graduated Fred's year remembers this as a point of fact. The popularity of the Little Mermaid yielded message threads that were too long for the new voice mail technology to handle. And so the messaging service for the whole of Columbia crashed. It goes further still. Fred's mother's message went on to become the most crowd-pleasing musical number from the year-end Varsity Show, a time-honored all-male production that goes back to Columbia alumni Rodgers and Hammerstein in the early 1900s. The choreographed routine involved a kick line of hairy-legged men in seashell brassieres and mermaid tails. Steve Nadick, the show's lyricist, dug out the words and favored me with a few select lines. Oh, here it is. Look at that. But I don't even know if this is the final wording, because I see some handwritten notes on the side. It starts off, "We beautiful creatures inhabit the sea. Fish-women, frolicking frivolously. Although no one said that we'd have to enjoy-a, it still could be worse. We might be in La Jolla." And we sang "in La Jolla" as Handel's "Messiah." "So it's time to decide what you might want to do. We're not going to wait up all night for you. Goodbye." As even the most casual viewer of VH1's Behind the Music knows, fame like this doesn't come without a price. When Fred's mother came to New York for her son's graduation, she experienced the darker side of super stardom. On Broadway, in restaurants, in the shops there they would say things like, that's Fred's mother. That's the Little Mermaid. And I was mortified. Wherever we were, people would point and laugh and snicker. So she just made it her job, at that point, to just walk up to any random group of people, and just start saying, you don't understand. I never use the F word. He provoked me. He provoked me. So she felt that that was her responsibility, to clear her name, to at least let them know she never curses. Before my message came along, the funniest message they had sent around was something like other kids' mothers begging them not to forget to use their rubbers in the rainy season. Here's an example of what Joan Schultz is talking about, one of those feel good homesy messages. This is a message from Huey Hockman's grandparents, making sure he was taking care of his cold. Huey, we heard you have a cold, darling. We called to see how you feel. Yeah. And to tell you we love you. Yeah. That's all. We hope you're OK, darling. Yeah, me too. Good night. Good night. Mine was so far and above that that they won't even go back to the old one. Do you take a certain level of pride in that? I guess so. In a strange way, yes. The Little Mermaid message was everything Josh said that it was. And now that I spoke with everyone about its glory, there was really only one more person left to talk to. What do you want? I made some calls to Columbia. I spoke to some people who went to school the same time that you did. Yes, I did. And diggy do, you were right. It was all true. The message made a great impact. Wow, thanks John. Listen, what a bastard you are. I gave you gold. Don't you understand? But anyway, you are missing the point that what I'm saying is that I apologize, because you are right. I diggy don't give a rat's ass. I am going to read to you a piece of the script that I've written that I'm thinking I might actually end this whole story with, because I want to get some of your feedback. OK? Oh, I'm ready. I would say something to the effect of, "and so a recording intended for one person unintentionally became the beloved property of thousands. And in so happening, the message went from being what might have been considered a rather tragic personal artifact that spoke of dysfunction to becoming a triumph of contemporary American humor. What is that? That's public radio wussy talk. Be a man. No, a part of that whole statement is that I'm actually saying to you, you were right and I was wrong. All right. Whatever. If you want to talk that fancy talk, you do your thing. But don't drag me into your serious voice nonsense. And you get to speak in this stentorian tone, like, and then America laughed at this inadvertent piece of comedy. I'm John Goldstein. Jonathan Goldstein broadcasts his bitch squeals these days as host of the CBC's program Wire Tap, which you can hear on some public radio stations in this country and also find on the internet. His friend Josh is a regular contributor to the show. Act two, Special Effects Story. When this story was recorded, Kevin Murphy was a college student in Idaho. And normally, if he was moderately relaxed, he talked like this. Not too long ago, a few of my friends and I were hanging out in my dorm room, watching TV. But using the editing gear that we use to edit all of the sound on our radio show, we can take out the stutters, the pauses, the repeats. We can make Kevin sound different from how he has ever talked in his life. So he sounds like this. Not too long ago, a few of my friends and I were hanging out in my dorm room, watching TV. Kevin was interested in using this powerful technology to record a message for one man at one business who has been bothering him. Here it is. This recording is for the Pizza Pipeline in Moscow, Idaho. Not too long ago, a few of my friends and I were hanging out in my dorm room, watching TV. Same old stuff, nothing new. As college students, when hunger calls, we call for pizza. I pick up the phone behind me. I've got the coupon book out. I decide to go for the $10.99 special, drinks and crazy bread included. I dial the number. This is when the beast takes over. Anxiety climbs with every ring of the phone. This is what I feel whenever I have to call you up, Mr. Pizza Man. I've dealt with my stutter every second of my life. Is it too much to ask for you to deal with it for a couple of minutes? You interrupt, you cut me off, you speak as if I am this nuisance to your day. Well, today I've saved you this inconvenience. I've edited out all my stutters and pauses to make it easier for you. That is what you want, isn't it? When my anxiety has reached its peak by the third ring, I hear you bellow, hello. I attempt to respond, but nothing comes out. This is the most difficult point in a phone call for stutterers, getting past the point of being a suspected prank caller. Hello, you say again, impatiently. I still can't get a sound out. Please don't hang up on me. Please stay with me. This it finally pops out, my name is Kevin, and I stutter. I would like the $10.99 special with pepperoni. There's no response. I fear I've lost you. Are you there, I ask. My friends act as though paying attention to the TV. You finally respond, yeah. Thank God, I think, I got him, hook, line, and sinker. From here on out, all I have got to do is reel him in. But then you ask what kind of drinks we want. Oh no, I didn't even think of this. Now I've got to tell you to hold on. That has an H sound in it. I hate H's. They are always a killer. They start but do not end. They drain my lungs' air capacity. But I finally get it out and ask everyone what kind of drinks they want. All Cokes. That's easy enough. Oh, no. Oh, no. I don't have any cash. This means I am going to have to put it on my bank card. That is one heck of a lot of numbers. I break the bad news to you. And I can hear the oh crap in the silence of your voice. You carry on with this curt annoyed voice. You obviously couldn't be bothered by such a nuisance. To think I would have the nerve to call you and waste so much of your valuable time. If you knew what I go through, Mr. Pizza Man, I'm sure you wouldn't act this way. You know what, Ira? I don't think this is working. Turn off that editing equipment. It's not for me. Stuttering is a part of my life. Without it, I'm not myself. OK. You see? One thing that makes it tricky about stuttering, Mr. Pizza Man, is when I'm afraid I'm going to stutter, it makes me stutter more. So one way I can actually stutter less is by forcing myself to stutter now and then. It relieves the tension. So if you can relax, Mr. Pizza Man, and let me stutter, I'll take less of your time. But I would appreciate a little more consideration. Sincerely, your loyal customer, Kevin Murphy. Kevin Murphy, from Idaho State University. He asks us to mention-- and we're glad to mention-- the National Stuttering Association. He says contacting them changed his life, led him to learn how to handle his stuttering. Their web address, www.westutter.org. Coming up, people recording love and people recording war. In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Most weeks on our program we invite writers and reporters to put together stories on various topics. Today we are trying something completely different. Every story in the show today is built out of tapes that were made for just one person, not for a national radio audience, recordings made for just one person. We have arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, War Story. During the first Persian Gulf War, back in 1991, John Brasfield was an Army scout. That meant that he and three other guys would drive out ahead of everyone else in their unit. They were in a Humvee, which is light-skinned, no real armor, one big gun on it to defend themselves, and some radio equipment. And what they would do is they would drive out, they would spot the enemy, they would call in bombs and troops and tanks on the positions that they spotted. And he took along a little cassette recorder to make tapes for his wife. And I had made the tapes in case I was killed, that my family might know what happened to me in those last few moments, what actually took place. Maybe if I didn't die instantly, I'd be able to say goodbye to them. And so when would you record? I would record any time I thought a significant event was going to take place. If I felt like we were getting ready to go into a battle or something had already started, I might push the record button, and go ahead and get the tape rolling. Well let's go through some of these. Let me ask you to explain what, for example, is happening in this one. You never want to go through this. You never want to go through this. What is this? Where are we? This was, basically, the first artillery attack that I had sat through. We were sitting under a pretty intense artillery barrage. And I was just, basically, telling my wife-- and I had a small son at that time-- that, basically, you never want to go through this type of fighting or conflict. It was pretty scary at the time. Now you had trained for this kind of thing. How was actually being in the real thing different from the training? Well, they say train as you fight. And I guess it's a lot louder. We had done simulations of this, where they have small TNT chargers that they explode around you while you do your training, but nothing like the real thing coming down and just kind of shaking your nerves up. Now you don't really say that much to your wife on most of the tapes. Usually, it's just long stretches of bombs going off. Let me play another one, and ask you to just explain who is talking in this. [GUNFIRE] I've got my tape recorder on. Really? Yeah. Damn, I didn't think of that. This is one of my friends, Frank Carlson. And we had just moved on to what's called a screen line. And it's our job to report any enemy that would come through our position. And we were just having a conversation. Basically we've stopped, we're resting, having a conversation about some events that had taken place earlier that day. I'll tell you what was awesome, was when we were on the road. We stopped, and we fired that [UNINTELLIGIBLE], I almost ran over two guys. They were laying on the road. On the road? Yeah. I didn't see them. They were like this. If I hadn't seen them, I would have run over them. And so in that situation is there just a lot of sitting there and chewing the fat? Basically, at that point in time, there was nothing we could do. We had put ourselves out in the open. And we felt about as secure as you could feel in that type of situation. And we were just going about business as normal, waiting for this to all pass by. And are there tanks between you and the enemy? No. No, we were the lead element. There would have been us between the tanks and the enemy. And your weapon, the weapon mounted on your vehicle, could it shoot back at them? Or was it too far away for that particular weapon? No, much too far away. And so you're just sitting there without any kind of armor on you, just sitting there waiting. Sitting out in the middle of the desert, having a conversation, just kind of waiting for the next order to either move forward or call it quits for the night. That does not sound like a very pleasant job. It's really hard to relay your combat experiences of what you went through to a person that has not been in that situation before. When you are actually in the battle, you have this immense fear of being killed. I just felt like-- when I was sitting through those artillery attacks, I just knew at any second one of those artillery rounds was going to land in my lap and kill me. That is just what it felt like. They are exploding all around you. And you just have this immense terror that the next one that goes off, you're not even going to know it's there. And it's just going to blow you to bits. And then you would go in, and you engage these guys that were firing at you, and destroy them. And you'd be elated. They died, you didn't. You're alive. All right. And then you move on to the next little conflict. And then you'd be back down in the pits of fear, of you're just going to die on this. And then you get through, and you destroy them, and you're elated again. It was just an emotional roller coaster going through that. And about the only people I could really-- besides soldiers that have been in the same situation, would probably be a victim of a violent crime, that has gone through that fear of-- they just know that they're going to die, because that person standing on the other side of the gun is just going to pull the trigger. And then when they make it out of that, the elation that they feel, I am alive. I've come to the conclusion that if you can hear the artillery, you are still alive. Is that incoming? Yeah. There? Exactly. The last round you heard, where it kind of shut the tape recorder down, exploded right behind us. They were just kind of feeling around for us, where we were. And they had us pretty much. We had been sitting in the same location for a while. Come on. Do your [BLEEP] job, artillery. Take out their [BLEEP]. I don't [BLEEP] care if you [BLEEP] kill [UNINTELLIGIBLE] [BLEEP] artillery [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Just kill them. [BLEEP] kill them. Man, they're firing up some [BLEEP]. What is it like for you to hear these tapes? It gives me an adrenaline rush. It kind of brings me back to the battle. Sometimes it's more than I really care to think about, because it brings back a lot of aspects that the mind has kind of forgotten, and has done that for a reason. I know that that's one reason why you were hesitant to talk to us, that your wife was concerned about you listening back to these tapes and thinking through all this again. For a couple years after the Gulf War, I had trouble sleeping. And I had nightmares. And she didn't want that stuff to resurface. Did your wife eventually listen to these tapes that you originally made for her? No. She has not listened to those. Could you talk about the impulse that made you want to make the tapes, that you wanted her to have a tape if something would happen to you, a tape of the moment that it happened? I think it's tough. As a soldier, I've dealt with friends dying and death. And I think it's the not knowing of the family members that is the bad thing about it. Even if what had taken place, even though it wasn't pleasant, that answers a lot of questions. Now on February 27, 1991, you made some recordings. Let me just ask you to explain what's going on in this first one. Well, what had happened is, we were on a screen line again. And our tanks and Bradleys had stopped to refuel. This is something that happened about every two to two and a half hours. We happened to be sitting-- part of us happened to be sitting across a major highway that ran between Basra and Baghdad. And what was happening is the Iraqi forces were retreating out of Basra to Baghdad. And we just happened to be right in the middle of it at that point in time. And these were vehicles. They were buses, trucks, what we would call light-skinned vehicles, or vehicles that we could engage and destroy very easily. So we could actually stop these vehicles on the road. And that is what we started doing. And we got to a point of about 200 plus prisoners that we are taking. Now the prisoners are just-- they're just sitting there on the ground, basically, in the middle of where this road is this? Is that the deal? Exactly. We had stopped them on the road, and had taken them out, and we had-- I guess if you want to call it processed them. We had taken their weapons away from them, and done whatever we needed to do to neutralize them. And they were giving up very easily. They had no will to fight left in them. And when the task force was done-- when they had refueled and re-armed, or whatever they needed to do-- we got the call to go ahead and move out. We had communicated the location of the prisoners back to the battalion command net. The problem with this is we have radios on our vehicles, but not everybody has the radio to the same frequency. So typically what would happen is the battalion commander would have a battalion command frequency, where he would have his commanders up on that frequency. Right. So the commander knows everything that you're saying. He knows. That is correct. Basically, we left the prisoners, by themselves, with no weapons, sitting out in the middle of the desert, expecting that the battalion command net would put out that there were prisoners there. Now I don't know if this was ever put out or not. I can't-- but as the infantry moved up and came in the visual range of the prisoners, the infantry began opening fire. Now what you hear on my radio is a call from one of the scouts that was left behind, saying, I hope they know what a Humvee looks like, because he was afraid of being hit by friendly fire. He saw the rounds coming down. He did. Yes. I never saw the rounds coming down. The lead company right behind us is buying up all those vehicles there. I hope they understand what a Humvee looks like. Vehicles continue to come down the road. And instead of processing prisoners-- the Bradleys have quite a bit of range on them-- they were engaging these vehicles and destroying them. It was not a fair fight. Why, why are we shooting at these people, when they are not shooting at us? I know. They want to surrender. [BLEEP] armored vehicles. And they don't have to blow them apart. Now that's you? That was me speaking there. And I was agreeing with the platoon sergeant, Sergeant Mulek, about these guys want to surrender, we've got armor going up against light-skinned vehicles-- trucks, buses, whatever-- that were carrying people back and forth. I didn't feel that there was any need to be killing these people, because they didn't have any fight left in them. All we had to do was take prisoners. See those guys toasting the back of that truck? When we drove up? Man. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] The killed a lot of people that didn't have to be killed, because if they would have moved the company up there, everybody would have given up. I guarantee you. I felt that, at that point in time, if we would have set up a roadblock, that we could have processed Iraqi prisoners all day. And there was no need for the unnecessary taking of human life. But this means these guys don't want to fight. You saw the equipment we blew up. They could have wasted us. They were coming down the road. This is X-ray. We have got a truck with troops on it, moving down [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Don't shoot it. See? He's telling them to engage. Why don't you tell them, sir, they they are willing to surrender? Tell him that. Why don't you tell the commander that? It's murder. You're on here saying, it's murder. Tell the commander that they are willing to surrender. Did anyone tell the commanders that these guys were probably willing to surrender? I can't recall if we did or not. I'm sure that the platoon leader did make some reference that these guys didn't have any fight left in them. But I couldn't tell you if that was actually said or not. It just felt like we were doing the wrong thing. Now since then, you have had a lot more combat experience. This is still pretty early in your combat career. Just explain briefly where else you served and where else you saw combat. Well, I was in the Gulf War. I finished that out. And I've also spent time in the Bosnia Kosovo conflict. With the Kosovo conflict, flying military intelligence missions for that. And with more combat experience, do you feel the same way, that it was wrong for the commanders to just fire on these guys and not try to get them to surrender? No, actually my view has changed quite a bit. It has done almost a 180. And I feel now that what we did was right, that we were not actually murdering people unnecessarily. We were soldiers, they were soldiers. There is risk. They knew what the risk is. People that haven't been exposed, they may listen to those tapes and still feel like it was murder. As I grew a little bit more battle hardened, I realized there are risks. And they were risks that those soldiers were willing to take. They were risks I was taking at the same time. It could have been me that was killed. This particular set of events on February 27, 1991 has gotten a certain amount of press coverage. Seymour Hersh wrote about it in The New Yorker. It was on ABC News. It has gotten a certain amount of coverage. Do you feel like the media's attention to it and the public's attention to it misunderstands it? The information that was put out in ABC News and the Hersh article, I think, was kind of one-sided. They used parts of my tape in the Hersh article. And they took the tape out of context to kind of support what I felt was their point of view. And they were trying to build a case that American soldiers had killed innocent POWs illegally, and that everybody knew what was going on. It's more of a deal if you have another My Lai Massacre during the Gulf War than if you actually say that if prisoners were killed, it was because of lack of communication. It was almost like a friendly fire accident. If they were killed, if they indeed were killed, I imagine it was a communication problem that took place, and that the people that killed them-- they wouldn't have done it intentionally-- did not know that these were prisoners, did not know these people were not armed, and did not know they did not pose a threat. The guys who were killing them never got word that these guys weren't armed. That's right. It's more of a story when we have American soldiers that are renegades out there, intentionally killing enemy prisoners of war. And that's not the case. If you sit there, and you listen to the tapes, and you listen to what was going on, there was a lot of confusion on the battlefield. And there's no proof-- even the scouts, even though they felt like the prisoners could have been killed, or they saw rounds exploding around them, nobody actually saw anybody killed. John, do you have friends who you served with in these particular fights who still feel like it was wrong to kill those guys? Yes, I do. And some of these people have a real difficult time-- they just never-- some of them just have this sense of guilt, where they feel like they have killed people unnecessarily, or were part of a team that killed people unnecessarily, and some of what we did was wrong. I've struggled through that myself. And I feel what we did was right, and what we did was just, and we did what we had to do. And I've moved on with my life. I was able to do that because I came to that conclusion. If I had felt like I had murdered people on the battlefield, I don't think I could live with myself. I think I would have a lot of stress and grief, and not be able to deal with a lot of issues. I think that's basically what it comes down to. You've got to either rationalize what you did, or you're going to live with a lot of guilt. When you take a moment and you reflect on it, do you feel like there's a part of you that's rationalizing? I did my rationalization some time ago. And I've made my decision on what I did was right. And I stick with it. And I've rationalized at that point. I think you've got to do that so you can live with yourself. John Brasfield now has a job as a flight instructor for civilians in Wichita, Kansas. He is also in the Army Reserve. Act Four, Love Story. Well, let's return to the guy who's recording we heard at the beginning of today's program, the percussionist who met the woman in Italy and had started sending her tapes. His name is David Cossin. He sent her over a dozen tapes after their week together, trying to convince her to please, please visit him in New York City. These tapes are such a complete portrait of a certain kind of quest and a certain feeling you get early in a relationship. And he agreed to let us play some excerpts here on the radio. It's David. I thought I would try to make you a little tape, give you a little tour, or a picture, of how it is in New York. And I guess I will tune in and out with the events of my day. I'm in my apartment. There are instruments everywhere here. [PLAYS INSTRUMENTS] And there's a vibraphone. [PLAYS VIBRAPHONE] Hopefully one day you could see all of this. So I will turn off now, and come back later, and talk to you some more. I'm about to leave my apartment. So you'll hear Chinatown. Usually there are people hanging out in front of my building, old Chinese ladies. So this is my neighborhood. It's nice. There is a bus here, filled with Chinese people going on a tour. And this neighborhood is pretty residential. At nighttime it's very quiet. In the daytime there are a lot of children. You can hear them from my apartment. At lunchtime they're out in the schoolyard playing. And everything that I see, I think of you. So I thought I could just talk to you as I see them. You have to let me know if it is incredibly boring or if you like this. So I'm going to a rehearsal today in Queens, close to my parents' house. Hey. I'm in my rehearsal. And I'm sneaking, talking to you. [INSTRUMENTS TUNING UP] Oh, Allesandra. I just read your letter. Wow. I finished reading the letter, and I realized I wasn't even breathing while I was reading. I was holding my breath. And I finished. And I realized I am out of breath, like I just ran up a flight of stairs or something. I miss you so much right now. Oh, please write me more. It's very beautiful, very tender, and making me so happy. And you're great, you're great, you're great. I miss you. I love you. I really have fallen for you. Thank you so much. That was my first letter from you. And to know that-- even though it was a week ago, my feeling is stronger and stronger. So thank you again. That was so nice. I feel so happy right now. I'll speak to you soon. Well, I just talked on the phone a little while ago, Allesandra. And we'll be OK. It's just a feeling. It's not my thought. But just-- I feel confident that everything will be fine, and we will see each other soon. I'm thinking about you. I couldn't just end like that. I'm back, 10 minutes later than before. Wow, it's even hard to say goodbye to you on a tape. It's hard to say goodbye to you on the phone. I went back outside. So maybe I'll just record the sounds of outside for a moment. [SOUNDS OF CHILDREN PLAYING] This is New York, where, hopefully, you will be soon. So David Cossin, who made these tapes, now joins us to explain, first, if they worked. Yeah, I mean that was three years ago. And I guess they worked, because I'm sitting in Italy right now with Allesandra. And how worried were you about how she would react to the first tape? Yeah, I was a little worried, because it's a fine line between somebody who is intensely trying to connect with somebody with distance and being a stalker or something. I have never really went after something like that before. Allesandra is the first and only person that I ever felt a strong need to keep being connected to on that level, especially for such a quick meeting. And Allesandra is sitting right there with you, right? Yes. Could you put her on? Sure. Hold on one second. Hello. Hi, Allesandra. Hi. So could I ask you to talk about what it was like getting the first of these tapes? It was tender. It was really feeling again the presence of somebody. Before you got the tapes, did it seem like such a serious thing that happened between you and him? I have to say, it was serious because it was intense. We met, and we had a wonderful, incredible week. Something really special happened. But then, maybe I started-- more than him, I started to be more rationalistic. I started to step again on earth. So all this was like a romance, but I was rationally thinking, oh, I'm in Rome, he's in New York. And those tapes helped to continue the romance. And I think this was when I actually consciously felt in love with him. I became aware of that. And this helped me to believe in that love. It was easy in that situation to be scared, and to try to hide from your own feelings or your own state of mind. On the tapes, he worries about being too intense or being too boring. Were there moments of the tapes that struck you that way? No, no, I was never bored. And I never felt this was too much or too intense. It was tender. I was always sorry when the tape finished. I always wanted more. And I rewinded some parts. And I listened to some of these many times. He's so in love with you on these tapes. I guess he was. And that's why it was so convincing, in a sense. I felt it was true, and it was irresistible. How can I say? I could not resist. It was natural. Really, you have the sensation your destiny was changed. I guess every love story starts in the same way, in a sense. Allesandra and David are now married. In the years since we first broadcast this story, they have had a daughter, named Nina, who just turned four. Well today's show is produced by Jonathan Goldstein and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and Starlee Kine. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help for today's show by Brian Reed. Music help today from Adam "the tape guy" Jacobs and from Edward Wilson. Our web site, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to all of our shows for absolutely free, sign up for our free podcast, or check out all the merch in our online store. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by our boss, Torey Malatia, who keeps showing up at my house dressed as a pizza, saying-- [MUSIC - "EAT ME"] I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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